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Any way to discover the exact released date for a comic from June 1982?

Started by Silent Master,

6 posts in this topic

ThreeSeas

ThreeSeas

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Posted

You may want to find someone with old issues of the then weekly Comics Buyers Guide. I did not start getting it until 1984 but they always had the ship dates of upcoming comics listed.

 

When I used to get my weekly fix of comics in the mid to late 80's my LCS used to get them on a Wednesday if I remember correctly, or maybe he got them on a Tuesday and put them out for sale on Wednesday. If I could find my old checkbook from that era I could tell you for sure.

 

For that GI Joe, check the back pages of other Marvel comics from earlier in that year as they may state future comic ship dates.

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shadroch

shadroch

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It all depended on where you lived and who your store's distributor was. Shops in NY put new books on sale on Saturday in 1982, with the exception of St Marks Comics. They stayed open late on Friday nights and would usually have the books out around midnite. At that point, books were trucked in. In 1983 or early 1984, they started air shipping the books in to Kennedy and a shop owner could pick them up on Friday or have them delivered on Saturday. Then an upstart called Crown promised Friday delivery and Comics Unlimited matched it. The few NY stores dealing with Capital, Friendly Franks,Glenwood or L&S had either switch distributors or get the books a few days after their competition. Crown offered crazy discounts plus free delivery, as well as comic racks and all sorts of goodies so they became quite a force for a short while until they went bankrupt. Then Comics Unlimited ran afoul of Marvel over a policy issue and Marvel cut them off, allowing Diamond to expand into NY and then to take over the whole ball of wax after Marvels attempt to self-distribute failed and put half the shops out of business with it.

Shops that didn't have a local distributor got their books shipped to them on Friday, so they might not get them until the middle of the next week.

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