Malacoda

Nice catch. Very nice. Would you not agree that it's more impressive how few of these there are? (Given that tens of millions of comics were stamped). I was trying to find examples where there was a nice big smear as if the next comic was put down on top of it and then moved while it was still wet, but there are really few. And what you do see all the time is stamps where they are blobbed by the fact that way too much ink was on the stamp, but they are still not smeared. It just looks like a lot of ink was used and then it was given ample time to dry. Like our old friend here. By rights, this should look like a fountain pen sneezed on it. This was clearly given space to dry.

Right, so they did all arrive more or less together and at this point just ahead of the cover date month. It's not an overlap that TOS 17 was still available at the end of May because it was the May cd issue, so not a big surprise to find it was still kicking about at the end of May. Many thanks. If you have any memories from later on in the 60's that would also be great.

Hey, Albert, please advise - what do you remember about the timing thing? In the 60's, did Marvel comics arrive in chunks of same-cover-date-month, more or less in the month they were dated or was it more chaotic? Were they split over 2 months, or was it just chaos? Many thanks.

But T & P stamped not only DC comics, but a wide range of other publications. Why have the same stamp number across the board? It must be so that T & P know which batch a particular comic, magazine, etc has arrived in. Yes. I think it was about stock control more than invoicing, and when I say stock control, I mean more about the returns than the outbound comics And although this has been dismissed with a 'pshaw' before, I still believe that the number is a signal to the newsagent that the item is approaching the end of its shelf life, a 'best before' indicator telling him to prepare it for return to T & P. Pshaw. Again. But I think you're right about the timing. It's not a stock count or invoice reconciliation from arrival, nor a tally of the comics as they get dispatched (though I'm sure that was done). I think it was a way to keep tabs on all the comics coming back in, which happened in a far more sporadic and not-under-Fred's-control way. And surely the books would have been counted BEFORE they sailed the ocean blue, if only to complete the paperwork, bills of lading, etc, and well before any stamps were applied. Absolutely definitely. And to clear customs, quantities and weight would have be specified.

I think this is exactly it. I think it served a purpose, but the numbering was absolutely secondary to the price, and the time/cost of re-stamping comics that were already priced in sterling would have been non cost effective. I also think, if the comics did have to be laid out or fanned out to dry, space must have been a huge consideration too. 1m comics laid end to end is 166 miles. Ethel's table would have started in Oadby and finished in the English Channel.

Thanks Robot. I suspect, given that IND had Marvel's balls in a vice, that the volumes of Marvels shipped to T&P were significantly less than DC's (keeping in mind that by the time Marvel in the US threw off the shackles of IND, IND owned T&P so Marvel did not escape them in the UK), so I would not be surprised if there were loads of places that only got DC. May also have been a question of which warehouse you were near. Distribution may have been very uneven. The IM/SM one shot is, of course, a total maverick for us to as a yardstick (not surprised it sticks in your memory though). I can easily imagine a newsagent hanging onto that 'once in a lifetime issue' and even more so in a holiday/camping area. Might have been re-distributed there. Can you remember where you were for that camping holiday? Cheers

I remember very distinctly, although I could afford so few (my weekly pocket money was less than the cost of one comic....usually by a single penny!) so it might be that, clear as my memory is, my sample base is not the best. However, I knew which newsagents had each month's comics the longest and when they changed over. As I posted before, Twickenham Station was always the last place hanging onto last month's mags, so if I'd finally got enough coppers together, that was always my last chance. I distinctly remember not buying Avengers 154 because Avengers never came in and its unexpected presence was surely a one-off fluke and I would be left high and dry on a cliff-hanger ending when 155 didn't turn up the next month. I then bitterly regretted this decision, but it was too late. It had disappeared from the shelves. A harsh lesson. But then.....a new hope. My sister was being driven to visit a friend in nearby St. Margarets. Would my mum take me and swing by Twickenham Station? Miracle of miracles, she said yes. And Avengers continued to come in thereafter ( I didn't know it was blocked by the UK weeklies at this point). My copy of 154 is spine-rolled to oblivion having been read so many times.

Obviously, it's hard to argue with this, but what I've found is that unless you've actually got some questions to ask the comics, they can't tell you the story. And the comics themselves don't always prompt the questions to which they are the answers ( I mean sometimes you look at a cover and go 'wtf? when did that start?' but often you have to get the question from somewhere before you even look at the comics). Maybe you & I are the Mr & Mrs Jack Spratt of comic analysis. When people have responded to the above, I'm going to post something which occurred to me and I realised the 3rd hiatus would be the point at which it would have been exposed. When I checked, I found exactly what I expected, but I was still none the wiser. Can't wait to see what the Brains Trust makes of this one. BTW, do you support my contention? You're a fellow Southerner, so I assume your memory of when/how the comics arrived and changed over each month is the same as mine? You don't remember, for example, split months where half the titles on the newsagent's shelf were Jan and half were Feb? It was always a particular cover month and then it changed, en masse, to the next cover month.

Don't worry, I jest, I jest. I'm actually going to post something about UK Marvel soon that will be completely irrelevant, but I will be surprised if it's not of interest to readers of this thread.

Aha. An excuse opportunity to get on one of my hobby horses without technically hi-jacking the thread. Hold my beer….. Primarily talking about Marvel here… Those of us in our 50's remember that in the 70’s comics were on the newsagents shelves in discreet cover months which were always the month we were in. It was not exact, the April cd comics didn’t get put out on April 1st and taken away on the 30th, and they didn’t all change in the same shops on the same day, but broadly speaking, you bought your April cd issues of whichever Marvels you collected in April and waited a month for the May ones, and, sure enough, a month later, the April leftovers were replaced by the new May issues. Many of us remember it like that, and, I think no one remembers it differently?? (Obviously, we all have stories about finding a 3 year old gem unaccountably still in a newsagent's rack, but I mean generally). Now, we know that the comics were not distributed like that in the US. They were printed and went on sale at 4 points in the month for each cover date. We can debate the exact accuracy of sources like Mike’s, but unless the information is 100% wrong it seems there are 3 or 4 sets of release dates for each comic e.g. Kid Colt 166, Hulk 159, DD 95 & Iron Man 54 all had on sale dates of 3/10/72 Thor 207, Cap 157, ASM 116, Avengers 107 & Subby 57 all had on sale dates of 10/10/72 Rawhide Kid 107, Amazing Adventures 16, Conan 22 & Marvel Feature all had on sale dates of 17/10/72 FF 130, Sgt. Fury 106, Captain Marvel 24, Creatures on the Loose 21 and Kull 6 all had on sale dates of 24/10/72. So these comics would have appeared on US newsstands at those weekly intervals throughout the month of October 1972. But they all had cover dates of Jan 1973, so the export / UKPV issues would have appeared on the shelves of UK newsagents all together at the same time in Jan 1973. Note: all together, at the same time and in the month they were cover dated. This raises the point that the UK orders must have been collated together at some point in time & space. Obviously, they were put to one side and collated at some point in the month at WCP in Sparta (they were pence issues, so they could only be piled up until they were ready to go) and I imagine there was only one sailing per month. This leaves two possibilities: either WCP piled up 4 weeks’ worth of UKPV’s and waited until the last week of the month when a complete cover month of UKPV’s had been assembled and then dispatched them in the last days of the month such that a complete cover date month rocked up in the UK with a neat bow on it (this seems unlikely to me, given the scale at which Sparta were working and how inconsequential the pence order for Marvel was, even to Marvel, let alone Sparta). More likely, when the container lorry offloaded at the Circulation Dept at World, it had 2 cover date months together and they separated out the cover dates and prepared each month’s orders to go out. Distribution of comics at World was part of the News Division, so they handled a mix of daily, weekly and monthly publications anyway and putting half a batch aside for future delivery was what they did all day long. In the 1960’s, Marvel comics were being distributed (along with all the other major US comic publishers) by T&P arriving on conventional ships, but in the 1970’s, Marvel comics were being distributed by World Distributors and arriving in container ships, so distribution patterns & practices for Marvel in the 70’s may be different to DC and others (World also distributed Archie and Gold Key at a certain time). However, given that IND were sending palettes of random, returned whichever-month DC’s alongside palettes of bespoke-printed UKPV’s for Marvel, it surely can only be that a group of warehousemen in Fred Kite style brown coats in Oadby were offloading and sorting out the Marvels by cover date and, in some fashion, sorting out the DC’s. This is a key point I will be coming back to because, in the great mystery of T&P ink stamps we have (we = maybe just me) treated the question of what the ink stamps were (i.e. what do the numbers denote) as being largely the same question as what are they for? Which it’s not, necessarily. Even having figured out the pattern and the batching (to the great extent that Marwood has) it doesn’t inherently answer the question of why they batched them up like that and why they needed to actually stamp each comic rather than, for example, just put them in secure bundles with a batch number on the bundle. The newsagents would seem to be the key to that, but maybe not as directly as we think. But, before we get to that, let’s go back a bit: 1) Does everyone who was collecting in the 70’s remember it like that? Marvel comics arrived on the shelves in discrete months and DC was more chaotic? 2) to Albert and others who were collecting in the 60’s….was it also like that? Do you remember comics coming in the month they were dated or was it more split / mixed? I appreciate we’ve touched on this before, and apologies for asking people to repeat themselves but this thread is 2435 posts long now and also people may have thoughts other than the ones posted. This isn't just repetition, I am going somewhere with this, I promise. And just to whet your appetite, what got me thinking about this was this question: T&P stamped US comics with UK price stamps that bore a numbering system which appears to have sequentiality & purpose. Even at the start of the ban being lifted (before Marvel existed as such), T&P were distributing 1 million comics per month. Assuming, for argument's sake, it takes 3 seconds to inkstamp a comic (bearing in mind that you can't just pile the wet ones up, you have to fan them out and let them dry), that would be a full time job for 5 Ethels. There may be factors we know not of, but it was clearly a beast of a job. However, on the UKPV's, obviously there was no need for the price stamp, but there was no stamp at all. Clearly whatever the purpose of this stamp was for T&P, the price was essential, but the numbering system was just a nice-to-have because it was omitted from the UKPV's, which means that most of the time, T&P's distribution system for all Marvel comics operated without it. Similarly, World used no visible stamping or system, so they didn't need it either. So....what was it for, that it was a nice to have, but not essential and.... (here it comes).....why was it a nice-to-have for T&P but completely unnecessary for World? Ta.

The great moment for this is the 1965 annuals which were all PV's. I think Ethel stamped the whole lot of them to be on the safe side.

Nope, no proof, but I do have an interesting speculation for you. Charlton were initially distributed by T&P, then went to Millers. After Len died in 1964, Millers got out of comics and seemingly Charlton went to the mysterious RV. T&P were Roberts & Vinter’s printers (not distributors, but printers) for Science Fantasy / New Worlds / Impulse and when T&P went down, it took RV, or certainly these imprints with them. When IND bought T&P, they let RV go down with the ship, rather than trying to save what was, I believe, a profitable publication. I always assumed this was because IND only cared about the distribution of their comics (including Marvel, who were a customer), but actually if letting T&P fall and not bailing out their debt to RV knocked out Charlton’s UK distributor, well, that would be a little bonus, wouldn’t it? Incidentally, get a load of this bad boy. Great big roundy 1/3 stamp and a price sticker from the legendary Forever People in Bristol.

Couldn't agree more with this sentiment. From looking at DC and even Marvel, I would never have deduced that T&P actually went totally bankrupt in 1966 and were bought out of receivership by IND. From the continuity of imports, it looks like they maintained business continuity and from everything you read it sounds like IND bailed them out. It's only when you start reading about Roberts & Vinter and Science Fantasy magazine that you realise that T&P went down in flames. It's not visible in the comics because IND served their own interests, but if you weren't flying about in a cape, you weren't getting saved. Sometimes the answers to our comic-related questions are outside the comics history. But I would say that, wouldn't I?

Porters were completely gone from the company long before 1959, so they definitely never met Ethel. I always think it's amazing that they got out because they didn't want their name sullied by the soft porn for which Fred was always being raided, yet the company remained T&P probably until long after Porters itself was wound up. Fred, I believe, was very much involved in the business from 1959 to 1962. Classics Illustrated had been their biggest sellers throughout the 50's….and having started as Bible Classics, were refreshingly free from the threat of incineration as indecent literature or being seized as adolescent-warping, juvenile-delinquency-causing, Post Wertham horror pulps, as defined by the Not In Front Of The Children Act of 1955. So when Fred needed some deep pockets and an American base of operations to start importing US comics as soon as the ban lifted in 1959, Gilberton’s were a pretty logical first call as the publishers of his top sellers. Unfortunately for Fred (or maybe not, depending on the size of the handshake), Gilberton’s sales were drying up in the US, but the market in Europe was still pretty good, so Bill Kanter de-camped to the UK. In the mid 50's, when CI was at its height, he had been on a buying spree of Northern European distributors, so moving the publication of CI to the UK and using T&P as base camp seemed logical as business died off in the States. I think he significantly over extended himself, and failed to see that the drop off in sales in the US was precursor to the drop off in Europe. I think that’s why T&P went suddenly and surprisingly bankrupt in July 1966. Bill Kanter had relocated the company from Oadby (after a fire) to newer, bigger premises in Thurmaston at the same time that he was running these companies in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden & West Germany. I think his love affair with Classics Illustrated (he was a huge proponent of it and it was he who struck the deal with our friends, Curtis Circulation, who got it distributed nationally in the US) may have blinded him to some obvious business logic. Seemingly, the reason for buying these distributors was to own bases from which the translations of the originals into the national languages could be overseen, which seems absolutely bonkers to me. It may not be that the costs of the companies in Europe hit the bottom line of T&P directly, but when IND bought out T&P, it included all of these European companies, so they seem to have been owned as part of T&P. not Gilbertons (which was sold off separately the following year). I think you can see a pretty strong trajectory upwards to 1962 which I associate with Fred, and a pretty fast decline downwards as soon as he left, so I think he had a lot to do with the importation of US comics, primarily via IND and I think he was definitely the first one at the T&P Christmas Dinner Dance to whisk Ethel onto the floor in the Gentleman's Excuse Me. (No innuendo required).

Not sure you ever will. Porters were a builder's merchants who diversified into newsagents (possibly just because they were the freeholders of some of the properties from which they ran their business and therefore had some leaseholds to commercial properties?). One of their leaseholders was a Mr. Collis who was a newsagent in Coventry and thereby met Fred who was a newsagent in Leicester. Imagine the conversation where Mr. Collis casually mentioned to Fred that his shareholders were looking to diversify into the news business. Cha-ching. I would guess being a builder's merchants was a pretty cash rich business in 1946 (what with one or two buildings needing a spot of work after the recent hostilities).

Only a few. That one with the van was added to the Ulverscroft website recently, I think. Corker. My first assumption was that it was the borrowed van he first started up with in 1946, but he ran a mobile library service before the war (when he was a painter & decorator), so it might well be from that.

There's certainly nothing to suggest otherwise and it ties up neatly. Where was this blog, Steve? Anything else that might be of interest? (Enquiring minds need to know....)

Lordy Mama. So now we have the possibility that reduced price stamps applied by the retailers might have been identical to ones used by T&P! Streuth. It's almost as if they didn't realise that 50 years later there would be clusters of high-functioning sociopaths going over every ink smudge with an electron microscope. I mean...what chance does this give us?

Lost my bet. I was sure you'd go with 'caught red handed'

Re: people alive, I agree, but I think the opposite also applies i.e. there must be a lot of material collected over the last 30 years from comics professionials who are no longer with us, so for those of us still ticking when he finally gives birth, it will literally be the last word on some topics. Re MWOM, rarity may be an issue. Whereas with the US AF 15, ASM 1, FF 1, Hulk 1 etc most people simply binned them because no one knew what they were destined to become, when MWOM launched in 1972, there were thousands of established Marvelites who bought and kept their copies. Add to that the sheer volume - MWOM 1 shifted 500k copies, so even if 90% were binned after reading or destroyed subsequently, that still means there's 10 copies out there for anyone who wants one.

Did you manage to keep a straight face while you were typing that, Gary? Remind me never to play poker with you. Seriously, I think the first time I saw Rob announce it was more or less finished and about to go to press was on Lew Stringer's blog in 2007. I bet some of you have been waiting even longer, haven't you?

Hooray indeed. Let's see an app duplicate that. (Though I'll be surprised if one doesn't).

Thanks Both. Yes, where the GCD has indexed it properly, it's brilliant.... Daredevil (Marvel, 1964 series) #5 (December 1964) [pages 1-10 with panels 1 and 2 deleted from page 10 with panels 1-3 of page 11 moved to the bottom of page 10] I love the notes of which panels have been re-formatted to create the UK reprint. They also list all the people who wrote letters in and there are links to US originals, indica information, creator info, it's just what you'd want, but a huge amount of it hasn't been done yet and also there's no simple table of what was reprinted from where, you have to go into each individual comic. As you've said many times, Steve, things only jump out when you put everything into a table. For instance, here's something I had never noticed before: I was always fascinated by the decision, given the rate that Marvel UK was burning through the US content, to create the Titans & SSM&TSH in that landscape format that ripped through more than 60 pages of content per week. This meant that, for example, the Titans alone was burning through about 13 comics per month. I had always assumed, as was the norm, that the Titans re-printed half of a US story per week, but when you look at how it started this is exactly what it didn't do. It started with the Inhumans from Amazing Adventures (split book), Cap from TOS (split book), Subby from TTA (split book), Nick Fury from ST (split book) - so these were all titles where the US story was only half a book long and therefore the perfect length for a UK reprint on a 1 to 1 basis. The other title in there was Captain Marvel, where they reprinted a whole issue every week at the start, so nothing was half a US issue. It then further occurred to me that Cap, Subby & Fury were kind of the leftovers. IM had been reprinted in SMCW, leaving the Cap half of TOS unused, Hulk had been reprinted in MWOM leaving the Subby half of TTA unused and Doc Strange had been reprinted in Avengers leaving the Fury half of ST unused, so Titans was predominantly sweeping up the leftovers. So, was this perhaps because the continuity was drifting so far that it was getting beyond any semblance of continuity in the UK reprints? For example, the Avengers fished Cap out of the water in Avengers #4 (Mar 64) and he starts doing his ‘man out of time’ ‘what shall I do with my life?’ thing in TOS 59 (Nov 64), so there’s only 6 issues between the two. In the UK, Cap defrosts in Avengers 1, but doesn’t get his own strip in Titans until the Avengers have hit issue #111 ( which reprints Avengers #73), so for UK readers, the gap between Cap defrosting and wondering what to do next is five and a half years of US issues or 110 UK issues. Massively longer than in US continuity. The Inhumans stories in Titans were only 4 years old, so relatively new, but the Cap stories were 11 years old, and Subby & Fury were over 10 years old ( Captain Marvel = 7 and a half years). Maybe it was getting to where the old material didn’t make any sense continuity wise, or maybe some of the older material was getting so old, it was looking creaky vs the likes of Starlin & Kane? Maybe there was some method in the madness. Or maybe Transworld were just cranking out the backlog as hard and fast as possible until the music stopped playing. Even if that’s the case, it interested me that Titans printed no half stories (that weren’t halves to begin with). Never noticed that.

On another matter: I assume there is not a list anywhere of all the Marvel comics that were reprinted by Marvel UK - exactly which US Marvels were reprinted in which issues of MWOM, SMCW etc? Know you of such a list? Anyone? Anyone?

I fully agree with the facts of this statement. Both DC and Atlas were incredibly nepotistic. Martin Goodman hired 3 of his brothers to work there. The shell companies bore the names of family members. He fully imagined, even after he sold it, that his son would take over. People imagine that Stan got the job there because he was Goodman’s wife’s cousin, but far more likely because Robby Soloman was his uncle. The first time Goodman saw Stan he reportedly said ‘what are you doing here?’ which was surprising considering the place was crawling with outlying family members. Likewise at DC, Harry Donenfeld hired Jack Liebowitz because he had known his father growing up on the Lower East Side. The other key employee later was Donenfeld’s son, Irwin. Both companies were run very much on the principle of ‘Bob’s your uncle’ which was literally how Stan got his job. However, Harry Donenfeld seems to have really disliked Goodman and felt that Marvel had stolen their ideas and were just an inferior copy of DC. All the more infuriating that Marvel were killing them at the newsstands (though I'm not sure Harry knew that, Irwin seems to have done a pretty good job of keeping the sales figures to himself). Donenfeld could have made a fortune out of Goodman, but he preferred to crush him. As soon as both Donenfelds and Jack Liebowitz were gone from DC, and Kinney turned the whole place corporate, the first thing they did was opened up the printing presses for Marvel, which tends to suggest there was no business reason for not doing it. So I agree, there were a lot of personalities involved, but it just makes it more mysterious. Marvel were direct competitors for DC in a way that Dell, Archie, Charlton, Harvey and the others were not, and Harry Donenfeld seemed to have some personal animus towards Goodman in a way that I don’t think the bosses of the other companies did. It seems like they both got into bed with their worst enemy & cut their own noses off to spite their faces. This went on for 10 years and the minute the 2 companies were sold, it all changed. When Kinney bought DC, they immediately turned the presses on and let Marvel expand and when Perfect bought Marvel they said ‘why the Hell is our distribution in the hands of our competitors?’ and promptly acquired Curtis. I can believe that Donenfeld preferred to crush Marvel and make DC dominant rather than make money out of distributing Marvel, but what was in it for Goodman?