Marvel UK Price Variants 16 16

[Get Marwood & I]

26 minutes ago, Albert Tatlock said:

I did indeed, it is providing fine detail, along the lines of the physicists' quest for the Theory Of Everything.

I think you have got the last few pieces of the jigsaw trapped in a corner, and they will soon be waving a white flag.

I've done it again, gone and mixed my metaphors. You should never do that, it is a shark-infested minefield.

It is indeed, Albert, very dangerous. Though some say it's better to throw caution to the wind and live your life like a candle at both ends. 

22 minutes ago, OtherEric said:

I'm prepared to agree with that in the general case, actually.

Me too. He's an idiot.

[Bookaholic]

Anyone have an idea of what this would sell for at auction?? Trying to make a fair offer to a friend. Thank You. 

[Garystar]

Try here;

https://www.comicsvalue.com/

 

 

 

[Get Marwood & I]

17 hours ago, Get Marwood & I said:

I received the final book I needed to complete my Marvel Thorpe & Porter Indicia Types research this week and, happily, it meant I had to rewrite half of it 

I'll update The Pence Palace of Doom soon with all the new data and summary docs (which I've tarted up a bit).

As is often the case, a few things jumped out at me as I was doing it - one, relating to the 'what was printed first' discussions that I've been having with myself in this and my US Price Font Variations threads.

Take a look at these three JIM #64's:

  

One 9d, and two different 10c fonts. Following through the logic in my earlier posts, the absence of a standard approach  bold font cents copy makes my theory that the printing order went 10c bold, 9d box and then some more 10c in a box theory look fairly suspect.

Returning to my T&P indicia research updates, here is the updated Type 4 page, which shows that, where a UKPV exists, the 10c copies also have T&P UK indicias:

Here's the indicia of one of the cents copies of the Jan 1961 JIM #64 which has the T&P indicia:

Does that not suggest that the UKPVs were printed first for this issue, the T&P indicia being present in the cents copy? Consider:

1. There is no  style US copy in existence from which the UK 9d copy was 'scratched out' (why, who knows)
2. Logically, the appearance of the UK indicia in the US copy suggests that it was printed second - they forgot to take it off after finishing the UKPV covers

But there are two JIM #64 cent types:

 

So what if this cents version...  ... doesn't have the T&P indicia? 

That could indicate:

1. 9d run first (with T&P indicia)
2. 10c version run second (with T&P indicia, in error)
3. Additional 10c version run (without)

But why would you run another set of US copies with a different US font if the preceding template was already set as cents? Maybe the presence of the T&P indicia has some other bearing that I'm missing?

Do you think I can find a copy to check though? So, any one got one of these JIM #64's: 

If it has the T&P indicia though, where does that leave us? Back to the pence being printed in the middle? Why no bold cents 'starter' though, if so?

All good fun 

 

 

For those that are following this, I checked the second applicable US Price Font book - JIM #65 - and all three copies have a UK Thorpe & Porter indicia:

9d Copy: 
 

Version A 10c Copy:
 

Version B 10c Copy:
 

Which doesn't help much with my order of priority theory.

See ya!

[Garystar]

Have you got the comics in hand? It would seem logical that the narrowist price block was printed first. The bold cents “must” have been printed last as you can see clearly see alteration to price block, is there any difference in size (even part millimetre) which would suggest order of other two.  
If the plates were first set up for UK including indica, UK copies printed then ONLY the front cover changed that would work but doesn’t explain why two cent fonts. If the cents was printed first it would be illogical to set the front cover for US market and inside cover for UK. 
The no price x-men you recently posted indicates the UK price block is the alteration so presumably that was printed second. As you have said many times previously it’s probable that which was printed first, US or UK, varied from month to month or even issue to issue. 

[Albert Tatlock]

What if these were being run not consecutively, but concurrently on two separate presses?

For a normal run, machine A and machine B would each have all the plates they need to hand. Machine A prints 50% of the cents run, machine B prints 40+%, then switches the black plate to produce the UKPVs.

However, if machine A is given the cents plates (all it needs), but someone has been asleep at the wheel and machine B has only the UKPV plate, B cannot start the cents run. So B does the UKPVs first, and while the machine is running, they try to cobble something together so they don't have to wait until machine A (which may have been booked for another job immediately after, so cannot up the run to 90+%) has finished. The quickest way would be to go to the negs, scratch off the 9d and substitute 10c, any version that comes to hand, and produce another black plate for the remaining cents versions.

in this scenario, the two different cent fonts would be produced in roughly equal numbers. Is that what we observe?

[Get Marwood & I]

2 hours ago, Garystar said:

Have you got the comics in hand? It would seem logical that the narrowist price block was printed first. The bold cents “must” have been printed last as you can see clearly see alteration to price block, is there any difference in size (even part millimetre) which would suggest order of other two.  
If the plates were first set up for UK including indica, UK copies printed then ONLY the front cover changed that would work but doesn’t explain why two cent fonts. If the cents was printed first it would be illogical to set the front cover for US market and inside cover for UK. 
The no price x-men you recently posted indicates the UK price block is the alteration so presumably that was printed second. As you have said many times previously it’s probable that which was printed first, US or UK, varied from month to month or even issue to issue. 

Not having the comics in hand is a slight issue - I get your point about trying to see which white box is bigger etc. It's quite difficult going from online images, especially at angles. I can't afford to buy them all to do a detailed comparison though (would love to have bought that priceless X-Men I posted, to inspect that closer). Zooming in with what I've got, which would you say was first here, if this was one plate scratched off twice? The pence box looks the cleanest, yet has the yellow and red visible around the edge - colour bleed / plate placing could be a factor:

The wonky font looks like the last one, as it sort of breaks out of the perimeter in places.

This is quite a difficult thing to debate in writing. There's a lot I want to say, and discuss, but it's really hard to do so as you have to add pictures and crops and summary documents and everything. I keep looking, to see if I can see the smoking gun, but there always seems to be a reason to doubt any hypothesis that I come up with. And of course, not knowing explicitly what they did doesn't help. I don't know, for example, if there was one printing plate, two or three. One plate started with one price, that was then scratched out and a second price added, etc. I've read lots of stuff about it, but usually from a later period. 

As I've always said, there was likely no consistency in those early days. It may have been different every time, until a uniform process bedded in.

1 hour ago, Albert Tatlock said:

What if these were being run not consecutively, but concurrently on two separate presses?

For a normal run, machine A and machine B would each have all the plates they need to hand. Machine A prints 50% of the cents run, machine B prints 40+%, then switches the black plate to produce the UKPVs.

However, if machine A is given the cents plates (all it needs), but someone has been asleep at the wheel and machine B has only the UKPV plate, B cannot start the cents run. So B does the UKPVs first, and while the machine is running, they try to cobble something together so they don't have to wait until machine A (which may have been booked for another job immediately after, so cannot up the run to 90+%) has finished. The quickest way would be to go to the negs, scratch off the 9d and substitute 10c, any version that comes to hand, and produce another black plate for the remaining cents versions.

in this scenario, the two different cent fonts would be produced in roughly equal numbers. Is that what we observe?

The anecdotal evidence that I have seen down the years indicates that a single press could handle the volume. The covers were printed separately remember, so I don't know if it would have needed more than one to complete the job. With lots of comic titles in train, why would you split one issue across more than one printer if you didn't need to? I don't know.

Your A/B scenario is plausible in theory. So many suggestions are plausible, though. There always seems to be more of one cents type than the other, my research shows, which indicates a possible large cents run with a small additional cents and pence run as being what happened. Hence my sequential big cents, little pence, whoops, a few more cents theory of earlier. 

I find this all fascinating of course, and I'm glad that you two have chimed in this morning. A three-way beer one day, to discuss it might be needed. I could talk for hours. It takes a lot of time and effort to put these posts together and I lost one yesterday due to the ongoing board issues. I think I've put enough out there to at least show that there is a reasonable chance that some, if not all, UKPVs were first in the printing queue. I posted a thread last year, I think, asking "would it matter if it were proven that UKPVs were printed first?". The resounding answer was no. So maybe I'll just satisfy myself with knowing that I did all I could from a computer table in England to try to drive out some conclusions. The ultimate conclusion, however, is that the books are all part of the same end to end print job so it doesn't really matter which came first. It's not going to change anything, either way. It's just a curio from the past, that keeps me immersed in the comics I love. I think I have made the argument conclusively though, that the cents price fonts only exist because the pence ones were introduced. So not a bad service to the history of the books. 

Until we meet in that fictional bar boys....

[Albert Tatlock]

It seems strange that there are different fonts at all. In an ideal world, all the cents would be identical, and all the pence would be identical, so there must have been a hitch somewhere where the variations crop up.

The majority seem to have gone through without variations, though, so I think we can assume that these exceptions were not planned.

They must surely have been an ad hoc reaction to a cockup somewhere, but with the information we currently have, we can only speculate.

[Get Marwood & I]

1 hour ago, Albert Tatlock said:

The majority seem to have gone through without variations, though, so I think we can assume that these exceptions were not planned.

Almost certainly, I think.

The chart doesn't lie - three example titles:

• Journey into Mystery - no UKPV for #61 and, surprise surprise, only the usual bold cents font exists
• Kathy - no UKPVs, the usual bold cents font only on all copies
• Kid Colt - 90, 92-94 no UKPVs - the usual bold cents font. UKPVs - cents font changes

There are 91 books in the price font variation window, from first to last known cover date.

Of those 91, 40 have UKPVs.

Of those 41, 14 have cents price font variants (i.e. more than one cents type). Of the 27 others, having only one cents version, the majority of those have a 'non-standard' cents font (see JIM #59, 62 & 63 in the above table, to illustrate). So even where there is only one cents font, the presence of the pence copy seems to have stopped the usual cents bold font being used. To my mind, that leans towards the pence being printed first, as if the cents copy was the starting point it would surely have a standard 10c bold font which would then have been scratched off for the pence copy.

Did that make sense?

I'm convinced the presence or non-standard cents fonts, and the 14 multiple cents font examples, are the result of procedural hiccups and errors - nothing more. 

As I said earlier, difficult to put it all into words 

[Get Marwood & I]

Gents, your thoughts please - I have threads all over the place and they keep crossing over due to the various links. Most of what I have posted above should sit in the Price Font thread - it's here re the pence order of printing aspect. Should I mothball all my threads now, and create one for all my research strands, or keep them separate?

[Garystar]

1 hour ago, Get Marwood & I said:

The pence box looks the cleanest, yet has the yellow and red visible around the edge - colour bleed / plate placing could be a factor:

The wonky font looks like the last one, as it sort of breaks out of the perimeter in places.

My first reaction rather than bleed that this is the price “hole” being slightly misaligned or slightly different sizes and only one of the colour plates registering on white paper during printing. I was wondering if this also could tell us something about printing order but beyond my technical knowledge. 

[Get Marwood & I]

1 minute ago, Garystar said:

My first reaction rather than bleed that this is the price “hole” being slightly misaligned or slightly different sizes and only one of the colour plates registering on white paper during printing. I was wondering if this also could tell us something about printing order but beyond my technical knowledge. 

Good point, and same here. I've got a few examples where the overlay of ink appears to be different on the same copy / font type - I'll try to post an example shortly

[Get Marwood & I]

....here we go, three of the same JIM #64 font types - all have slightly different box edging due to printing variances:

That makes it very difficult to judge them against the alternate cents font and the 9d copies. 

[Garystar]

17 minutes ago, Get Marwood & I said:

three of the same JIM #64 font types - all have slightly different box edging due to printing variances:

 

Difficult to see on a phone (and the colour has deteriorated differently and/or photoed in different light) but are they not the same albeit slightly shifted left/right? 
Your JIM #64 pence is clearly different to cents as the red is showing all round. 

Edited July 1, 2021 by Garystar

[Get Marwood & I]

2 minutes ago, Garystar said:

Difficult to see on a phone (and the colour has deteriorated differently and/or photoed in different light) but are they not the same albeit slightly shifted left/right? 

Yes, they're all taken from Heritage scans, graded books. Scans and photos always differ. I'll just have to win the lottery, buy them all, and get my magnifying glass out....

[Garystar]

1 minute ago, Get Marwood & I said:

Yes, they're all taken from Heritage scans, graded books. Scans and photos always differ. I'll just have to win the lottery, buy them all, and get my magnifying glass out....

You could also buy a 1960s printing press and try out different scenarios for printing to test your theories. Perhaps you could get John Romita to knock up a new Spider-Man cover which you could use in these tests. 
Sorted. (Are we allowed to enter Euro Millions draw since brexit?)

[Get Marwood & I]

Just now, Garystar said:

Perhaps you could get John Romita to knock up a new Spider-Man cover which you could use in these tests. 

I tried Mr Ditko when he was still with us, but he wasn't interested...

 

[Get Marwood & I]

....'trivial' he says, all my work...

[Garystar]

Love that letter, if he’d sent it to me I would have it framed on my bathroom door to read it every day. Strange when someone you admire insults you it’s great! I especially like UK being described “some foreign country”

Steve Ditko, Laurel and Hardy - three of my heroes in two posts!!! If you could work in Joe Strummer and Mr Holstein Pils this would be the best thread ever. 

[Get Marwood & I]

13 minutes ago, Garystar said:

Love that letter, if he’d sent it to me I would have it framed on my bathroom door to read it every day. Strange when someone you admire insults you it’s great! I especially like UK being described “some foreign country”

Steve Ditko, Laurel and Hardy - three of my heroes in two posts!!! If you could work in Joe Strummer and Mr Holstein Pils this would be the best thread ever. 

I don't know what possessed me to send such an infantile letter in the first place. It was like I could barely be arsed and he still replied 

Contrary to the opinions of some, I think he loved receiving and replying to letters. Absolutely loved it. 

No Strummer I'm afraid Gary - it would only Clash. Here's your beer though