Malacoda

Conclusion: That said (a) there are no titles that have one ND issue (unless it’s number one) (b) if you were manipulating the order, why pick the Surfer? Doc Strange and Nick Fury were both cancelled from this month, and both had just had 2 issues ND, yet they were both still distributed in November and the Surfer was selected for ND? 4 out of the last 6 issues of Captain America were ND – why stop there and ND a single issue of the Surfer? It makes no sense. I think the first theory is correct. There is just so much mess and such a suddenly foreshortened deadline around SS #10, I can easily see how it would happen by mistake and it makes no sense as a conscious decision. So now that I’ve conclusively proven Silver Surfer #10 was ND and why, how long do you reckon we will need to wait before someone turns up a stamped copy? I reckon a week at the most!

Theory Number #2 Because I haven’t taken up enough of your time banging on about this one single comic. It might be deliberately ND. I think that during the 3rd hiatus, with the expansion of Marvel titles, T&P found the flexibility of having a cents-only order that didn’t have to be carved in stone 3 months in advance very attractive. However, there were enormous benefits to having the PV’s: the time saving of not having to individually stamp tens of thousands of comics is not hard to calculate. Also the reduced wage bill, reduced mess, space saving, lack of confusing dual pricing for newsagents, the list goes on. I also think that a key difference between 1967 and 1969 is that when the hiatus ended, everything had been transferred to Sparta, who could rattle off a few trillion PV’s faster and probably more cheaply than ECP. The solution, obviously, was to have both. Have a core order of PV’s for the core titles and top those up with cents copies and just have cents copies for the titles where the demand might be lower or more variable. But I think they went one better. I think they started using ND as well. I mean, that’s not really a different method to varying the size of the order, it’s just ‘varying’ it down to zero. Everyone who's still awake: I don’t think so, Rich. I think the ND’s were the usual ups and mis-fires in distribution, printing issues, batches that missed the boat, titles that weren’t ordered, etc etc etc But here is the thing that is very telling: during the last 28 months of T&P Marvels, there are 36 titles comprising 495 issues. So that’s a pretty decent sample base. How many titles have ND issues? 14. How many of those titles had PV’s? None. And how many of them are reprint titles? None. Every single time there’s a ND, it’s from one of the titles that has cents only issues. Kid Colt, Rawhide Kid, TOS/ Cap, Captain Savage, Nick Fury, Dr Strange (remember, I said 179 would be back), Tower of Shadows, Chamber of Darkness, Where Monsters Dwell, Where Creatures Roam and even the first issues of Amazing Adventures, Astonishing Tales and Conan. All of these titles have ND issues and every one of them is (1) an original-material title (i.e. not a reprint) and (2) was not in the PV print run prior to going ND. 495 out of 495 is an undeniable pattern (actually, technically, it’s 494 out of 495 because the first issue of Where Monsters Dwell is reprints, but I’m pretty sure that was not supposed to be distributed – it was a last minute substitution because Captain Marvel was cancelled unexpectedly). Again, it could just be 494 coincidences, but I would say it’s a pretty undeniable pattern. And Silver Surfer 10 was the first issue which should have been a PV but wasn’t. It does fit that pattern.

Theory Number #1 1) The first thing to note is that the Surfer was hanging ten off the print run: check out this table of on-sale dates and tell me which title, if any, had the greatest potential to miss the UK distribution deadline, to literally miss the boat (by the way, Captain Savage was ND, so no help there). 2) I don’t know why the Surfer was originally last (maybe because they were all GS and therefore square bound so stapled differently and had the covers attached differently?). It’s possible that when they set the print runs up, they did the GS comics last, but for whatever reason he has the last on-sale date. 3) As long as he was GS, there would be no PV’s, leaving T&P to stamp the comics as they did with the annuals, Marvel Tales 1 & 2, Marvel CIC and Fantasy Masterpieces (for the most part). 4) From issue 7, the Surfer went monthly, but this didn’t affect ‘the UK batch’ because there was no ‘UK batch’, we just got cents copies. This is where the bonkers relationship between the on-sale date and the cover date comes from. To give you a flavour for the knife-edge the Surfer was on compared to other titles, this is his run compared to Spidey for the same months (lead time in days from on sale date to 1st day of cover month). 5) From issue #8, the Surfer went down to a 15c standard size, this was demonstrably completely unexpected. There is no mention of it coming on the Bullpen Bulletins in issue #7 though they were clearly desperately short of material that month and no mention on the letters page – one of the responses to the letters even mentions the number of pages in the comics and doesn’t reference the upcoming change to the Surfer the very next month. 6) Then at the end of issue 8 there is note from Stan explaining the unexpected change, which he literally says caught them with their pants down. 7) Stan says that this is because we, the readers, demanded that the Surfer go monthly that very month. I suspect it’s more likely an issue with the distributor. This is the exact month that it flips from IND to Curtis, so, messily, half the titles are distributed by IND and the other half by Curtis. The Surfer, being at the end of the print run, was conversely one of the first to flip. 8) So this means, as Marvel didn’t know it was happening, and T&P certainly didn’t know it was happening, there was no time to get the Surfer added to the PV print run. As you can see, the uniquely tight gap between the on-sale date and the cover month date meant that with the last-minute decision on Surfer 8, number 9 would presumably already have been in the print schedule by the time the conversation with T&P about a PV took place, so the first issue of the Surfer which SHOULD have been a PV was…all together now…. number 10! (Keep in mind that half the titles were PV and half were cents stamps, so it was by no means a given that the Surfer would be a PV). So why did it fail to happen? Don’t know. But look at the dates. The Surfer had always been printed last, was always printed tightest against its release date, and had always been excluded from the UKPV print run, so it wasn’t like it got knocked off the PV schedule, it just failed to be added to it in time and if any title was going to miss the boat, it was always going to be the Silver Surfer. The really interesting thing is that it seems that no PV’s meant no cents stamps issues either. Why? You would imagine that with the PV’s not getting printed, they would have made up the order with a ton of cents copies, but they didn’t. This is how I think it happened: 1) We know that distribution is split exactly down the middle at this point: there are 10 titles which get PV’s which then get a load of (seemingly variable in quantity) cents issues added to the order to top it up and there are 10 titles which have cents issues only, to be stamped by T&P. Obviously, these are not part of the ‘top up’ list as they are all cents copies to start with and there would be no difference between the main order and the ‘top up’…. they’re all just cents copies. 2) Let’s imagine that as two job lists at Sparta Distribution: (1) the cents only list, where the whole order is made up of cents copies and (2) the PV + cents copies list, where the order is based off the PV print run and then cents issues are added. This would definitely be two separate lists, as List One would be wholly the US domestic order and List Two would be wholly the export order, parcelled up and headed straight for the docks. 3) With the Surfer, from issues 1-9, he’s on List One: there’s a standing order to put (let’s say) 8,000 cents copies into the UK crate because there were no PV’s. 4) The Surfer has just changed from bi-monthly to monthly creating the unprecedently tight distribution schedule. Then when he drops overnight to a standard 20 pages, they decide to do PV’s from issue 10 so the cents-to-be-stamped order is, obviously, cancelled and he’s deleted from List One. 5) Then, due to the time crunch / a scheduling error / general confusion caused by the change in size / price / frequency of publication / whatever, he doesn’t get added to List Two in time for the PV print run. 6) As the cents top up copies are a function of List Two, he doesn’t get these either. 7) As he’s now on neither list, there are no Silver Surfers shipped to the UK. Later, when people are scratching their heads saying ‘why are there so many Silver Surfers left over this month?’ they realise and send a wad of the leftovers in next month’s crate, which is why a handful of them show up as seaside specials after the event. This may all be coincidence, but then you have to believe that the change in size and price, which demonstrably caught everyone on the hop, had nothing to do with it, the change from bi-monthly to monthly had nothing to do with it, the flip from cents copies to PV’s had nothing to do with it and the fact that the Surfer was the last title printed each month had nothing to do with it. The balance of probabilities would perhaps suggest otherwise.

Silver Surfer 10 OK, so what the Hell happened to Silver Surfer #10? (this is for you, Gary…not that you ever asked for it, obviously….) Things to keep in mind: Evidence indicates that the cents issues which came over with the PV’s from April 1969 to July 1971 came over directly alongside them in the same months (changes in price and currency format tie up with the titles which had no PV’s and also the stamps stop dead when the PV’s transfer to World). There are some comics that were non-D clearly by intention, but there are others that equally clearly were supposed to be distributed but something happened (e.g. TTA #62, FF #80 and our old friend Silver Surfer #10). Doc Strange #179 may also be on that list, but I suspect not. More on that later.

You know, given that the thread actually starts with these words, it's almost a license to go into insane depths of detail and speculation about ND. I say 'almost' but you know what's coming next, right?

Looks like it. They're probably an earlier version of these kind of comic bags.

Makes sense. Everything you read about them says they were sealed. It does make you wonder about the process at World. They would have to have been ordering the bags along with the comic order and then sealing them up with their own returns. Maybe they came with a one-time peelable strip, so once sealed couldn't be reopened (except verrrrry slowly and carefully). Thinking about it, that would probably have to be the case, because whatever Curtis were doing, World could do too.

I don't think he did buy them for preservation. The bag must be re-sealable. Here they are out of the bag and it doesn't look torn open.

...and he doesn't have any more, I'm afraid.

" If memory serves, I *believe* I bought these (or more likely were bought for me!) when on holiday, so probably from somewhere on the south coast (Bognor, Bournemouth, somewhere like that)."

We've been together too long. Yup. Sold to US buyer, believe it or not. So the seller is from Maidstone in Kent, not a million miles from the coast, but not exactly what you'd call a popular seaside destination, so do you think he bought these in Maidstone, or do you think they're seaside specials.....if you don't want to know, look away now.....

They definitely weren't. I suspect that World got some of them UK-varianted. I guess if you can have millions of comics re-priced in pence, having a few thousand bags re-priced is not a biggie. From the looks of things (anecdotal), these things ran (for Marvel) in the US from 1972 to 1984 and there were a ton of them. Doesn't seem a huge stretch to imagine that World piggy-backed on that. http://www.wymann.info/comics/MarvelMultiMags-Overview-BronzeAge.html According to Tom Brevoort (Senior Vice President of Publishing for Marvel), they were 'everywhere' in the US, even in vending machines. When you read this, scroll down to the responder from the West of Scotland. He says that distribution there was bad in the late 70's and these things were a godsend. https://tombrevoort.com/2020/04/18/blah-blah-blog-marvel-multi-mags/ Silver Age - 47c for 4 at this point. https://comics.ha.com/itm/silver-age-1956-1969-/superhero/marvel-silver-age-multi-mags-pack-69-a3-marvel-1967-/a/829-41181.s

Nope, never saw them, but as I said previously, occasionally at my local shop, comics from one or two years ago would suddenly pop up, re-stickered with the then-current price.

Didn’t expect to find these, looks genuine so I’m going to argue with myself; Dang my britches. The very things. And all of the PV's produced at that time were for World, so those are definitely the things. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease tell me that you won them !!!!

Yes, I'm surprised the pricing wasn't more attractive. It would explain why the newsagents tore them open and re-priced them. If you could re-sticker them at new prices, you probably only had to sell a couple of them to make a profit. I also wonder what the target market was? Were they aimed at desperate parents trying to keep the kids quiet on long journeys or similar? I got 50p per week pocket money once I turned 11 (1977), but before that 50p was an unthinkable sum. And Grown Ups still called 50p 'ten bob' as if that was an even more unthinkable amount of money.

I suspect the numbers were low. World's complaint to Marvel wasn't that they didn't know what to do with all the leftovers so much as 'please, sir, I'd like some more'. For the first year and a half, they were only getting 10 or 11 titles per month (T&P's typical supply hadn't been that low since 1964 when there were only 10 titles). They were prohibited, for varying lengths of time, from distributing ASM, Hulk, Avengers, Fantastic Four, Xmen, Master of Kung Fu, Tomb of Dracula, the Defenders, Peter Parker SSM and anything else that had its own UK reprint title (including Star Wars) or was featured on the masthead. And we all remember cycling round at least 10 newsagents trying to find our favourite titles. We don't know what the numbers imported were. Estimates for how much of the print run was PV's seem to range between 2% and 5%. The circulation stats submitted to the government may be extremely inaccurate / fictional. But let's run with those for a second. In the 70's, Avengers had print runs of c. 350k - 370k (Spidey was more like 550k but World were denied him and the Hulk right through). If you min/max that over the 2-5%, it means the total PV print run (and therefore the total UK order) was between 7,000 and 18,500 for a mid-selling title. That's impossibly low. That's between 7 and 19 issues for each town & city in the UK. I'm pretty sure London got more than 7 copies of each title because we had more than that just down my high street. So my takeaway from that is that we don't know what the numbers were, but the flavour I get is that returns for each title were in the hundreds, not thousands. There were maybe a few thousand returns overall each month, so when you then put 5 or 6 in each lucky bag, you're only producing a few hundred lucky bags each month. That's all pure conjecture, but the fact that World seem to have needed nothing like the process T&P had for dealing with returns and none of us seem to have stumbled onto anything like the discount stamps, double doubles, annuals etc suggests to me that the numbers were minimal (until something suggests otherwise).

Interesting. That, of course, is why they were invented. In the US, Gold Key sold them in gas stations, 7-11's and convenience stores. They were designed for places that were not on the sale-or-return map. By the sound of it, they took the same approach here.

Hi Kev - where's round here - Newcastle? Any chances of some pics of multi bags? Would love to see them. Cheers

Dude. A Close Encounter of the 3rd Kind with a Marvel Lucky Bag (or similar.....I believe there were a few versions of this re-distributing tactic, Lucky Bags seems to be most often remembered, but there were others). X men 113 would be some time after Sept 1978 and 12p was indeed the cover price at that point. Very specific memories (but those memories are always crystal clear, aren't they? For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face). Thank you for this. There is zero chance that any of these survived in the bags and they were non-returnable, so if newsagents couldn't shift them, I imagine they just opened the bags up and priced them down or threw them out. For that reason, people who distinctly remember buying them are the only resource left. Of course, you bartered with the newsagent for your paper round money so your memory of this is all the more distinct.

I love these kind of posts. Marvel were being distributed by World, who were distributing through the absolute headline chains of national, regional and local distributors, so no surprise that there were plenty of their comics in your bog standard newsagents. T&P would have been distributing via sales reps working from a regional depot (maybe Eastbourne or Brighton, but could easily have been South London.....we forget how much less traffic there was in the 70's). If I had been the T&P rep, a cafe which wasn't selling other comics is exactly where I would have taken my spinner rack. (Atlas Seaboard comics were also distributed by T&P). Did you have much experience of the 'seaside specials' ....the comics which were re-circulated to seaside leisure towns, typically in the summer? Dare I ask....did you ever come across a Marvel Lucky Bag? (I suspect these didn't get much beyond Manchester-Liverpool-Leeds-Sheffield).

Slabbing might pre-date the UK Edition nomenclature. They only started using that recently, didn't they?

Can I ask ...where was this shop? Which town are we in?

There's enough examples out there to evidence that that was likely going on to some degree. Do you remember if the shop was maybe selling them second hand? My old shop did that, would buy, sell and reprice customer's old comics, but that was the late 1970s. Here's T&P doing it for an extra penny. This little beauty must have fallen down the back of Ethel's radiator because FF 19 came out in Oct 1963 and this got stamped 10d somewhere between December 64 and Aug 65. Note how Ethel had to use her stamp to obliterate the 9d price, which was of course never necessary with the cents prices. Also, Steve, for your 'state of that' file, note the 3 additional stamps it picked up after those two. Considering it was a PV to start with, this collected a lot of extra ink. And just to add insult to injury, someone has coloured in the A and the O with a biro.

Are you about to introduce Les Dawson in a top hat and Bernard Cribbins playing the spoons?