Ink stain during printing process 0

[shadroch]

There is a colored distributor marking on the top edges of many comics from the 1970's. I agree, and that as its very common also.

 

I know warehouse guys in the NY area who bought pallets of these blue inked 20 centers books back in the 1970's, they were credited as not sold by a distributor. They bought them real cheap on the secondary market. I actually have bought long boxes of these types of books, and got the story straight from the guy who bought them in the 1970's.

 

 

The Ink on this particular comic is not a distributor stripe, that heavy blue ink indicates it was on the returns. Similar to cutting the top third of the comic off. CGC will kill the grade, so would I as its no better than a 4.0.

 

You can get 9.8's on distributor marks without a problem.

 

The fact that they bought pallets of books that were noted as destroyed has nothing to do with them being inked. Lots of books that were supposed to have been destroyed ended up being sold on the secondary market- Mile High 2 being the most public example. In the 80s, most of the stuff sold by koch and Dolgoff had these distributor markings, it wasn't uncommon for distributors to cheat the companies and sell stock they swore was destroyed.Think this thru and give me one reason why a distributor would mark books like this, after they were supposedly destroyed.

[Topnotchman]

On 7/16/2011 at 1:35 AM, shadroch said:

 

The fact that they bought pallets of books that were noted as destroyed has nothing to do with them being inked. Lots of books that were supposed to have been destroyed ended up being sold on the secondary market- Mile High 2 being the most public example. In the 80s, most of the stuff sold by koch and Dolgoff had these distributor markings, it wasn't uncommon for distributors to cheat the companies and sell stock they swore was destroyed.Think this thru and give me one reason why a distributor would mark books like this, after they were supposedly destroyed.

The books were not destroyed, they did not get the tops cut off the covers either, they were marked with a heavy ink after they were returned to prevent them from being returned twice.   Say a 20 cent Marvel was on the newsstand for 10 cents, it was returnable.  Newsstands returned unsold books back to get there 10 cent credit.  One distributor in "The New Jersey Area" realized that these comics were sellable in bulk to flea market dealers at say "3 cents" per book as long as they had the full covers.  The sooner they could get them to the flea market vendors the better, so the time window shrunk to a few months.   They than realized that flea market dealers were taking the lesser titles and sneaking them back via the newsstand route for the 10 cent credit.   To prevent the books from being returned a second time, they started inking them along the sides of the books to identify them as returned, yet not deface them to unsellable like having the top third of the cover off.   

[shadroch]

Any reason you waited nine years to continue this conversation?

[Topnotchman]

It was linked in restoration category.   The turn around time for the inking was weeks, the books were still within a return window so the fix at the time was to brush ink along the side.