Malacoda

Also the reason that 40k number is significant is that people get very interested in whether the UKPV's were printed first or afterwards, but given that the presses were running day & night and cranking out 40k comics per hour, it still pretty much means the PV's were printed the same day as the cents copies.

I think we've all seen it, but you can never watch this too many times. My favourite part is the guy who says that one press can produce 40,000 comics per hour. That always puts everything in perspective for me. I don't know how many presses they had, but given that comics wasn't even the core activity, the numbers are unimaginable. I also think the thing where you see that they had $3.5m worth of paper at that moment and that that whole warehouse full of output would be gone by the next day puts the whole "DC-had-already-bought-all-their-paper-for-the-year" thing into perspective.

Like the saying goes: Make Mine.....Charlton.

Yeah, but come on, you're far more widely read and knowledgeable than the average Marvelite (which is me....I know jack about other publishers). So does this mean there's a whole other Marvel thread I have to read and post on now? Dang. And worse yet, I've been propping up a DC-centric thread while there was a Marvel one right next door? That said, you put 'Distribution' in the title of this one, so you might as well have put on fishnet stockings and winked straight at me. This is my spiritual homeland.

I can't tell if you're being ironic or not. That other thread has generated far more views, but this one has generated nearly the same number of replies in one third of the time. So I assume you're ripping into me and, of course, other Marvel fans generally. 💖 We can take it.

That's logical but I think the shilling / 5p stamp is an exception. In the run up to D-Day, there was a convention that all shops displayed everything in both old money and new. Up to D-Day, they were shown with the old money first and the new money second, and then afterwards it flipped the other way round. It was perceived that this was a hard and fast rule or even law (part of the Decimal Currency Act of May 1969) but it wasn't, it was only guidance because of a widespread fear by a lot of people that they were going to get ripped off when the new money arrived. It therefore makes a lot of sense to me that T&P were dabbling in that first month with both formats, before ascertaining that they didn't actually have to display the old money. Given their predisposition for scooping up all the leftovers and either re-packaging them or re-distributing them to seaside towns months later, I imagine that they flipped to new currency as fast as possible, but had the dual stamps ready in case it turned out they were breaking the law. If there were issues with 1/- stamps and 6p stamps from Dec 71, I'd be doing a Scooby Doo double take, but of course there aren't because they're all PV's at 6p. I think DC may yield more possibilities than Marvel.

It crossed my mind before that if I could find enough of the CS issues with date stamps on them and none on the concomitant PV's it might prove something, but what stamps there are are so chaotic and with so much variance and no proof of what they mean that I never got anywhere.

YES! I think this is really key. Would be good to know what was going on with other publishers too. The fact that these are stamped with both old and new currency makes it seem likely they came in in different months. Also, note that the September cover dated 403 has the dual stamp which we see on August Marvels. I mean, not even all the August ones of the same title have the dual stamp, so God knows what you can tell from it.

I also have some ideas about why it happened in the way it did and also 3 possible answers to your question about why Marvels went decimal at 6p rather than 5p. We'll get this thread over 100 pages if it kills us!

Yes, I thought that would be up your alley, Blackadder. Nope, you’re not missing anything. Nothing here proves what actually turned up at the newsagents. If CS’s and PV’s arrived together, did newsagents get a mix or one or the other? I assume they were batched up so newsagents got one or the other. Also more confusing if mixed. Even if you had the actual delivery note from T&P to the local wholesaler or the delivery note from the local wholesaler to the newsagent, it’s not going to say ‘and by the way, these ones are ink stamped not cover printed. Have a nice day’. You’re just never going to get that. I think substantiating what happened at T&P and assuming that distribution remained consistent is the best you’re going to get. I don’t believe these are returns, but it is technically possible. Returns, at least from the East Coast, could have come back after a month on the stands and been shipped to the UK in time to still arrive on cover date. They could be returns from wholesalers not retailers, meaning they were still in the same condition they went out in. I assume that retailers got their refunds from the wholesalers, not from the publishers, which might explain why there were 2 different systems (cutting the covers and not). It just seems more likely to me, with Marvel, as the normal system was to send freshly minted PV’s straight from Sparta, which they were still doing, and, we believe there were a ton of cents copies coming off the presses that were not US distributed copies, that these cents copies came from those, which also explains how they seem to have arrived at T&P at the same time as the other cents copies. You’re right, it proves nothing, at the moment, I just prefer this theory. Arrival date stamps would help, but then when & where were they stamped, by whom and how long did they sit around afterwards?

Spot on. And there is actually a way to prove (well, you know), that there was no such gap. The CS's went decimal 16 months before the PV's. Mad but true. CS's went to 5p in Aug 70 and PV's in the GS month (Nov 71). This leads to a weird little period where although World took over from T&P 5 months after decimalisation, they were distributing pre-decimal PV's, where T&P had been distributing post-decimal CS's. They actually rolled decimalisation BACK. (Not relevant, but I always wrongly think the World era was all post decimal). The key point comes during T&P's last hurrah, when they were distributing decimal stamped CS's and pre-decimal printed PV's of the same issues. The CS issues of the dual priced titles (the ones that had both PV’s and CS’s) changed in the exact same month as the titles which ONLY had CS’s. If the CS’s were returns coming over later, there would have to have been a lag, so what you get is the CS’s which are ONLY CS’s changing to decimal at one moment, and the ones that are (allegedly) returns changing over 2 or 3 months later. Instead of which it’s absolutely in lock step, even including the month of August 1970, when the stamps were priced in both old and new money. This will be easier with an example. Captain America has no PV’s, everything is stamped. #127 Cover date July 1970 = stamped 1/- #128 Cover date Aug 1970 = stamped 1/- and 5p. #129 Cover date Sept 1970 = stamped 5p. Thor, on the other hand has both PV’s and CS’s, so let’s see if he mirrors Cap: #178 Cover date July 1970 = stamped 1/- #179 Cover date Aug 1970 = stamped 1/- and 5p. #180 Cover date Sept 1970 = stamped 5p. It’s exactly the same. This tells you (I believe) that the CS’s which also have PV’s came over in the same month as all the other comics bearing the same cover date. If they had been true returns, they would have turned up 2 or 3 months later and been stamped 5p. The fact that that unique month of dual stamping literally only happened for one month tells you one thing: you had to be on Ethel's desk THAT MONTH to get that stamp.

Marwood's point about the same DC comics coming over in different batches in different months and acquiring different T&P stamp numbers might indicate both things are true. If it were both it would explain why anecdotally people remember DC comics arriving out of sequence sometimes/places and in sequence others.

I’m not sure that nailing these stragglers changes the picture any. The fact that we were able to get to a 90/10 ratio almost straight away (remember I captured 84% of them in the first sweep) indicates to me that there was a whole separate block of cents copies shipped to be stamped for every issue or virtually every issue. It certainly was not a case of ‘oh, there’s a few leftovers this month, chuck ‘em in the UK crate’. Whatever this system / volume, it was clearly far less than the UKPV’s (though I think I saw a few where there were more stamps around than PV’s but it was a very few). I would also venture that the volumes were inconsistent. This might just be a trick of fate, but there are some titles where there are no end of CS’s for a particular issue and just one or two of another. Retention by collectors (or lack thereof) cannot explain that. That said, it makes perfect sense. The PV’s had to be a fixed, pre-ordered run which could go nowhere but the UK. The CS cents issues, whatever the reason for them is, were clearly more flexible in quantity and therefore it’s not a surprise that the volume was flexed.

OK, so these are Marvels cover dated from April 69 to June 71 for which we (the Royal We) believe that there are BOTH cents copies imported to the UK with T&P cover stamps AS WELL AS UK printed pence variants. The UKPV's are bountiful, what we're trying to track down are the cover stamps. As I said, the scatter of ones I haven't found yet makes me think they're probably all out there. The oddball is Xmen where odd numbers have CS and PV and the even numbers have PV only. I think that's a quirk of fate, and they will turn up, but if there was any experimentation or makeweighting going on, X men would be my bet, particularly as it was on the brink of cancellation at this point. If anyone can find a T&P cover stamp copy of any of these, I will get very excited: Hulk 116, 137,138 FF 91, 102, 109 ASM 76, 79, 88, 94, 95 Avengers 65, 69, 70, 72, 86 DD 54, 58, 59, 62, 69 Iron Man 15, 21, 22 Captain Marvel 13, 14, 21 Subby 17, 20, 23, 32 Surfer 15, 16, 17 Chamber of Darkness 6, 7, 8 Monsters on the Prowl 9, 10, 11 Where Monsters Dwell 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Amazing Adventures 3 Astonishing Tales 2, 3, 4 Xmen 56 58 60 62 64 There’s also Sgt Fury 86 for which I’ve only ever seen stickered copies. Many thanks, everyone.

In fairness to Ethel, that month was the start of the first hiatus, when some of the comics were PV's but most were not, so she probably just had a massive stack of comics most of which did need stamping. She also got caught out in 65 when the PV's came back.

Sure thing. So, between April 1969 and June 1971 Marvel published 487 comics (excluding romance and probably some comedy titles I’m not tracking). Of these, 48 were non-distributed by T&P. This is interesting in itself as T&P had previously distributed everything (barring the odd random missing issue here and there). Bear in mind that you’ve not only got the Marvel explosion of 68, but also 6 months into this period, Marvel shrug off IND (T&P’s parent company) in the States and start distributing in the US via Curtis. It’s therefore not a huge surprise that T&P’s relationship to Marvel changes at this point. Of the 439 that were distributed, 168 were CS only (Two Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, Captain America, Sgt Fury, Marvel Tales, CIC/Greatest Comics, FM/MSH, Captain Savage, Nick Fury, the Surfer (to #9) & Mighty Marvel Western). Of the rest, I have so far found 215 which have both CS and PV and there are 56 left for which I have so far only found PV’s, no CS’s. (Thanks to Gary for his list on this). The ones that have yet to turn up are just odd missing issues here and there, no patterns or missing runs, so I see no reason to imagine they won't turn up eventually (although X men is a looking a bit weird). Thor is the only title for which I’ve got a confirmed CS & PV for every issue, but some of the others are pretty close now ( Hulk has 3 missing out of 28).

This is superb work and practically the definition of a thankless task, so....thank you. I can't remember if the dearth of first round 7's only applies to DC? On the subject of collecting samples, I've carried on looking for the cover stamped Marvels from April 1969 to June 71. So far, the only title for which I have 100% crossover of both CS and PV's is Thor, but there are now only 9.9% of the total Marvel publications for which I have PV only, so I would say it's pretty definite that it was not sporadic or leftovers: there were probably both cover stamps and PV's for every issue that was distributed. CS + PV 215 CS only 168 ND 48 PV only 56

I think T&P is carnage by 1975. Having been conglomerated into Warner Communications by Kinney in 1970, T&P is really just an imprint at this point. In 1971 the offices were all shut down and remaining staff moved to London (if any of them actually went). Williams Publishing was in theory a subsidiary of T&P, but as Gilberton bought T&P primarily to publish its Classics Illustrated for distribution across Europe, Williams was pretty much the whole show and took over most of what T&P had been doing after 1971. In addition to that, T&P was raided for pornography a number of times, the largest raids being in 1972 and 1975. GBD was specifically created to separate off the imprints so that when they got raided and all the porn got seized, they wouldn’t lose all the comics & other legitimate publications at the same time (not sure how well this worked as the Obscene Publications Squad were notoriously corrupt and routinely carried out raids just so they could sell the porn back to the publishers afterwards). It wouldn’t surprise me if some of these non-distribution incidents were caused by the comics being seized and having been superseded by the time they came back or just never coming back at all. Or just that the company was in total freefall by this point. In the 1975 raid, over 200,000 publications were seized. At this point Warners’ decided to cut their losses and sell T&P to Howard Whitman (W. H. Allen & Co) in 1977 , who close it by 1978. I think the name carries on in some form until 1979. To back up your Alan Austin quote (“with T&P you can never be sure about anything”) here’s the Panelologist reporting that T&P simply ‘forgot’ to order the September & November 1975 DC’s. This sounds extremely unlikely to me, more likely they were putting out too many other fires, watching Regan & Carter carry everything out of the offices in plastic bags and answering memos from Warner telling them not to buy any green bananas.

I’m never too sure about using Charlton as a typical example. Your devotion to that ancient religion is commendable, but Charlton are unique. They did all their own stuff in house, owned their own printers and distribution company and did it all under one roof, paid the lowest rates to creators, used leftover material from other publishers and published in every genre. I always felt like they had taken Martin Goodman to the next level. So their practices (and costs) may well have been different to everyone else’s. Also, in an interview in here, Giordano does say that they pretty much just made up the Post Office numbers, which might mean that everyone else did too, but it might not.

Wow. OK, I need to read I inwardly digest that again before I respond. Thank you. In the meantime, here's the other point about returns I didn't make last night: On the question of whether the UK imports were returns (DC all the time, Marvel during 69-71), I think there was a contradiction we never quite resolved. I think we agreed that we did not believe the stamped Marvels were returns because the cover dates & stamps don’t support that and because returns would be dog eared and knackered after 1-3 months on US spinner racks. We also know that it was mostly just the covers or partial covers returned after a certain point. I think we concluded that the Marvel issues were undistributed copies / oversupply while the DC’s were indeed returns, but that leaves some questions: Here’s a thought about the bad condition argument (‘if the comics were returns they’d be weather beaten and dog eared’). Newsvendors had to accept what the local wholesaler gave them. If you consider that: (1) a newsvendor will have very limited space (2) will make maybe 15% of the cover price of whatever magazines he sells (3) adults have far more spending power than kids (4) the more of any publication the newsvendor returned to the local wholesaler, the less he got of those next time, so they would actively try to return the (low margin) comics and not get their supplies of (high margin) magazines cut. It’s a no brainer that comics either got very little space or never actually got put out at all. For example, Cosmopolitan & Playboy cost $1.25 in 1976, comics cost 25c, so not only do you have more chance of selling Cosmo and Hef (because adults have wages and kids don’t) but you make 5 times the profit. (And in the case of Playboy, you sell a newspaper too). I think a lot of comics never came out of the bundles they arrived in, which means they’d be in the same condition they arrived in. And I think the phenomenally high returns (50% Marvel, 70% DC) say nothing to contradict that assertion. However, we know that returns were only partial (covers or part covers) and we also know from the Publishers' Statements of Ownership data (bogus as it may be) that there were huge numbers of comics printed that were never distributed in the US. According to Carmine Infantino, Marvel had sell-through of up to 85% where DC were getting half that figure, so DC had vastly more returns than Marvel. We also know that Marvel were always far more Anglophile than DC, so it seems plausible to me that the UK-distributed Marvels arrived on cover month because they were undistributed overspill (of which Marvel had a lot) and DC rocked up later because they were returns (of which of DC had a lot). I wish I knew what the difference between the Publishers' Statements of Ownership figures for Total copies versus total distribution were, because they seem to indicate that there were hundreds of thousands of comics printed every month which were never distributed and were not returns. What happened to them? I know those PSO numbers are total BS and only existed because of a Post Office statute about junk mail, so it really did not matter what the Marvel or DC numbers actually were and they could have just made them up (as Giordano said Charlton did) …..but if you’re trying to satisfy the US government that your books are in order, why would you make up a bunch of numbers that spectacularly do not add up or make sense? Why would you make up numbers that are going raise exactly the questions they’re designed to silence? They look more like numbers that are inconveniently true than neatly falsified. I’m sure they’re just guesstimates but Accounts depts at Marvel and DC must have been collating the real data, so surely you’d use that as a basis?

Hey, listen, I've got a whole new theory about that 69-71 period and if you're not careful, I'll share it with you. Also, another point I forgot about returns. Dang.

Hi Baggsey, I'm very familiar with your blog so it's great to welcome you to the Nerdhouse. In fact, if you spin back a few pages to September 8th, it's actually your blog I'm quoting as I'm sure you noticed, so I'm already a fan. I think the questions about how comics were distributed and how returns were returned should be one question about a single process, but I think we all know it was way more of a shtshow than that. The fact that (Marvel) comics appeared on UK shelves on their cover date month is interesting, as I don't believe it was a fortuitous coincidence caused by a 2-3 month sea crossing. In the US, logic tells you that they must have been picked up when the new ones arrived, but I suspect the process of hauling them from Illinois to the four corners of nearly 10 million square km’s via a network of regional and local distributors and wholesalers means that crates had a lot of stop offs both coming in and going out, so the point at the retailer where it was 'old bundle out, new bundle in' may have been a 30 second swap over, but the point where all the returns made it back to Sparta was much more dragged out. In the 50’s Senate hearings, William Richter asserted to Mr Beezer (OK, it’s spelled ‘Beaser’, but I really want the guy who was trying to destroy comics to be called Mr. Beezer, so can we get behind that spelling?)….anyway, Richter asserted that newsvendors could not return comics until they were passed their cover date, but I am pretty sure that they could and did. I think they didn’t get the refund until the cover date expired, but I suspect that the comics & all publications were picked up when the new month’s ones arrived. The idea that the average news vendor was permanently storing hundreds of comics & magazines in a kiosk typically 6 ft wide x 5 ft high x 3 ft deep is logistically impossible, and off-site storage is financially unviable. Richter goes on to say that he believes if they did return the comics, they are passed onto other newsvendors until all avenues have been exhausted and they are never returned to the publisher, so he was clearly making it up as he went along. According to Carmine Infantino (and if you want to know about DC distribution, who better?), the returns took an astounding amount of time to finally all come back in: "The first numbers would come in after three months. Then at six months you'd get final sales figures, and one year later, you'd get final, final sales.” Note that even the first indication took 3 months, which tells you that that was when the returns were first refunded? Seems reasonable. So my guess would be that the returns were picked up monthly when the new comics arrived, but the size of the US meant it was probably messier than that and I believe some vendors who had the space would have hung on to back issues hoping for an eventual sale. I think they were distributed 3 months in advance for a reason, and that can only be that they hung around for a lot longer than one month in some places. Were they sold at discounts like they were in the UK? I think that the vendors did not get refunded until the cover date was expired, and maybe sometimes later than that. If the return had to make its way via multiple depots belonging to local and regional wholesalers, I suspect it was not a big priority and they were, as Carmine Infantino said, making their way back in a slow and disorderly fashion. This makes it seem likely that the DC comics shipped to the UK were returns because they had a pattern of coming in erratically, being stamped predominantly with comics of the same cover date, but with enough issues turning up out of sequence (both cover date sequence and T&P stamp sequence) to make it mirror the chaos I’m describing at point of origin. Marvel is a whole other conversation, as their predominantly UK pence printed covers and cover-date punctuality tells a completely different story despite them having the same US & UK distributor as DC up to 69/71. The big exception there is April 69 to July 71 but my colleagues here will make me sit on the naughty step if I open that Pandora’s Box again.

I know. Actually, I don’t think there was one as such. Irwin Donenfeld was Editorial Director in 1952 and became Executive Vice President in 1958. I think Jack Liebowitz officially retired in 1965 but was still on the board at DC and stayed on as ‘publisher’ which is a very ill defined term. Carmine Infantino was promoted to Art Director in 1966, then to Editorial Director (Irwin’s old title) after Kinney took over in 1967. He then became Publisher in 1971 and was replaced by Jenette Kahn in 1976. The key thing for me is that with the Donenfeld’s gone in 1967, IND and DC became much more separate under Kinney’s reign at National. This, rather than all the changes at Marvel (Sparta/Cadence/Curtis) is actually the key moment in the Marvel explosion of 1968.

Hey DC fans, I have a question if you can point me in the right direction, please. After the Donenfelds were escorted off the premises in 1968, who took over Irwin's role at DC? Harry D and Jack Liebowitz were already gone. Harold Chamberlin took over at IND (for the short period it lasted), but who took over at DC? Thanks

Agree David. I'm very much enjoying it at the mo. Also, just in case anyone here is more old school than Kindle (what are the chances?) it's only £3.73 in paperback.