Malacoda

I know. I got that off this auction site and it's still there.....allegedly with High Res pics, but I can't get it to open. Have a go.... https://www.andersonandgarland.com/auction/lot/the-fantastic-four-nos-21-23-32-and-37/?lot=228573&so=0&st=&sto=0&au=343&ef=&et=&ic=False&sd=1&pp=100&pn=1&g=-1#

Haha! I've-got-something-you-don't-have ! Ne-ne-ne-ne-neeeer-ner. Actually, the only copy I've sighted is this terrible photo. It's a really awful photo, but thankfully a nice big thuddy stamp. Thank you Ethel.

One thing is that we know Gold were the distributors for DHOKF, Savage Sword of Conan and those titles, but that was in the 70's. There were no Marvel Magazines in the 60's (except a 2 shot Spidey). I've always assumed that what Gold were distributing in the 60's were Magazine Management's For Men Only, Stag & Male type magazines which would have been right up David Gold's alley, which is how they came to be connected to Marvel. But I don't actually know that.

Ha! I think it was Albert who first posited it on here but I had that conversation with you & Ben off board last year and GS was kind of acknowledged as the prime suspect. Yes, the orange ones were unbranded.

Lovely. Ta. Of course, it won't prove that other distributors weren't using the same stamp, but it will prove that Gold were.

Yeah, there's no end to it is there? Let me ask something else to the group. Whenever I bought Deadly Hands of Kung Fu (which wasn't often because 25p was a massive sum of money), it was never a UKPV. Always a US price and an oblong orange UK price sticker. Are there David Gold distributed magazines or comics from the 60's which have the famous oblong stamp we think is his?

I think there are makeweights. I think T&P had volume deals with all their suppliers, but with Marvel they were obviously a lot tighter organised because the PV's were printed for T&P and had one useable point of sale only. However, if they had leftovers, overspill, copies that were printed for a US wholesaler or retailer who didn't need or want them, whatever, Marvel knew T&P could stamp them, therefore they had a guaranteed failsafe / backstop sale and I think T&P wanted as much as they could get their hands on. You're right, there are other publishers, but Marvel were in a unique boat. They were screwed on their distribution deal in a way that no other publisher was and they printed specific runs of PV's for the UK market to a level that none of the others did. So they had to be watching events at T&P far more closely than anyone else. You're right inasmuchas we see these stamps for other publishers and at other points in time ( I imagine they are completely generic John Bull stamps) but in what numbers? You & I and our fellow boarders have looked through thousands upon thousands of comics (looking for all kinds of things) and how many comics have these stamps? And of those, how many fall into the 66'ers? I agree that to an extent you find what you're looking for and miss what you don't, but let me ask your own question back to you..... "Could we find enough examples to put the 'they only exist because of the UKPV gaps' theory in doubt?" If we could, why haven't we? I appreciate we've targeted the known cover stamped issues but all of us have looked at zillions of PV's as well. When I went through Duncan's website, pulling up the one or two mistakes that are there (!) I spent as much time capturing PV's to prove they weren't cover stamps or Non D as I did looking for cover stamps. Actually, that's a lie, not more time because the PV's were easy to find & the CS's were usually harder, but my point is there's a lot of comics where he says it's Non D or CS and I went trawling for PV's and did not find these anomalous stamps. So far, these issues where there are stamps (of any description) as well as PV's are in a tiny minority. You might be right. I'm sure if we looked for more, we'd find more (that's practically axiomatic) but if there were significant numbers out there, why haven't we found more than this? I think if we look we'll find more, but I think they'll be the same issues over & over again. Because they're makeweights and 'Hey Fred, we've got some leftover Daredevils this month. You interested?'

Notwithstanding that #20 is a UKPV. Ahhhhh....that was my earliest issue of DD for years. Bought it at Dark They Were. By the way, re: your #21 stamp, Sue Storm called.....

The search in the top right is not bad. Depends whether the person who uploaded the pic also typed clearly & specifically what it was. But you did.

Gold stamp AND a sticker? OK, maybe it's time to go outside, walk in the sunlight, talk to girls....

And another that's completely useless. Not too sure why I'm posting these.....

I think X men 25 is definitely out there as a 1/- OP. I think this is it, but too faded except for the 1/-

The 66'ers really are the gift that keeps giving, aren't they? One thing I think we can at least be clear about is that the cause & the outcome are potentially not linked. In a lot of cases, you can say issue X arose, they responded with Y and it caused Z. It might be, if my pet theory about the T&P bankruptcy is correct, that Gold were sounded out, possibly as a permanent replacement, possibly as a temporary one, but the final result was just these few months of leftovers fell into their hands. It might be that there was never any suggestion of Gold taking over for T&P and they ended up with these in a one off Del Boy deal.

True dat. Though on other copies, Ethel went pretty accurately into the Corinthian columns. Sits really well here, don't you think? What is the term for something that sits well on a SHIELD cover? A Jasper, perhaps?

This probably doesn't mean anything because it's probably just the exact same copy, but my copy of DD 29 has the exact same double stamp. I mean the other thing is, of course, is that DD 29 is actually a UKPV, so why are there stamped copies at all, let alone Gold stamps and what are 1/- higher priced, roundy T&P style stamps presumably from the 1967-1969 period with no PV's?

Superb find. I usually (and by usually I mean once in a million years) find this one with this T&P O.P. stamp which must surely be a rarity. The fact that there are issues with both this and the Gold oblong must put DD #22 in a class by itself. Anyone have a theory about what the O.P. stamp denotes? I think it sits nicely in our theories about stamps denoting months/batches as it was presumably a remainder which T&P distributed later. Really great find though.

I must be missing something here. Surely, if we know DC were sending returns, it’s axiomatic that it was the less successful titles, inherently the US returns, that were getting sent over here. Also I don’t think Fred was choosy to start with. He’d been ganting to get his hands on any kind of American publication since the war: magazines, books, pulps, anything American. He started importing leftover newspaper supplements, then imported the printing matrices to reproduce them, then moved onto comics, pulp magazines, Classics Illustrated, Bible stories, Horror comics, Esquire and other girly mags, anything American. Even before the ban on fiction was lifted he started importing American non-fiction to get the shipping lines established. And when the ban lifted he was straight in there. So when he called DC and said ‘I’ll take anything as long as it’s cheap’ they must have looked at the warehouse full of returns and thought it was Christmas.

What does that look of weary resignation mean, Mr. Marwood ? ( BTW, that would be a great gif to end a thread on).

Indeed, although a lot of people believe paper quality was a contributing factor, which I find quite compelling. If all of the damage was done by the blade right there, straight off the press, I think Eastern would have surely changed the blade rather than carry on mashing a blunt blade into tens of thousands of comics. Also, it went on for years, so someone at Marvel or the news vendors themselves would have complained eventually. It seems more likely to me that the blade caused rough edges, micro tears in the edges which, due to the quality of the paper got worse over time. This would explain (1) why it went on for so long (2) it wasn't brought to their attention for so long (3) it wasn't picked up as an error before leaving Waterbury and (4) it also makes sense to me that as the comics got handled and read by excited little hands, such a defect would emerge. Also based on the scale of the operation, I find it impossible to believe that no one was performing quality checks on either the guillotines or the finished comics. Eastern was printing over 26 million comics per year in the 50's. God knows what the number was by the 60's.

Good point. I also thought of something else that might be relevant, but doesn't answer this point: we know that Eastern were using inferior paper for the covers compared to the paper used by Sparta because of the Marvel chipping.

I think it may be because comic printing fell between two stools. Typically different processes of printing (and therefore different ways to make the ink dry) were used for newspapers vs magazines. Comics, of course, required both because they are like newspapers inside, but have glossy covers like magazines. World Color invested heavily in web printing the 50’s and upgraded to a best-in-world web offset system at their newer plant (in Effingham) in the 60’s. Cold set web offset printing relies on the ink to dry into the paper – this is what you typically use for newsprint. Hot set offset printing, like glossy covers, requires the printed paper to be dried by heat because most of the ink doesn’t soak into the paper, it just sits on top of it. Then, because of the heat of the paper/ink, it has to be artificially cooled because it’s too hot to work with. However, it’s the first bit, the heat, that determines how fast it dries. The cooling bit is to counteract the drying process, not part of it, however it does catalyse it. In Sparta. they were producing up to 40,000 comics per hour per machine (don’t know how many presses they had) and by the next day the whole lot was shipped, every day. So, we can say that when the comics & covers were put together, they had been printed by two entirely different processes, the ink was dried by two different processes with different time frames and the whole thing was done at breakneck speed. But the key point: the covers were made by a process where the ink is dried artificially onto the surface of the glossy paper and the innards were designed to dry by letting the ink sink into their rougher, cheaper paper. So….if you put a not-quite-dry-yet cover onto a comic, the inner paper will do its job and absorb the ink. If, at the end of your print run, you have to re-set the press to print the UKPV, and then get this last 2-5% of the run out of the way to do the next 20,000 comics, it doesn’t seem a big leap to me to believe that the UKPV’s were more likely to suffer ink separation. I think another clue might also be in the fact that you only find it in these super-oldies (?) By the 70’s in Sparta, you can see stacks of the finished covers piled up together waiting to join their innards, so by that point they must have been long since dry (though you do still see colour bleed on the covers themselves).

You're not kidding. I reckon that must come as close to non distributed as it's possible to get. It's also a real swine to search for outside of ebay etc. The amount of hits you get for 'daredevil' coupled with just the number 4 is about a bazillion. I was considering taking the easier option (...just building a time machine).

OK, I'm not going to bother trying to make new friends in future. I'm just going to come to you.