Malacoda

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.

Is that why Fruit Salads have kept the name?

Rightly so. Though removing the lion from Tate & Lyle seem a bit nuts.to me. How many lions actually wrote in, do you think?

Indeed. The facts that they were all over the shop, almost all of them appear to be number 5's, but the other numbers are there in seemingly random order and the 2/- price goes from being insanely expensive to not being legal tender at all would all seem to point to the stamp just being a marker. Given that the T&P round stamps specifically indicated that the comics were returnable (SOR), it might be that the purpose of the diamond stamps was to cancel the T&P returnable stamp. There was obviously no way to remove the you-can-return-this-to-us-for-credit stamp from the covers, so the only way to cancel it out (other than the obliterator stamp, which leaves no replacement indicator) would be to put another stamp on it, like the triangular discount stamp. The higher price would then also differentiate these never-to-return, sold by the ton issues from the discounted sale price ones. The idea that these were bound for foreign shores but missed the boat is a nice thought experiment, but they go on for 10 years. How many boats can you miss? One thing that is intriguing to me is that the 2/- stamp goes from being a ludicrously high price in old money to a ludicrously high price in the dual currency period to being completely invalid in the new currency. At no point is it a realistic price. Maybe that was intentional. Just as you say, Albert, if they failed to sell this time around, their next destination was the pulper, but if you were trying to unload them in the Last Chance Saloon, nobody would take them if they bore a stamp that said 'these are worthless, please pulp them'. A high price stamp both makes them attractive to the last re-seller/customer, whilst at the same time ensuring that they never find their way back to Thurmaston again. If these stamps had, at some point, been a sensible market price and then just carried on getting used, that would be one thing, but the fact that these stamps appear for fully 10 years but are never a real price must indicate a different purpose.

Though it does make it the cheapest comic in the spinner and you could spend the extra penny on some Fruit Salads and Blackjacks.

Thank you so much for pulling all these together, Albert. That must have been quite a project. If you stumble across any more, they would definitely be of interest. It might be that if we can nail down the time frame it will give us a clue. Also, geography may be an issue. I never saw any of these at the time down south, and I trawled many second hand shops & books shops in west London, plus the comic marts and all the London comic shops. Maybe it's a Northern thing. Re the date range it's intriguing that they seem to fall between 1965 and 1974 (haven't checked them all yet). If you'd picked these up in 74, I'd say it doesn't mean anything, but the fact that you picked them up 5 or 6 years later makes me think that 1974 could be the cut off. Also, they seem to be 90% DC as you say, but there's quite a few randos in there. As you & Steve and the Robot and others have demonstrated, just about every publisher seems to get a look in somewhere.

Somewhere there's a pic of me reading the Avengers annual 1977 at my Gran's house. I was so engrossed I didn't even know the pic was taken. I might recreate it for its 50 anniversary.

Mwahahahahahahahahahahaha! Two Hulk annuals in the same year is especially weird. Also, the Spider Woman annual? I mean, just, what? I don't think this is even the full strength of the 20th century ones, let alone recent stuff.

Amazing. I'd imagine they'd be murder to acquire. And, as you say, it would be very unlikely that even the creators would ever have seen them.

Indeed, though I have to say hats off to the yearly hardback annuals for printing stuff we weren't going to get any other way. Some particular highlights: This one reprints FF 22 - 24 which were 6 years old by this point. This one reprints the classic 'Prisoner' run in it's entirety so it's really like a TPB. This 79 annual reprints annuals 4 and 10 which were both ND. This one reprints GS 4 which was ND and FF 28 which was old and LD. This Cap annual reprints the Steranko issues. T/A/P Xmen. I was gutted by this Hulk annual as the great Gary Brodsky cover led me to expect good things and inside are the early Ditko Hulks which I hated. Of course, years later you realise that you actually just bought the Ditko Hulks in full colour in hardcover for £1.35 and you're never going to own the originals. This Spidey annual reprints ASM annual (KS special) #5, which, surprisingly was distributed but I still think it was a rarity and ASM #11, which I certainly didn't own. This one reprints GS ASM 1 which was ND. This golden oldie has, believe it or not, Hulk 1 (but only the last part!), Hulk 4, TOS 57, which is the first Hawkeye, ASM 23 (3rd Goblin), JIM 105 (the first teaming the Cobra and Mr. Hyde) and also Golden Age reprints for Captain America and the Sub Mariner. All in full colour and in hardback, but for the high, high price of 12/6 (comics cost a shilling at this point, so 12/6 was a lot of pocket money. Good job it was a Christmas pressie).

So, as you were asking, I've been reading the original X men in these TPB's. I do have the originals but I don't want to get my jammy fingers on them. It got me to thinking, how many times did Marvel manage to sell us UK-heads X men 1 before these TPB's started rocking up. Would you like to know the answer? And so you shall! So, not to be afraid of the obvious, X men 1 was a PV, so we bought it in Sept 63 or thereabouts. Then 2 years later, the reprints in Marvel Tales were also PV's. And stamps. Sometimes both. Two years after that, it gets an actual UK reprint by Odhams. Mmmmmm. This scar could be yours..... Then you have to wait a whopping 6 years until you buy it again. This time is very cool. Having blasted straight through the first 6 Hulks, all of TTA and starting on Hulk 102, Tony Isabella's team decide they'd better start eking out old jade jaws, so they print FF 25 and 26 (which should have been the FF back up stories) in their entirety as the Hulk story (because the FF fight the Hulk in these issues). Then this gets really cool, because next in FF 26 ("The Avengers Take Over") what happens is that the Avengers take over. Strangely, as a complete one-off, they decide to supplement these FF reprints with reprints of X men 1 (only number 1 is reprinted at this point). What I thought was really cool about this, and probably the reason they chose Xmen, is that it means you have all 3 Marvel teams in the same comic. Less than 2 years later, the X men start their new home in the Super Heroes, a very strange UK title that seems to specialise in retired titles. A sort of Last of the Summer Wine in spandex. Barely had you put down your copies of Super Heroes 1, than the super-hyped and super exciting Son of Origin appeared, not so much in newsagents, but in comic shops, bookshops and other retail outlets. Inexplicably, I saw one brand new in the window of an electrical retailer behind Centrepoint. A little wait until December 79, when you get buy it for a 7th time. Amazing Adventures volume 3 was also not in newsagents, but there were a lot of comic shops, marts, cons and the like by this point. Hope you read that quickly, because in your Christmas stocking are this year's annuals, available everywhere from September 1980. Having bought it for the 8th time in a nice big glossy hardback, I'm not sure why you're going to buy it again in a b&w pocket digest size only a few weeks later, but apparently you are..... And finally, to celebrate the 20th anniversary, it gets its own full colour reprint (even spelt with a U) in it's own UK comic for the first time. But really the 10th time. None of that counts other reprints in the US, nor reprints in France, Spain & Germany. It really drives home how unfair the work-for-hire thing was when you see how many times all that one-paycheck material was cashed in on.