Newsstand vs Direct

[valiantman]

Specific to the "Spideyhead" mention, the black Spider-man #1 with gold webs

is extremely common with the "Spideyhead" and uncommon with the UPC.

The black/gold version with UPC is currently "rarer" than even the Spider-man #1 Platinum on the CGC census.

 

The other "Spideyhead" situation is Amazing Spider-man #300.

Spideyhead is the most common version of high-grade ASM #300,

while high grade ASM #300 with UPC shows up much less.

ASM #300 with UPC usually is 9.2 or lower.

[Topnotchman]

I have been getting emails through Ebay with people wanting me to check my group lots for direct edition or newsstand editions. They are also emailing me about second and third printings. I have seen a growing interest in these questions this year.

Its only a matter of time.

 

Cats came out of the bag on this when My Comic shop started to split there listings.

[Hero Restoration]

I think this was already covered in a previous thread but I can't remember the answer. When I was a kid in the 70's I remember and am still a little confused between newsstand, direct and reprint. So is this Shogun and direct addition or a reprint? In the 70's did all reprints say reprint or was the diferent price boxes a clue?

 

[phobalicious]

Does CGC recognize ALL newsstand issues from any title? My recent sub clearly indicated it is newsstand issue (submission form) but when the book came back, nothing noted about newsstand. Does the price difference of ns & dm considered price variant. I am not collect popular title & it is extremely rare to find an issue printed ns & seem like CGC doesn't recognize it's ns version. I asked the same question to CGC last week, hope Gemma can answer it this week.

[JohnJacksonMiller-migratio]

I think this was already covered in a previous thread but I can't remember the answer. When I was a kid in the 70's I remember and am still a little confused between newsstand, direct and reprint. So is this Shogun and direct addition or a reprint? In the 70's did all reprints say reprint or was the diferent price boxes a clue?

 

Actually, what you have there is one of the "Special Market" edition copies that Marvel produced for Western Publishing's Whitman brand -- which ordered copies without UPC codes for placement in bags, for sale in mass-market retailers and toy shops. They were printed at exactly the same time and were not reprints -- exceptions being the labeled-as-such reprints of Star Wars #1-6, for example. (But even Star Wars had non-reprint issues sold with the Whitman "fat diamond" -- at least for #2-6.)

 

These copies have sometimes been called "direct sales" copies -- direct market retailers reported getting these copies in the 1970s. And of course, when we get into the true direct-market copies after 1979, those all had a "flattened diamond" logo (and later, a Marvel "M"). But it appears, however, that this variation came into being not because of comics shops, but because of Whitman's order -- Shooter says that here...

 

http://blog.comichron.com/2010/04/jim-shooter-on-marvel-whitmans-direct.html

 

...and we can tell it anyway, because there is a gap in the existence of these editions coinciding with the months during which Whitman was doing its reprint runs of Star Wars (which approached a million copies and evidently knocked out all other comics from its bagged program for a few months). Despite what Shooter says in the link about Phil Seuling's copies coming from the returnable Curtis run, I think that must have just been initially -- again, I have heard enough reports to believe that DM distributors were getting copies from the run produced for Whitman later on.

 

My own research and a subsequent Overstreet article differed over what to call these editions: for a long time (including in that link) I preferred "Marvel Whitmans" because the variant initially existed only because of Whitman and that was how the vast majority were distributed. The Overstreet article's author preferred "Direct Market edition" noting the comics shops who'd gotten copies, but my concern there was that it gave an incorrect historical impression -- that the Direct Market was significant enough in 1976 that Marvel was willing to give it its own variant. It wasn't, as Shooter says. I think in our discussions, we ultimately agreed on something like "Special Markets edition," or simply "Nonreturnable edition" -- which covers it both ways.

 

I think the important lesson of these books is that the variant was created for Whitman, whose sales were intended to cover a growing gap for publishers caused by the decline of newsstand outlets -- but in fact, it was comics shops that were the real savior, and so we see when the Whitman bagged-edition program ended, Marvel kept on doing a non-returnable variant. By 1979, comics shop sales were more than large enough to warrant it.

[mr_highgrade]

Does CGC recognize ALL newsstand issues from any title? My recent sub clearly indicated it is newsstand issue (submission form) but when the book came back, nothing noted about newsstand. Does the price difference of ns & dm considered price variant. I am not collect popular title & it is extremely rare to find an issue printed ns & seem like CGC doesn't recognize it's ns version. I asked the same question to CGC last week, hope Gemma can answer it this week.

 

 

I've spoken to Paul Litch about this many times over the years, unless there's something different on the cover other than the price, they won't label it a newsstand price variant.