Marvel Whitman Variant List

[RockMyAmadeus]

I can add to this long-long-ago discussion (having just rediscovered it) that Jim Shooter confirmed for me in 2010 that it was Whitman's very large purchase of copies -- and the need to prevent them from coming back as returns -- that resulted in this variant's creation:

 

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

 

The fact that Whitman was only buying reprints of Star Wars was why there weren't variants for early 1978 cover-dated issues.

 

Hey JJM.

 

What JC didn't understand then is that Whitman WAS (part of) the Direct market...the largest customer of it for the first several years.

 

But they weren't the ONLY Direct market, as Sueling and others prove. While the "Marvel Whitmans" may have been produced at the behest of Western, they were not the only distributors that got them.

 

That point seems to have been lost.

 

 

[RockMyAmadeus]

By the way....there are "squashed diamond" books from 1977 and 1978...long before the company wide adaptation in June/July 1979.

 

Tarzan #2, for example, which has a cover date of July, 1977.

 

So, I imagine that Shooter's recollections are a bit fuzzy, saying that no Direct market distributors received any of the diamonds.

 

It's understandable that, if Whitman didn't order a book, it wasn't cost effective for Marvel to print for the rest of the then-fledgling Direct market, but it doesn't make sense that, when they DID print for Whitman, that they wouldn't do the same for the rest of the DM, since, after all, they were testing whether it could work, and they still needed a way for Direct copies not to be returned.

 

 

I don't know if the issue will ever fully be resolved, but we've come a long, long way from the fuzziness of the 90's and "reprints."

[JohnJacksonMiller-migratio]

That Tarzan isn't a "squashed diamond" by design, I don't believe -- I suspect they mocked up a smaller one because the placement of the "origin issue" burst and the female character made it impossible to get the regular Whitman piece to fit into the trade dress.

 

http://www.bipcomics.com/showcase/Direct/images/Tarzan/002d.jpg

 

I haven't seen any of the other squashed diamonds you're mentioning, but I'm wondering if it's the same sort of deal. As far as I know, there was only the one variant. If I see a fat diamond and a squashed diamond side-by-side, certainly I'll think otherwise.

 

I can accept as logical that if retailers got copies from the Whitman run, Shooter might not have known. The issue from my perspective has simply been that the Direct Market itself wasn't yet large enough to warrant its own covers in 1977, but Whitman made them necessary -- and that's what Shooter confirmed. Then when Whitman went away the Direct Market WAS large enough, and flat diamonds proceed from there.

[RockMyAmadeus]

That Tarzan isn't a "squashed diamond" by design, I don't believe -- I suspect they mocked up a smaller one because the placement of the "origin issue" burst and the female character made it impossible to get the regular Whitman piece to fit into the trade dress.

 

http://www.bipcomics.com/showcase/Direct/images/Tarzan/002d.jpg

 

I haven't seen any of the other squashed diamonds you're mentioning, but I'm wondering if it's the same sort of deal. As far as I know, there was only the one variant. If I see a fat diamond and a squashed diamond side-by-side, certainly I'll think otherwise.

 

I can accept as logical that if retailers got copies from the Whitman run, Shooter might not have known. The issue from my perspective has simply been that the Direct Market itself wasn't yet large enough to warrant its own covers in 1977, but Whitman made them necessary -- and that's what Shooter confirmed. Then when Whitman went away the Direct Market WAS large enough, and flat diamonds proceed from there.

 

Hey JJM.

 

Tarzan #15 and #16 have squashed diamonds, too. Those are the only ones I've seen that I can remember off the top of my head.

 

I'm not sure the artwork would have necessitated the change. Marvel was extremely reluctant, before the 80's, to mess with cover format on an individual book. It was classical branding 101, straight out of the 50's and 60's: don't mess with the fundamentals of your design; it confuses consumers.

 

Not saying it's not possible, just that it wasn't likely in 1977.

 

If I ever have them in my hands while thinking about it, I'll post pictures.

 

My contention is that, after seeing the "squashed diamond", it looked better to the production folks at Marvel...and they ultimately became the company-wide look for the 6/79 cover dated books going forward. They had been using the fat diamond up to and including 5/79 books, and then...squashed diamond from there on out, and the fat diamond vanishes completely, never to be seen again.

 

The squashed diamonds had been around, in limited form, before 6/79.

[JohnJacksonMiller-migratio]

Okay, yes, the thinner diamond seems to be endemic to the trade dress of Tarzan for its entire run -- Nick Pope's scans show it on 11-13 and 15-16, changing to the fat burst (taking the place of the "Still 35¢!" copy from the newsstand Marvels) by October 1978. And there are other titles as well, as you note.

 

Looking at what series did and didn't have narrow diamonds pre-1979, I see a possible common thread. It appears to be only the titles that started while the Whitman experiment was already underway -- that is, post January 1977 -- that got the thinner diamond. The pre-existing Marvel newsstand titles had the title name in a white box at upper left, above the issue number and price box; together, they equated to a fat diamond when black-plate changes were made.

 

But Tarzan, as a June 1977 starter, never had the title name repeated in white at upper left on the newsstand books: http://www.comics.org/series/2408/covers/. The same appears to be true for the other titles that have the flatter diamonds, like Shogun Warriors (http://www.bipcomics.com/showcase/Direct/images/ShogunWarriors/003d.jpg), Marvel Spotlight (http://www.bipcomics.com/showcase/Direct/images/MarvelSpotlight/001d.jpg), and Micronauts (http://www.bipcomics.com/showcase/Direct/images/Micronauts/007d.jpg). They all came along at a time when either the title-box wasn't used (as in the Shogun and Marvel Spotlight case) or when the title had been shifted rightward as part of the "Marvel Comics Group" crossbar (on at least one Micronauts issue).

 

I just spot-checked Nick's images, but I bet we'll find that's the case line-wide. I suspect a Marvel designer, as you suggest, decided with the new cover-mock-ups that they could save real estate by dropping or moving the title-name box on all new titles -- which in the case of the variants would have simply meant that they had less of an area to replace on the black plate.

 

As I understand it, the changes to the black plate were done at the printer at least some of the time: the infamous case of the DC logo dropped onto the Marvel Dennis the Menace issue's UPC box happened at World Color Press. They just grabbed the wrong logo to splice to the negative.

[bababooey]

Here's a great blog on the history of Marvel Multi Mags with some Whitman info.

 

 

Graphic from the blog -

 

[Jeffro.]

Re: the squashed diamond. I was at a local show last month and saw a Tarzan 16 with a weird looking diamond. It was less than a buck so I grabbed it. I don't think I have ever seen a diamond quite like that. A check on ebay doesn't show very many for sale at all. Most appear to be newsstand versions.

 

Even comics.org doesn't show those versions.

 

Interesting

[bellrules]

There's also a John Carter Warlord of Mars #2 with a small diamond box as well as a UPC. I was caught off guard when I saw it as all the ones I've come across over the years had square boxes (ala newsstand) I think all the small diamond books with 30 cent covers might be a lot rarer than the large ones. (35 cent covers and up) The most common type of small diamond boxes I've seen are for comics with a 40 cent cover and a line through the barcode.