Malacoda

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?

It actually gets cancelled in AAF between issues #14 and #15. In issue #14, a Trudy Richards writes in to suggest they get rid of the contents page and they ask the readership what they reckon. They then report the results of this in AF #15. Go Trudy!

An interesting vacancy in our Sales Ledger department. We would train a suitable applicant. "Here is the stamp. And, see over there....that's the ink pad" Leicester Chronicle - Friday 23 November 1973

Thorpe and Porter are apparently inviting applications from go-ahead women. Which has always been very much my policy too. Liverpool Echo - Thursday 02 October 1969

Blimey, this one's a game of two halves.