Malacoda

Given that most actual sources are gone, I think the great strength of this board on topics like this is for all of us to say what we remember and see if it gels with what other people remember and actually makes sense. We all need to stick our necks out. I suspect that your memory is accurate - that your Dad did pick up a bunch of US Marvels for you, (maybe not?) every week, directly from the wholesaler in Middlesborough, so 7 year old you assumed they came in like that, which is certainly how my mind worked at that age ('I experience it as this, therefore it is this'). Love to know how he avoided duplication, but then your Dad sounds like a pretty cool dad. I also suspect that if your Dad was getting them directly from the wholesaler because he was on friendly terms with them on his beat, some of them might have been returns, which at minimum doubles the frequency.

Thanks Gary. That's how I remember it too. Not every outlet got the new comics on the same day, but when they did, it was out with the old and in with the new at the same time (supporting the idea that the returns were exchanged for the new ones). That period you're referring to (April to July 1974) could give the 66'ers some competition as the most interesting hiatus. From our perspective, it seems like chaos that none of our comics came in at all but actually it's a weird moment of stability. From Aug 1971 to March 1981, Marvel production is in such a state of chaos that the same number of titles is almost never produced from one month to the next, in a constant storm of cancellations and new titles. In that whole decade, there is only one moment when exactly the same number of titles is produced for 3 months running. And I'll give you three guesses when that is. The fact that production stabilises with no cancellations and no new titles (only Doc Strange which was hardly new) at exactly the moment that all exportation to the UK ceases seems like one Hell of a coincidence to me. Given the US increase to 25c is matched with a UK increase to 7p and then almost immediately to 8p and again to 9p, it seems likely that part of the hiatus was choosing a new price. Another interesting point is that when the Marvels return, they have that 'Marvel All Colour Comics' banner which is an almost unique incidence of the Pembertons getting one over on Ray Wergan. With Al Landau in the driving seat at Marvel, the UK reprints were always first up and best dressed, but this is the one time I can think of when World were given a fair shake.

Thanks for this. Just to be sure: were these definitely the US Marvels? Not the UK reprints?

I used to love it when movies would come back round as double bills, usually linked by absolutely nothing except that they were made by the same studio or had the same distributor (as here, Columbia). Sometimes the films married up didn't even have the same certificate. I distinctly remember seeing the first 2 Spidey 'movies' (they were actually episodes of the TV series bolted together), but I don't know anyone who saw this one:

He's talking about the summer of 74 being the point where they discovered DTW, so early 70's, but I'd be interested if anyone remembers a specific day of the month that either Marvel or DC used to rock up at any point in time. Somewhere else I read that the delivery days were staggered to prevent 25 or more titles all arriving at the newsagents on the same day, which makes perfect sense to me, BUT I don't believe they were shipped across the Atlantic in multiple batches, which means that they were staggered either at the importer (World/T&P) or by the local wholesaler (if they were staggered at all). It sounds logical that they were staggered, but I don't remember it like that. To my memory, some shops got the new months comics sooner than others, but when they changed, they changed all together (implying, equally logically, that the returns got sent back en masse when the new batch arrived).

Just read a blog by a collector (Ian Baker) who posted "[our] experience of comic collecting had been scouring the local newsagents and second-hand shops in our native Portsmouth, on the last Thursday each month for DCs and the 2nd Wednesday for the limited set of 16 Marvel titles that World Distributors imported." Does anyone else remember it this specifically, down to the day of the month?

The end of this is pure Naked gun.

Wow, that has no publisher or distributor logos, which would make you think it's a freebie or a supermarket giveaway, yet it has a price in cents and was distributed by T&P. Is that another Aussie one, cobber?

Dang. And he's greener than me. Actually I'm surprised more people aren't using that pic. It is a stunner.

There was a point, I think made by Albert, about comics coming over via a dealer going over there and coming back with a load in a suitcase. We've also talked about UK dealers buying US returns. There is an interesting comment that comes up a few times on Duncan McAlpine's site, specifically in reference to the GS specials of 1972 ( Avengers Special 5, Sub Mariner Special 2 etc). "A very small number of cents copies came over to the UK after publication through dealers buying US unsold returns. These copies have ink marks (green or red) on one or more edge, sometimes quite heavy. This defect is significant and in general drops the value by at least a grade. Very hard to find a high grade copy without staining in the UK." What interested me about this is that it's the very moment that things are getting competitive among the growing number pf dealers. Bram Stokes opened DTW in 1969, Frank Dobson organised the first comic mart in 1970, the first Comicons are now (1968 onwards), in 1972, Dez Skinn starts to organise a huge comic mart in London, but finds he's been pipped by Rob Barrow & Nick Landau and the following year, Nick Landau founds CMDS and starts importing comics specifically to sell to dealers, not to the high street. Additionally, at this point, there have been no UK Marvel reprints for some while. Odhams stopped publishing reprints in 1969. TV21 printed a strange blend of what I assume were the nearest-to-TV heroes: Silver Surfer, Spider Man, Ringo Kid and the Western version of the Ghost Rider ( and, of course, Homer the Happy Ghost). This lasted less than a year. Then the Martspress debacle, before Stan doubled down in the UK and created his own UK imprint (or had his strings pulled by Al Landau and Ray Wergan, depending on your viewpoint). In August of 1971, distribution of the US Marvels to the UK flips from T&P to World Distributors, which initially halves the number of titles distributed. This is exactly the moment when, if your name is Skinn, Landau, Barrow, Lake, Dobson, Clarke or Hudson, you're at the Heathrow checkout, explaining to Mandy from BOAC why you're travelling with empty suitcases. This is why it caught my attention that Duncan says that canny dealers were buying up returns of comics which were not distributed in the UK. When I first read it, I thought 'why at this moment?', but this is exactly the moment it would have happened. It fits in with everything else. Sorry about that. Felt compelled to share.

Right, but as you say, that would just be speculation, so I can produce 15 different versions of it, but I think, as you also say, we need the smoking gun. And unless you have all the smoking guns, you still don't know. To take one of my examples, the difference in offloading at the docks was anywhere between nothing and ten days, so unless you know when comics started coming in containers, you know nothing. But even then, how long did they spend parked in a container lorry park? The one thing that would be telling is the delivery manifests to Oadby. You wouldn't necessarily know all the steps in between, but you'd have a release date for Sparta and an arrival date at T&P. Next on my reading list is Martin Ackerman's book on the Curtis Affair, so that ain't gonna yield any help with this.

But....but......I only need that issue of 'Going Steady' to complete my collection. That is a beautifully crisp 1 stamp. I think I actually have fallen in love.

Hah. I was in the middle of the writing you a note last night that makes exactly this point, but I wanted to check the release dates of a full month's worth of titles in the 70's. (And, much more importantly, I just wanted to go to bed). This is what I was writing: OK, unless we're disputing what I think all of us remember (that US comics arrived here as cover dated) there is a 2 or 3 month gap between the US release date and the cover date when they must have been stacked up somewhere, either in the US or here. Unless you’re proposing that the trail of possible delay points you highlighted took exactly the 3 months for every month’s comics, which seems too neat, but clearly, some of that 2-3 month gap was consumed by transit. Here's where I disagree with you. We know that the comics were printed 3 months in advance to suit US shelf life. I don’t believe they would have based the entire production schedule around the 2% - 5% of comics of UK bound comics. Yet they went on sale here as cover dated. So was it just a complete coincidence that the length of time it took them to get here was exactly the grace period between the release date and the cover date? Isn’t it more likely that there was no coincidence and the comics were simply warehoused until the appropriate date? Another variance we haven't touched on yet, and this might be a place where memory isn't good enough, is that I believe cover dated comics arrived in the shops all together in the cover date month. We didn't get some from one month and others from the next/previous month. However, that is how they were released in the States, so the idea that they were put on a boat hot off the presses and came straight here doesn't square with anything I remember. Had that been the case, you would have gone into the newsagents on for example: The first day of the month and all the comics would have been from the previous month. Then in the first week of the month, Daredevil, Where Monster’s Dwell and Western Gunfighters would have been replaced by this month’s issues but everything else would still be last month. Then a week later you would find that that month’s Thor, Captain America & Sub Mariner would have rocked up, replacing last months, so now we’ve got 6 of this month’s titles mixed with everything else being last months. Then a week later, Avengers, Captain Marvel, Amazing Adventures, Conan & Marvel Spotlight would arrive, replacing last month’s issues, so now most of the issues at the newsagents are this month’s but still a few of last months. The following week Fantastic Four, Kazar, Marvel Team Up, Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night would rock up and for one single week, we would have all of this month’s titles together. Then the following week we would start all over again. I am absolutely sure this did not happen. I’m sure they arrived all together. One thing I particularly do remember is that the kiosk at Twickenham Station, near me, always had last month’s comics about a week later than other places, so if I needed another week’s pocket money to save up for a comic, that was always the last-chance saloon. As I kid, I imagined this was just some quirk of the bloke who ran the kiosk. Now I realise it was more likely because, being a railway kiosk, he had a different local wholesaler to the newsagents. However, even his new titles all rocked up together. I did not monitor this so I could be wrong, but I’m sure they all arrived together. Which means they were definitely stacked somewhere, probably, in my opinion, both in the US for a time and here for different periods of time for different reasons.

This is a great piece of work and a great list of operational issues. I will get into this in some more detail, but I think you’ve got a problem with this operational list. Unless you’re saying that we’ve all remembered wrongly and that when comics came in relative to the cover date changed out of all recognition, this doesn’t work. If you believe that comics were printed 3 months in advance in the States, but were imported into the UK and warehoused until the cover date, you have no problem. If you believe the 3 month delay was caused by operational issues, how do you explain that the massive operational efficiencies in this period had no impact on the 3 month time frame? Examples: At Eastern, Marvel comics were printed in 2 batches in the first and second weeks of the month. At WCP they were printed weekly. So there’s up to 2 weeks of time savings there. I don't know how fast upon completion ECP loaded up the vans (they were a more old fashioned operation), but Sparta cleared the floor every 24 hours. Prior to containerisation, stevedores could take up to 5 days to load and unload a cargo ship, so you have a saving of up to 10 days there. Prior to 1972, there were no motorways in the UK. The 70 MPH limit was introduced experimentally in 1967, on certain roads, but remained 20 mph or 30 mph in built up or restricted areas, so the creation of motorways massively changed the speed of delivery of goods. You get the idea. If these operational issues were the source of the 3 month delay, it would have to massively and consistently decrease all the time, not stay at 3 months even while the causes of it being 3 months changed out of all recognition.

Yup, that's pretty much it. It doesn't make much sense to me as I reckon Sparta could have knocked off the PV's really cheaply, but T&P was in the hands of....well, no one called Thorpe or Porter by this point. All of the book imprints & pulp magazines were gone, I think it's pretty much comics and porn at this point. I wonder if the CS+PV was part of the eventual deal that was struck ('we'll do your PV's but the whole point of this deal for us was to alleviate the returns, so take some of those too') or maybe it was the other way round. Maybe after 17 months of dispute about the PV's, the CS's were a good bargaining chip for T&P.....'this is the most we'll pay for PV's and we're not bothered if we have to stamp 'em, so take it or leave it'. More likely, it was pure Del Boy. 'Oi can you shift some of these?'

Let’s do the plane thing first. Originally airmail accounted for 85% of air travel and passengers were only 15%. Freight accounted for 0.2%. And it wasn’t comics. After the war (and the Berlin Airlift) air freight ramped up very slowly (and expensively) and only accounted for a minuscule proportion of freight until 1970’s. Boeing launched the wide-bellied 747 in 1968, and the first cargo flight was in April 1972, but the start of commercial air freight (FedEx & DHL) doesn’t begin until 1973. Air Freight as we know it didn’t really start until the 90’s. We know that both Titan and Neptune were importing comics by air freight in the late 1980’s / early 90’s (for sale to the direct market) but as Titan didn’t exist until 1978, we know that comics were all arriving by sea until the 80’s. I mean, we know that anyway, right? Ballast, dock strikes etc.

Well, if they were publishers and distributers of kid's comics, yes. Of course. They would have employees whose job it was literally to do exactly that. It's like asking if McDonalds and their meat suppliers ever play hardball over the price of beef. Bear in mind that T&P have just gone bankrupt at this point and just been bought out by their supplier and chief creditor. There is no way they weren't looking for every penny. For Marvel comics, kids comics is literally what they did. Magazine Management and the other imprints did their thing, but Marvel was the jewel in the crown (as soon as Perfect took over, the first thing they did was subsume Magazine Management and the rest of Goodman’s labyrinth under Marvel Comics, rather than the other way round, as it had been). For T&P, it can hardly be understated. Fred Thorpe (and others) had made a small fortune out of the import ban, but unlike Millers and the others, he was poised to make a large fortune when it ended. At the start of the fifties, T&P had turnover of half a million pounds, primarily in the late 40’s from digest-sized semi-pornographic novels and reprints of US pulp magazines. From 52 onwards, they shifted to comic books (along with men’s magazines). After the ban lifted in 59, within a couple of years, they had turnover of about £450k just from the comic books. That was literally 90% of the entire company turnover in the 50’s, and they weren’t publishing any of it, just distributing. And buying them at less than wholesale prices. Yet, from that base, they still managed to go bankrupt within 5 years. They were shifting 12m comics per year in 60/61 (all publishers), but Marvel were tiny at this point. By 1967, Marvel were printing about 40m comics per year. If T&P were getting 5% of the print run, that’s 2m comics. Which is £100k in 1967. Or in today’s money about £1.9m. “Kid’s comics”? Pshaw! The Devil, you say!

By the by, the Skywald magazines rocked up here with no cover stamps, PV's stickers, nothing. They mostly have UK prices written by hand in pen, though some do have those orange stickers we associate with Gold.

I fully acknowledge that this could be the case. In 1971, ELO launched their first album using the band name as the album name: it was called 'Electric Light Orchestra'. The manager of the US office didn't get that the album name simply was the band's name. He told his secretary to call the London office and get the name of the album. When he came back from lunch, she had left a note on his desk saying 'No Answer'. To this day, that album is titled 'No Answer' in the US & Canada and other countries.

Yes, Skywald ceased publication in 1974 and officially wound up in 1975. Sol Brodsky went back to Marvel quite a bit before this, I think. John Verpoorten was now doing his old job (Production Manager) so Stan convinced Galton he needed a 'Vice President of Operations' which was basically whatever Stan said it was. I believe part of this roving remit was actually Marvel UK and that Tony Isabella and later Scott Edelman reported into him. I think Stan just loved Sol Brodsky. When Goodman canned everyone except Stan, it was Brodsky who pretty much saved the company. I also think that, 20 years later, with Al Landau behind the wheel, Stan needed trusted allies keeping an eye.

No, come on. In their 62 year history of successfully selling sterling priced comics in the UK, they just decided to have a break for a bit and then started again? That doesn't add up, does it? I agree some properly bonkers decisions have been made, and I do believe that the hiatus started for a specific reason (price increase) but carried on for all that time for some different reason, but there must have been some actual reason for it. Even if it was just because Marvel took their eye off the ball, or because there were teething trouble at Sparta, why wasn't T&P pressing for a resumption? They can't both have just decided to take a break for no reason at the same time. It seems more likely to me that there was either (a) a specific operational problem or (b) some kind of issue - which can only have been money - between T&P and Marvel. I wonder if maybe IND had something to do with it. We know they had an active policy of suppressing Marvel. They had just lost their ability to do that in the US thanks to Curtis, but still controlled Marvel's distribution in the UK. The other thing, perhaps supporting your theory, is that if the PV's somehow did fall between the cracks, no one at Sparta would have been raising it, would they? If Marvel had still been with Eastern, then they would have been asking 'when are we going back to printing the UK priced ones? How many do you want this month?' but Sparta took over at a point where there were no UKPV's, so it wasn't like that was a change to the print run.

Incidentally, in the same interview, Hewetson says: "Our issues were selling well, and some sold out. Such returns as we received were shipped overseas, mainly to England, where they sold out completely." ......which is all kinds of interesting, isn't it?

This is a really key point where Marvel are concerned. This starts under Martin Goodman - find out what your competitors are selling, create imitations and then flood the market with them - he literally says this. And in the 70's - long post-Goodman - they pretty much put Skywald out of business this way. Al Hewetson: When Marvel entered the game with countless titles gutting the newsstand, their distributor was so powerful they denied Skywald access to all but the very largest newsstands, so our presence was minimal and fans and readers simply couldn't find us. We had a business lunch with our distributor in the fall of '74 and we were given very specific information about the state of affairs on the newsstands – which had nothing to do with Warren's or Skywald's solid readership base.

Before I forget it: quick theory. Do we agree that the time of a cover price increase would be a logical point at which to talk about both the wholesale price / volume (as a price increase might decrease volume / demand) and also, if the cost of getting the PV's printed was an issue for T&P, maybe that too? In November 1967, T&P put the price of a comic up to 1/- which is a whopping 20% increase. Is this because demand is now so great that they can get away with this and they also increase the size of the wholesale order? Or, with the greater profit per comic, are they looking to decrease the order and cut costs? Either way, production of PV's ceases for an incredible 17 months. When it finally resumes, on top of the restored PV's (now at 1/-), T&P are also still getting supplies of cents copies (as they have for the last 17 months) and stamping them. Are these events connected? Was the 17 month hiatus a result of Marvel and T&P playing hardball with each other? If T&P wanted to up their order, did Marvel, trying to stave off an increase from 12c to 15c, increase the price of either the wholesale comics or the PV printing? Given that they were at up to 40% returns on the US newsstands, was T&P looked on as a cash cow, albeit a relatively small one? Perhaps more likely, given that WCP had taken over from ECP, is it possible that the PV print order was regarded as so small by Sparta that the cost of doing it actually went up? Sparta had a special area of the warehouse used for the ‘tiny’ jobs (only a few thousand print run), so they definitely had separate pricing & set up for jobs they regarded as not economic. It seems like the price increase precipitated the cessation of PV’s (it usually seems to be that) but it cannot possibly account for a 17 month stoppage. Whether you count 6 hiatuses or 5, this one is almost as long as all the others put together. Demonstrably, it did not take 17 months to work out how to change the PV slug from 10d to 1/-. It seems very unlikely that the changeover from Eastern to Sparta, which happened 3 months into the hiatus, was not in some way a factor in the length of the hiatus. There is no obvious event around Cadence, Marvel, Curtis, IND or T&P, that explains it so Sparta seems the likely candidate. World Color was actually being bought out at this point and relocating HQ to NY. I also strongly doubt that Sparta were printing any comics in currencies other than dollars. I would love to end here with a brilliant deduction that explains why there was 17 months of chaos followed by this unique, new CS+PV era…..but I got nothin’. I would just be surprised if the two things were unrelated. .