Malacoda

Pretty seldom, sadly. Great find though. And great that they survived long enough in the barn to get into the hands of a loving collector. Kind of makes you wonder what else is in that barn.

@valiantman Hi - this is a great post. I'm very interested in these product numbers. As you say, they are created by the publisher, but they actually long predate the barcodes. The product codes begin appearing on, for example, Marvel comics from July 1971. then when the barcodes are introduced in 1976, they get added to the bar codes, but still appear as a separate number on the cover. so these weren't created for the barcode and were serving a different purpose (presumably relating to distribution) years before the bar codes came along. They appear to denote the series (each title/series has it's own code, but they don't change from issue to issue or year to year), though the GS and annuals have different numbers. It almost seems like they denote size more than anything else (the GS and annuals have different numbers to the standard size issues, but the same code numbers as each other, despite different frequency of publication). Do you have any idea what these codes were used for? Thanks.

Those 'week ending' dates were the end of the week they came out. MWOM #1 came out Sept 30th, but yup, this is the week. It always gives me a jolt seeing that cover. Now that you can see everything on the net, we all know what every comic looks like. Back then, if you had never been in the same room as an actual, physical copy of the comic itself, you had no idea what it looked like (unless you saw an ad). Seeing the cover of MWOM #1 for the first time was quite a moment, I recall. I think it made collecting a very different experience. Also, I really hated those spot colour pages at the time, but now (of course), I love them.

Notice how the underground/overground (wombling free) trope is sometimes literally part of the plot and sometimes a framing device for 2 different plot threads.

Hmmm. Comics that reference movies that they probably shouldn't is a whole other thread, isn't it?

I always want to imagine that 135 cover is Byrne cunningly homaging the cover of 56 that Adams wasn't allowed to use, but actually it's far more similar to the one they used. Dang.

Dealer's choice, my friend. Obviously, if you watch it in this chronological running order, you are flipping about between series and movies, so you lose the flow of each series (which, as you say, is a nice way to watch it). Personally, I think it's like eating. When you take the first few bites of something it's delicious. If you then binge-eat, by the end, you can't even taste it anymore. Whenever I have binge-watched about 10 seasons of anything, it just becomes like wallpaper in the end. So jumping around with something like this list keeps things fresh. I really enjoyed JJ. It has my two favourite character reveals. I loved Krysten Ritter's performance as well. It used the longer form of the series well too. There's no real time for any layering or character exploration in the movies. I couldn't keep up with the way E4 showed it. They did a 'first look' late night showing, followed by the regular slot and then the repeat, which was hard to keep track of, then they split the 2nd season in half while Cap 2 was in cinemas and I missed when it came back. Gave up watching and decided to park it until it was done. I think DP is better than the drubbing it got, but yes, that's two failed attempts to tell that story now. Thor 4....my advice is to keep your expectations low. I think it's a Taika Waititi movie first and a Marvel movie second. The comedy elements that worked brilliantly in Ragnarok have been turned up to 11. And not in a good way. Christian Bale is absolutely brilliant, but unfortunately he's playing MacBeth while everybody else is in a Mel Brooks movie. The plot & direction are fine, the action scenes are great. They're just ruined by the cheese-tastic effects. It's like LXG - the effects looked rubbish then. God knows what they look like now. The guy who drinks the potion at the end probably looks like he was drawn onto the negative with a crayon. I will be interested to hear what you reckon to Blade.

I like the way it's edited to give you the impression that it's all of them (it's actually only 10). I agree. It was impossible to imagine it would ever be put on the screen as well as it could be put on paper, but here it is. I also think that most of it will age well. If you re-watch Raimi's Spider Man films, they still look great (esp. Doc Ock) and those are 20 years old now. I think if they were going to age badly, they'd have done it by now.

Good luck with Mutant X. If you make it to the 2nd series, let alone the 3rd, I will be impressed with your stamina. Gifted is quite Claremonty. It's more like you'd imagine the New Mutants to be than the New Mutants movie actually was. Helstrom I completely forgot about. Will have to add it. There's a few errors on that list (as it was never really made for public consumption). Will probably tidy it up, delete the old one and re-post it. I guess it should include the I am Groot one-shots. Werewolf By Night is imminent as well. Not to mention the Guardians Holiday Special. Never imagined a day when there would be too much Marvel stuff to even keep track of it all. What a time to be alive. (I usually say that ironically, but I really mean it). For anyone who wants a more digestible list, I have never grown tired of watching this....

You're welcome. So let's meet back here when you're finished and compare notes. Next Tuesday?

OK, here comes Kevin's list: all of Marvel in watching (chronological) order. Spoiler alert: it references a ton of stuff that happens in the MCU/ABC/Netflix-verse and all Marvel related projects for the last 24 years, so if you don't want to see the result, look away now. I am not endorsing any of this, in fact, I strongly recommend giving Mutant X and Runaways a hard swerve. Where something is set at a point in time other than 'now', I have used the time it's set in, but where things appear to occur purely in the then-present, I have assumed it was set in the year it was produced. You can probably find websites that dispute some of these points. You know what Marvel fandom is like. I particularly like the point where Disney announced that Moon Knight was set in 2025 and someone calculated that, by the phases of the moon (which are obviously critical to the plot), it must actually take place in 2024. Excellent. I'm proud to say I've gone nowhere near that level of accuracy. Obviously, things like DOFP, Endgame and Loki which jump around in time are dealer's choice really. Kev, the 3rd table gives you the Netflix series and where they fit in. The way I've laid it out means you can either watch just the Netflix series in the right order, or Netflix + the MCU, or everything. Whatever you like. BTW, the She Hulk/Shang Chi thing is disputed, which is why it makes no sense. It doesn't matter what order you watch these in.

Indeed. I remember vividly when I went to the usual spinner rack and found it suddenly full of porn. The newsagent shouted at me 'hey you, come away from there, there's nothing for you there' and I most aggrieved as she obviously knew that had always been the comic book rack. I wish I knew the date that happened.

I don't think it is. I think that when Warner Communications (i.e. T&P, Gilbertons, Williams, Top Sellers etc) shut down, the practice of recycling DC returns ended (keep in mind that that started with pull from Fred rather than push from DC). The end of T&P meant that there was no one to do the stamping of the new comics either, which is why it went over to PV's (incrementally). The timing is not a coincidence - it's more that the PV's started to replace the stamping than that the stamps wound down before the PV's finished. With Marvel and DC both now on PV's, the proliferation of distribution through comic shops and direct exports to both Canada and the UK, it's clearly not a coincidence that it then moves to dual pricing. Actually, I think that DC sales in the UK were so relatively low that the ball-ache wasn't worth the candle, so they led the way with dual pricing. Marvel had always done PV's and had much better sales (and from 1972 had been more focussed on the UK a reprint market and actually restricted sales of their US imports) so I suspect they would never have come up with the idea of dual pricing on their own. As soon as DC did it, it was... if you look at the gap between DC starting and Marvel bandwaggoning, it's pretty much the usual minimum 3 month gap. I imagine the conversation at DC went: "Why do the limeys suddenly want us to put their money on the comics?" "Because we used to send them all our leftovers, so they had to re-stamp them. But the UK distribution subsidiary is gone now, and the new distributor only wants new issues" "I get that, but why do we pay for a whole second print run when we could just print the limey pennies next to the proper price?" "Good point" What's interesting is the foothold. For years. Marvel and DC distributed through T&P in the UK and IND in the States. Because IND had a stranglehold on Marvel and latterly owned T&P, DC were always in a dominant position over Marvel (although I'm sure sales figures told a different story). When Marvel moved to World, it changed everything. Not just because they were arriving from 2 different distributors, but because the 2 companies were structured completely differently. DC then went to Moore Harness, where there was no stamping, so they finally had to find a solution. At this point, both Marvel and DC are with high street national distributors, but now Marvel, who are with Comag, are finally in the dominant position. And neither company has a foothold in the UK, they just have circulation deals with UK distributors. Anyway, my point is that the thing you're highlighting as odd does indeed seem odd if you just look at the comics, but if you look at what was going on with the changeover of distributors and the winding down of T&P era practices, it all makes perfect sense.

And after this they go solely PV until they go dual in cd Oct 81? (So in Batman terms, PV from 311 to 339 and then dual priced from 340). Correct? I'm always focussed on Marvel, but quite what the Hell happened to DC distribution in the UK after Warner's shut down the UK arm of Warner Communication must be a story worth investigating. I'm sure we'll get round to it.

The September 1978 cover date may be a telling moment. I think that that is the moment when WH Allen killed off Thorpe and Porter for good and the very last vestige of it faded from the world. You might find that the stamps stop saying T&P at that point, but I think no one gave a toss by that point and I'd imagine the stamps disappear chaotically over a period of time.

Yes, stick with it (pun intended). In the comics they never really made the connection between his Dad being fundamentally a streetfighter and him taking after that, but I got it from the show. Once you get to that bone-crunching, tooth-spitting fight in the corridor, you realise you're not watching Adam West nor the cinematic MCU but something that is its own beast.

The actual films are good enough, but the effects are 100% CGI which I remember looking bad at the time but they look like cartoons now.

Faintest?

Kev, I've done this, for all Marvel-content films (Fox, Marvel, New Line, Sony/Columbia, Universal & Lionsgate) and all TV series (Marvel, ABC, Fireworks, New Line, Disney, Hulu, Netflix & Freeform) and the one-shots. but my list includes a column which explains the reason why I think each piece of the puzzle fits where it fits, but this of course means that the list is crawling with spoilers, so I suggest I paste a copy which offers no explanation of the running order other than the year it was made, the year it appears to be set and where you can find it. Does that sound about right? I can take out the year it's set as well if you like, but I think this is overkill. I don't think that ruins anything. Everyone else, do you want to see this or shall I just send it to Kev? (It's pretty cool, btw). Note to purists (hey, what are the odds): This doesn't go back to the 1944 Cap serial, either of the 1979 movies or the Matt Salinger one, the Spider Man or Hulk TV series, the 1978 Doc Strange film, the 1994 Sony FF movie if such it can be called, Howard the Duck, the Punisher (Lundgren) or anything else that far back. I basically started with Blade as that seems like the real start point of the 21st century Marvel revolution (though the Blade films are terrible). Also, starting in 1998, I probably should have included the Hoff's turn as Nick Fury. I did not. For obvious reasons.

WANT!!!!! Is it good (lots of detail, specific attribution, quotes from Ones Who Know)?

Wow. You had read them all in proper US copies of ASM before you ever saw a UK reprint? That's really not the experience of most of us 70's kids. Literally the next day? That must have been utterly crushing. I stopped reading comics for about 20 years which was a catastrophic mistake as I've never really managed to get the magic back. I can still enjoy them, but when I was a kid, I was utterly transported by them. I guess that would have happened anyway but I can't help feeling it was the break in continuity with the little lad who learned to read on them. I mean, I'm still scared of Daleks (obviously).....

Pleasure, mate, any time. Pretty cool. I think the Robot has still pipped you, but that's almost a 53 year wait between issues. Bizarre, isn't it that as kids there were some comics where you couldn't wait to get the next issue and the month until it arrived was an absolute eternity. Other comics just sit unread forever. Or until someone plants the itch on your head in the middle of the night, obviously.

OK, can anyone beat this one? In 1973/4, I was about 7 or 8 so beyond the Beano and the Beezer but not yet into Marvel. I used to read comics like Warlord, Victor, Valiant, etc. One of these was, I think, the Hotspur. It had a strip which I remember being called 'the Denizen of the Deep' (I think it's actually called Fishboy: the denizen of the deep, but I really liked the word 'denizen'). I only got these occasionally, so I was never able to follow a story properly, and the story that really caught my imagination was 'the Terror in the Tall Tower', but I only had sporadic copies of the Hotspur (or whichever one it was), so I knew I would never know what happened in the (completely ludicrous) story. In 1980, I walked into Sutton's (my local newsagent) and there on the shelf was the whole thing - all episodes of that very story in a single issue. What we would later call a graphic novel and now call a TPB. I had never seen anything like this before. I bought it and kind of saved it. I was so stunned to see it, to 'have it back', that I was kind of saving it for a 'special read' (no, I don't know what that means either). Skip ahead 42 years and I still have it. Still unread. I sort of feel like when I do read it, a part of my life will be over. I think I may have inadvertently started my bucket list at the age of 13. The really odd thing is that the 6 years that passed between me reading this as 7 year old and finding the compiled edition as a 13 year old seemed like an absolute eternity. It seemed like something from a previous life. The 42 years since have gone by in the blink of an eye. So who can beat 42 years? (this can't be a comic you just forgot about or lost or decided you weren't actually interested in. It has to be one that has always been on your reading list, and somehow you just never actually sit down with it).

Yes. It's logical to think that whatever made it an odd-bod going out might also be the reason it survived i.e. it wasn't part of normal distribution so never got sent back in. It therefore doesn't indicate that there's a load more of them out there.

It was certainly a job no one wanted. I found one of the Ethels (don't get excited) but she literally spent 2 weeks putting price stickers on comics in 1960, and then moved up to a job in the office. The interview for the job in the office, she said, went like this: they asked her to add up some numbers in her head and as she got it right, she got the job. I would imagine the interview structure for the price label sticking job was even less rigorous.