Malacoda

You're most welcome. And keep in mind, I've basically only posted on one thread, so I've barely scratched the surface of what you've accomplished. Oh, and by the way....

You'll be relieved to hear, the cover was drawn by Ric Estrada, who eventually brought his bad-boy motorcycle skills to the right side of the law. (In the kind of twist you can't make up, Erik Estrada in later life actually did become a cop, sometimes on a motorbike).

Do you think she looks the same? The first lady blatantly has hair by Vince Colletta, while the second lady is so Romita it practically looks like Flash Thompson kissing Gwen Stacy (if Flash had Harry Osborn's hair). Dez Skinn instigated the Marvel Digests including these Young Romances which reprinted old romance stories from the 50's and 60's. This one, despite the title, is actually not a reprint of an issue of DC or Prize's Young Romance, but Marvel's My Love #3 (with less piano). That still doesn't answer the question of how they got away with it, but as there were only 14 issues, I imagine it was gone before anyone noticed. Probably wasn't worth a 13 year Captain Marvel style lawsuit.

That's obviously completely true. Much of what you've researched has never been researched by anyone else and, even if it had been, it would surely not have been to the same depth and with the same relentless, meticulous dedication. Or with the same incisive conclusions drawn. Where you say "I've always liked to own the comics I write about where I can, rather than use other peoples scans" I fully get this. There is nothing like holding the actual artefact in your hands, feeling the paper, smelling it and, in the case of stickers, holding it up to a 200w bulb. However, I think your other great strength has been the courtesy and credit you extend to other (less expert) adventurers in this curious back alley of comic collecting. I think your expertise coupled with the appreciation and respect you extend to others has created a gathering of eagles (bonus points if you can identify where I stole that from) and the interactions that have blossomed in that environment (particularly with input from those who were there at the time) has mushroomed into something far greater than the sum of its parts. I'm not disagreeing with what you say about your methods, I just think you're underselling yourself and your achievements.

I like the fact that she has eagerly filled it in and then (presumably) learnt that she'd have to send it to Pennsylvania and probably was ineligible for the offer anyway. That must have been a sad little moment.

I fully agree with this in principle, but in practice, life's too short to wait years for a knackered copy (of something you don't actually collect) when you know that someone you chat to (probably on here) might have a FN+ copy of the smoking gun run behind them. That said, sometimes you need to get enough of a critical mass to even frame the question. I'm currently groping towards a question for your Alan Class Club thread, but I need to hone it down first.

I hate that. I saw a Doc Strange 179 with what may have been a T&P stamp but it was in a massive bundle. The seller said it was already parcelled up and wouldn't open it to tell me. I was sorely tempted but once bidding went over £500, it was too much money just to find out it was a dealer stamp or similar. Still haunted by it. Good luck.

Something that may be a factor in some of these differences, going back to the war and the post war years, is paper rationing. In the US, Canada and the UK, newspapers were still published, but rationing meant that publishers had to get clever. For newspapers, there was no real choice as they were limited to size of newspaper they could print. In the UK, in 1939, it was reduced immediately to 60% of their pre-war consumption of newsprint. Paper supply then came under the No 48 Paper Control Order on 4th September 1942 and was controlled by the Ministry of production. By 1945 newspapers were limited to 25% of their pre-war consumption. Wrapping paper for most goods was prohibited, so ironically, newspaper would have been even more useful. UK newspapers didn't get back to their pre-war size until 1953 (and I think that was only because Liz got a new hat that year). In the US, there were similar restrictions. When Al Kanter was trying to print second + runs of Classics Illustrated, he did it by buying up paper allotments from 9 different publishers in NY, so you could have bought yourself 9 copies of the same edition and found each one subtly different. When he published CI 7 (Robin Hood) it was so popular it went to 5 editions in a matter of months. Despite being produced across only 7 months, the 3 latter editions came from 3 different printers on paper stock from 3 different publishers. The high suicide rate among Classics Illustrated completists is probably unrelated.

Hey @OtherEric this still won't answer your question about the first specifically UK content that was re-printed in the US, but..... In Switzerland, Rodolphe Topffler comics were sustained sequential narratives featured cartooning, panel borders and were the first literature to tell stories by sequences of interdependent art and prose. The very first American comic-style book was The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, printed in NY in 1842, translated from Topffler's original in 1837. This precedes Ally Sloper by nearly half a century. So whatever the first UK material was, this was definitely the first European material as they were the earliest European comics (in the sense that we use the term).

In the early 90's, when Ford re-launched the RS2000, my company got the only two in the country in advance and almost immediately one of them was stolen from one of our less switched-on sales reps. It being basically the only RS 2000 on the road, the police clocked it immediately and gave chase, but couldn't catch it. The marketing dept at Ford took the rest of the day off. This is the ad from the time. I always thought it was a bit on the nose for a UK ad, until the end.

Indeed. That's an absolutely superb montage. Do you mind if I put the cherry on the top?

Welcome back @Get Marwood & I Now, about this rather beautifully positioned stamp.... What is this? It's an Alan, so it's already got a UK price on it. This doesn't reflect any kind of sale price or discount. Alan famously insisted that all his comics be returned so he could sell them to me again at West Wittering the next summer, so maybe it's something to do with that, but I can hardly imagine newsagents stamping the returns.

You might have opened up way too big a can of worms there, my friend.

Mmm. It counts in both the crosshairs and strangulations categories.

Just an arm.....also, not sure these are exactly dinosaurs....

If it's a fade pattern, it's an extremely localised one. Commissioner Gordon's coat was supposed to be that shade of orange. Bearing in mind that you can't actually make red itself in CYMK (primary colour), so it's always some shade of red built from the right combinations of dots, it might be that they did the first set of dots to get the oranges on the left side, but then screwed up half of the title. The orange across the BAT is completely even & consistent which would be odd for a fade, but if it was missing the extra dots to make it go red (i.e. the extra dots of magenta) it would stay orange (and consistently, evenly orange).

@ganni @MR SigS Nice, Gents. Shall we have a little round up?

The Indicia is intriguing. Spire Christian Comics were published from 1971 - 1982 and the book on which this was based was published in 1973. Oliphants were the London end of a Scottish religious book publishers, so that makes a lot of sense, but Oliphants went into liquidation in 1968, so either it's a different Oliphants or a new company was formed.

It's from cd Dec 60. Comics went to 10d in Dec 64, so assuming it was current price, it's somewhere in that gap, but as you say, it was a PV, so something odd happened. This issue is weird in that everything says it features a Dr. Strange prototype. There are 4 stories in this: a SF one about shadowy aliens invading earth, one where a practical joker tricks a guy into staying a night in a haunted house but the guy turns out to be ghost, one about a time travelling petty criminal and one where astronauts discover that Atlantis relocated to the moon. Seriously, there is no Doc Strange prototype except that the ghost looks a bit like him because he's a Ditko character with a moustache.

And still they come....

And the Treasuries are described as 'special key' issues. The joke is on him as he has just made it meaningless, but he actually does have a few keys in there (Avengers 181 & 196, FF 51, Xmen 244, X Factor 5 & 6) but after the first ten times he uses the word, you just switch off.