Malacoda

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.

Don't suppose you know where that copy is? If it ever passed through Leicester, we could easily tell....

Pure speculation, but logically, the T&P reps must have had their own storage facilities (maybe just their own garages and lock ups) to make up the separate batches for the different towns and newsagents in those towns. And they must have stored the returns somewhere before taking them back to the nearest depot to be returned to Oadby. If you were the rep for Devon, based let's say in Ilfracombe, there is no way you did 8 hours of driving every day just to pick up and drop off stock at the Plymouth depot. You'd have to have storage. So the potential for a box of odds & sods that get forgotten is no surprise.

Thanks Steve. A nice reminder of why we're here and a great one-hit refresher. Re ASM #18, yes, we have stamped 9d's and the Obliterator + the mysterious 10d, but we also have 9d's replaced by the standard T&P 10d including the number. This indicates either that they got wind of the tax change in mid-batch (not likely, T&P would have re-priced the lot) or that the 10d were stragglers (possible), or most likely that they didn't necessarily stamp every issue of every title in one go, but rather got batches together for distribution. Given T&P's system of reps coming from far and wide to load up the vans themselves, this would make sense. If your rep from the Outer Hebrides is coming down to wherever your most northern depot is, you're going to get his whole order of magazines, Mads, books & comics ready to get to that depot, not make him come back next week when all the comics have been stamped. Obviously we can't be definitive about anything where we only have single examples, but if this double stamped T&P Spidey 18 is indicative of anything, it surely scotches Ireland? Also, didn't we determine that the Irish comics were more expensive, not the same price? It might be that the Irish comics were returns, but then there would surely have been a lot more of them and also, from the quote Albert posted from Tony Roche, they seem to have turned up in the cover date month.

Jessica Jones was far and away my favourite of the Netflix series. If you haven't seen a lot of those, you have a unique opportunity to watch them in event order (which means jumping around between the series, but of course that's effortless these days). I've been watching the whole of Marvel in chronological order - so starting with the Cap 1 movie, then the Agent Carter TV series, the Agent Carter one shot, Xmen First Class, DOFP, Xmen Origins: Wolverine....you get the idea. All the movies, TV series & one shots from every studio, everything from Blade onwards. I can send you the viewing order if you REALLY want a binge. From the newer stuff, Wandavision is phenomenal. You will realise why everyone has the knives out for Doc Strange 2 when you see it. Hawkeye is good fun. I always wanted the wisecracking, smug, pain-in-the-arse Hawkeye from the silver age, and this goes absolutely the opposite way with the family man angle, but I enjoyed it. It's more like one of the Netflix series, IMO i.e. it has more of the street-level punch ups of say Daredevil than the cosmic villainy of the Avengers movies. It’s also a kind of detective story so probably has more in common with Jessica Jones than the other Disney series. No spoilers, but some familiar and welcome faces turn up too. F&WS - some amazing flying and action sequences. It's basically a 4th Captain America movie without Cap, probably closest in tone to the 2nd Cap film (globe-trotting spy movie). It also struck me that what Marvel did quite badly in the 70’s when they tried to introduce more black characters, this does a lot better. I think it was all done in quite a ham-fisted way when the Falcon was introduced in the comics and I think maybe they went back to that original intention and did it a lot better. Or maybe I just think that because I always start from the comics and maybe the MCU doesn’t. Loki is full on bonkers. Where Hawkeye is like the Netflix series – bone crunching ‘real’ fights with occasional full on super hero effects and action, Loki is the exact opposite. Full on cosmic time travelling science fantasy with a lot of comedy. Big scale, big sets, lots of effects. Probably closest in tone to the 3rd Thor movie.

By the way, I think binging was necessary for Loki, Hawkeye, Falcon & WS and the Netflix shows, but I don't think you will gain from binging She Hulk. The episodes are all separate though related, and it's a much lighter tone. It's very much Byrne's She Hulk, breaking the 4th wall and where the comic parodied super hero comics, this does the same to the movie /TV genre. That makes it sound quite naff, but it's actually rather fun. Support cast is great. Also, watching it each week, like we used to watch TV, is really nice in a way I can't quite define.

Well, it's all correct information,,,,,

Yes. That. would. be. hilarious.

Lordy Mama. You have a slabbed #48 signed by Stan? OK. That is quite some collection. Kev, while you're checking for SS 10, could you please also look for stamps of 15, 16 and 17. There are plenty of PV's and unstamped cents copies, but no stamps found so far. (Actually, I say plenty, #15 seems to be pretty rare despite being a PV). As Steve will tell you, I spent an entire year scouring the Tinternet for Avengers #9 and DD #4 before realising that I actually owned stamped copies of both. And they're supposedly impossibly rare. Nothing would surprise me.

Might actually be the case. By the 80's they would have been typesetting on computer keyboards - US keyboards don't have the £ symbol, you have to hold down multiple buttons to get it, but if every UK comic you'd ever seen was a figure with a p after it, maybe this looked right.

Blimey O'Reilly. When I posted that, I started with 'this is for you, Gary' but I had no idea how much it was for you. Thank you for sharing that story. I think of all comics, if you discover the Surfer at a young age, he has the potential to really make you bond. When I read 'the Super Heroes' at the age of nine, I was enthralled by the Surfer - for some reason I thought the X men were silly and did not read them. Imagine my delight when I finally realised how good they were and had a whole run to catch up on. Odd really as I'm sure the reading age for the Surfer is well above the early X men. Thanks for all pics as well. And above all, thanks for not posting those 17 ink stamped ones that we agreed not to tell Steve about.

.....and thank you for the considered, thoughtful push back. You don't get diamonds without some pressure. Ultimately we all do this for ourselves, but I agree with you, when you post something that you think should be of interest to a particular group, and it's met with silence, it does make you wonder if you're barking up the wrong tree. Or just barking. Thank God for this little padded cell of like-minded nutters.

Indeed. And this is one that Duncan is adamant was ND. Alan Austin, interestingly, does not list it as so, but he also doesn't list it as 'scarce' which is his norm and I would say this definitely counts as scarcer than the average, so I don't think it was on his radar. Obviously, you can't ever prove a negative. Even if you found the actual shipping manifest from 1969, you could only say that it was missing from the manifest, it doesn't prove it wasn't in the crate. But here's my take: there does seem to be a dearth of this issue. If one wanted to believe it was distributed then one would have to hypothesize that there was some reason why ALL, maybe 8k to 20k copies, the stamped copies and PV's disappeared without trace and this is pretty much the only comic of its era to which that happened. Occam's Razor would suggest one incidence of them not being printed is more likely than 20,000 incidences of them being binned & destroyed. The version of events where it was not distributed but some randos came over later seems to fit Gary's experience, the volumes that are around now, the memories of people like Duncan and the fact that, try as we may, we can't find a single bloody copy of it out there anywhere.

I think 4 or 5...but there are 23 copies of no 1 which is interesting considering no 1 was squarebound, so much more prone to destruction and a new title and cost a whopping 1/9, you'd think no 10 and later, normal bound, cheaper priced issues would have a much, much higher incidence of survival. Is this because people knew number ones were collectible at this point? The Surfer was also the first title started at Sparta, so superior quality to previous squarebound issues.

Just to tidy up my syntax, I mean the fact that nobody remembers it like that is because it didn't happen like that. Somewhere along the way. despite each cover date month having between 4 and 7 different on sale dates in the US, they all rocked up at my newsagents at the same time (at least that's how I and others remember it). The 60's seems more mixed.

No. No no no no no no no. I'm disagreeing with you in case that wasn't clear. If there were a 100 copies of SS #10 for sale on UK ebay, sold by guys with descriptions like 'old comic for sale - clearing out my attic' and he was selling it along with 4 years of the Beano, a pair of moonboots (hardly worn) and a steering wheel for a 1973 Ford Cortina I would definitely say that this indicates that SS #10 came over in quantity and is out there among there general populace. But there are 2 copies of SS 10 in the UK on ebay, one by the Atomic Ninja's Comic Store and the other by Global Nostalgia. Only collectors have this issue. And, to underline the point, your poster boy is a guy who has Silver Surfers bound in hardback leather editions. Seriously, do we believe that this guy would not have got a copy of Silver Surfer 10 unless it was on the spinner rack at Bert's Mags, & Bags? This guy is the collector to end all collectors. He's probably THE Collector. He makes Gary look like he's not trying hard enough. I would say that the very limited availability of this comic and the people who own it are one of the better indicators that it did not get distributed.

It wouldn't necessarily. It's more the other way round. If the Surfer was seemingly printed in the middle of the batch, prior to a whole bunch of other titles which were distributed, you would pretty much have to assert that he got missed off for some other reason e.g. there was a whole pile of Silver Surfer 10's sitting there waiting to go but they got misplaced. If that had happened, they would surely have sent them later. If they were PV's pretty much definitely (though your Rawhide Kid issues would beg to differ). The point is really that a counter-argument could be "aha, well, ASM, FF ,Thor, Hulk and Millie Goes To The Betty Ford Clinic all had on sale dates after SS #10, so how come they caught the boat?". The fact that he's last in the line removes that argument and makes it a possibility. I've got a load more work to do US vs UK sales dates. In the 70's we all remember that the comics arrived and left all grouped together by calendar month. Yes, there were stragglers and odd-bods, but what NONE of us remember is that every month, half the titles were cover dated for that month and half of them were the previous month. In the 60's, it seems less clear. It seems more sporadic and collector's memories are all different together, if you know what I mean. I suspect that this is partly related to differences in printing & shipping, but mainly because T&P and World were completely different animals.

Thanks for this. I will pursue.

Yup, good point. Though we have no idea what these stamps actually mean, it seems bloody unlikely they're retroactive, so the on sale date may not be reliable.

If I ever, you know, go a little bit too far down the rabbit hole, you would tell me, wouldn't you, guys?