Malacoda

Yup, the first time I saw that August 31st date, I thought it answered another head-scratcher....why did T&P introduce dual 1/- and 5p stamping for a single month before settling on just 5p. I thought this was exactly the answer: they were on the old stamps up to July, planning to go onto dual pricing, which they did for August, but then the government ended the transition period much sooner than anyone expected on August 31st, so they just went straight to 5p only from September. Yay. Solved. Only one problem: this happened in 1970, not 1971. So why did they order dual stamps that they only used for one month?

I can see the possibility - as we know, the reason they introduced separate bar code boxes for direct vs newsstand was because of unscrupulous LCS dealers returning direct editions - but like Steve, I don't really buy the intentional use of an anachronistic stamp to demarcate them as non returnable. It would have been very easy & low cost to obtain a much clearer 'non-returnable' stamp, but even assuming they pulled an old stamp out of a drawer and re-purposed it, it raises the question of why this person/company happened to have the 2/- diamond stamp in the first place. What was it originally for? Surely it's more likely that whatever purpose it had in the first place, it was still serving that purpose now?

Your Kamandi's are 1974. This Avengers is Feb 1966. Obviously, it could have been stamped way later, but what was it doing for 8 years? It would have to be sold through a comic shop not a local agent. If it had been priced at 2/- in 1966, people would have gone ballistic. I mean, in them days you could buy 3 new suits n an overcoat, 4 new pair of good boots, goo n see George Formby at Palace Theatre, get blind drunk, have some steak n chips, a bunch of bananas n 3 stone of monkey nuts and still have change out on a farthing...

Is that correct? Dark They Were opened in London in 1969, but to my knowledge the other London shops didn't open til later (FP in 1978 and Comic Showcase in the 80's). Futureshock opened in Glasgow in 1980. I think Forever People in Bristol was early 80's. In Manchester, House on the Borderland bookshop opened in 1972, but I don't know if it sold comics from the off. I think Orbit in Shudehill came later? Here's an advert for Book Chain from 1977. Don't know when it opened. I think you'd have to have done a lot of mileage round the country to have shifted a bulk of comics to the comic shops which were very few and very very far between. I'd love to know if the Manchester ones were around then and I'm sure I'm asking the right person.

First off, can I just say I love this exchange of speculations? For me, this sort of thing is really the heart of this thread and the fact that we can all just throw something out there without the sort of carping oneupmanship that we see on other threads is just brilliant. That said.... World, not Transworld. See me after class. Now that I've posted that, that mask looks a bit iffy. I think I may have given away more about our leisure time activities than I intended.

Thanks for posting this. Most kind.

Hi - sorry - didn't see this post in time. Did someone snag this?

Overstreet....Overstreet....Overstreet.....the Bible.....Overstreet.....

Nice. He better hang on when that cord pulls tight! (Also, they only have 14 hours to save the Earth).

What a freak. Who would do that?

You probably won't be surprised to hear it's Guaraná Antarctica. I imagine this advert got a different reaction in Argentina to the one it got in Brazil. However, Coke in Brazil did pioneer the re-useable bottles which have (they tell us) reduced single use plastic bottles by 90%. I can't understand why they haven't rolled that out globally.

It is absolutely astonishing how you can look at comics in your collection and know instantly, despite 40 or 50 years of distance, where and when you bought it and even which other comics you forsook to buy it. I can tell you right now, without even checking, which was the first issue I owned of every Marvel title and I bet most of you can do the same.

Not sure that's a contradiction. You can be the largest in the world without being the largest in the UK. Coca Cola are forever trying to buy Irn Bru from AG Barr because coke is famously the number 1 soft drink everywhere in the world except Scotland*, so they are literally trying to be the no 1 in every individual country, but it's by far the most popular soft drink on the planet. *whenever that stat gets rolled out people are keen to point out that it's not true because of places like Cuba and North Korea where coke was banned, which is just silly. (It is however, not actually the most popular soft drink in Afghanistan, Brazil, China, India, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Thailand or the UAE, so they have a way to go. The most popular drink in the UAE, superbly, is Vimto).

I was buying a bunch of CI's from this seller and because I checked this out he offered me a reduced price. I countered with a lower one still and he went for it. He was already combining postage for me, so I was rather pleased. Before you went and spoilt it all...

Yes please. I could with something to read while I'm waiting for Rob Kirby.

Might it be that this issue's clearly strange life story somehow contributed to a higher-than-normal survival rate, or do you have more or less as many of this one as comparable issues?

Wow, that shilling sticker is at the exact same jaunty angle, exactly covering the shape of the 10d. So it wasn't a fluke. Donna had a very steady hand!

Speaking of American Beauties....check out the super accurate stickering on this one.... Slap bang on the oblong 10d'er. This is a great comic. It's a Charlton, it's from July 1966, so smack on the 2nd hiatus (assuming it was a return), and then it's been stamped with Mr. Oblong Stamp at 10d and then re-stickered at a 1/-, so presumably went round UK distribution at least twice. When did the Charlies go up to 1/- ? I assume same time as Marvel & DC? Well, that's your Christmas present sorted out for next year.

A case could be made.

Was it just me or did Roger Taylor look disturbingly pretty in that video? Just me then.

This is a great stuff. You're really vacuuming into the corners here.

It came off this darker shading. They also flip back & forth between the dark and light ones. You'd think it would change and stay changed, but it flips and flips.

I agree. In the US, we know about unsold returns being sold off by the car load (Jim Shooter gives an account of it) and in the UK, our friend Glenn reports that the GBD warehouse was stacked with palettes as far as the eye could see filled with returns dating back 20 years which were sold, pot luck, by the palette load to dealers. When World Distributors' deal with Marvel finished, they had over a million returns backed up in the warehouse. Imagine if you could go back.....they'd probably take £10k or something just to get rid of them. You wouldn't have most of the keys (Hulk 181, IF 14, Star Wars 1, Spidey 121, 129 or 135, Spotlight 5, Hero for Hire 1, GS XMen 1, or 94 or 95) but you'd potentially have a whole stack of WBN 32 & 33, Drac 10, Eternals 1, IM 55, Amazing Adventures 11, Ghost Rider 1-4, Spotlight 12, HTD 1, Ms. Marvel 16-18, Logan's Run 6, Star Wars 2-5, surprisingly Spidey 101 (SMCW wasn't launched yet so World distributed 99 - 120), all of the Kree/Skrull Avengers (not 89, but all the Adams issues) and pretty much the whole C&B run on Xmen (and 96-101). I reckon you'd make your £10k back in the first week.

Yes and no. I think the absence of any volume enables us to state that things are probably NOT related to whatever and prioritise the search. In this case, I think if they were Canadian copies, you'd find some quantity of them on sale from Canadian sellers, so that would guide the search. Similarly, if someone somewhere theorized that T&P stamps were from the UK, they could verify immediately by refining their search to the UK and they'd find that 99% of T&P stamps are on sale in the UK. They wouldn't have to gather thousands of examples and then look for a common connection, it would become obvious immediately and be confirmed by the near-total-absence of those stamps from all other sources. That logic could apply to other questions. Your theory is just a theory, but it sounds good to me. The numbers in which these show up would tend to make one think they have a single source. They're denominated in cents, which means they must have been on sale in the US, Canada, Aus, NZ, central or South America, the Caribbean or parts of Africa or the far East. Probability would suggest the US as they're US copies, not reprints. However, if they were being exported somewhere, that might be the reason for the increased cover price. I'd love to know the time frame of the ones you've found so far. My TOS 39 is from March 1963 and this Cap 109 (neatly the same series) is from January 1969, which is still within the period they were being distributed by IND. Likewise, the Robot's Lois Lane is from July 1968. This would make me interested to know if there are DC ones beyond Oct 69 but no Marvels, which could put IND distribution into the frame as a common denominator. However, you've got a whole stack of Charltons here, presumably distributed by Capital, so that likely blows that one out. I think the time frame (so far discovered) would be interesting to know. Also, I think this Cap has a slightly different font, so is it just a different batch or a different retailer? Or a different branch of the same retailer? Something I take it we haven't seen is anything other than a 15c sticker in this style over anything other than a 12c original price? If so, this puts an interesting time frame onto it. Marvel and DC both moved prices up in what was pretty clearly a co ordinated increase in June/July 1969. If these stickers disappear at that point (obviously they would not remain priced at 15c but they could continue), then someone was marking Marvel, DC and Charlton comics (and possibly others) up to 15c for pretty much the entire time they were at 12c but stopped when the cover price moved to 15c. This would suggest it was not another currency or foreign territory.

I'd love to know this. Throughout the 60's, the Canuck dollar was worth about 93 yankee cents, so if they'd been re-pricing like for like, US Marvels would only have been 13c. That said, there's no reason you'd necessarily charge the same cover price. If I'd just had to drive a pallet of Lois Lane's to Iqaluit, I'd be charging the extra couple of cents for my trouble. My TOS #39, which I believe to be genuine (based largely on the fact that I cannot bear to think otherwise) has one of these stickers. This would put it more than 5 years before US comics cost 15c, so it definitely can't be a leftover. I've had a couple of look-throughs of comics for sale in Canada over the years, but not seen any of these stickers. (Though, just to reaffirm, this doesn't contradict what Eric says about the 70's - the two currencies were more or less dead on for 6 years in the 70's and didn't really part ways until 77/78).