The Distribution of US Published Comics in the UK (1959~1982) 15 15

[Malacoda]

Wow . I just pulled 'Marvel comic' into ebay and location Ireland and got literally 838 results of which about 4 were silver age and a couple of dozen were bronze.  318 total for DC comic (if you do the same for the UK, you get 240k).  We may have the answer to who distributed comics in Ireland. No one. Ever. 

[Get Marwood & I]

Lots to read here! I'm on the road today so will give it all the once over at the weekend 

[Malacoda]

On 1/14/2022 at 8:33 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Lots to read here! I'm on the road today so will give it all the once over at the weekend 

Just me catching 5 connecting flights to get the point, as usual. But I am stunned by the dearth of silver or bronze Marvel/DC's in Ireland. Either I did the search wrong or the Emerald Isle was not at home to Mssrs. Lee & Liebowitz. 

[Albert Tatlock]

On 1/15/2022 at 1:56 AM, Malacoda said:

Just me catching 5 connecting flights to get the point, as usual. But I am stunned by the dearth of silver or bronze Marvel/DC's in Ireland. Either I did the search wrong or the Emerald Isle was not at home to Mssrs. Lee & Liebowitz. 

Quote from Tony Roche:

TR: Yes, American comics were always available for sale in Ireland when I was growing up. I remember them from the late 1950s, when I began buying the Superman and Batman titles. I would have been six or seven. The earliest actual title I remember buying was a Mystery in Space with Adam Strange on the cover. Then I got each of the Julius Schwartz edited new super-hero titles as they debuted, first the Flash and Green Lantern, then the Atom, Hawkman, JLA, etc. There was a newsagents in Monkstown entitled Hewett’s (it’s still there, opposite the Catholic church) where I bought the British weeklies. The British war comics were hard to get – your best bet were the little boxy newsstands in railway stations, where the monthly war comics were used to wallpaper the glass walls, covers outward.What a collage that was!The regular newsagents did not appear to stock the American comics. I got them from a shop called The Mart, which was just around the corner from our house,on 72 Mounttown Road Upper (Monkstown,Dun Laoghaire) – there’s a Cartridge Stop shop there now, where I buy the ink cartridges for my computer. The Mart was one of a little constellation of shops near the 46A bus stop – which included McMurroughs’ Chemist, McCormacks’ pub and The Mart, which was run by a very nice lady called Mrs. Grier. All of these shops were neighbourhood shops run by families, where in each case we would know the families and so got treated very personably when we went in. The Mart was more in the nature of a local grocery shop – I remember fresh vegetables and a large fridge full of ice creams. But just inside the door, on the left hand side, against the wall, was an elaborate rack filled with American comics. They were replaced on a monthly basis, and the date on the cover pages happened to coincide with the month in which they were sold (which meant they had come out three months earlier in the States). The price was approximate to what was on the cover – 10 cents was 9 pence, 12 cents a shilling, and so forth.

[Get Marwood & I]

On 1/13/2022 at 10:41 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Maybe the letters are sequential, like the numbers on the British T & Ps.

Could be. Or perhaps they relate to geographical areas - G for Galway, C for Cavan.

I don't have, or see enough examples of these appearing to build a picture though. 

On 1/13/2022 at 10:41 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

They have a vague similarity to the T&P stamps, wonder if there was any financial connection between the Irish and UK distributors. The most efficient way of supplying the Republic market may have been through an Ulster wholesaler supplied by T & P.

Personally, I don't see the T&P similarity at all. Yes, a circle split between price and some letter/number indicator but I would guess any stamp might look like that. Could be wrong though.

On 1/13/2022 at 10:41 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Can we find out the earliest of these stamps? I don't suppose they pre-date October 1959, at least not on the comics, but you never know.

Here's one on a 1956 Charlton:

No Irish county starting with a E, so....

As we know, there's no way of knowing when that stamp was applied - 1956, or at any point since when 10d was still operative.

On 1/13/2022 at 10:41 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Remember that the numbers on the British T & Ps began before the comics arrived in early 1960, having been previously used on various magazines. Maybe something similar was the situation across the Irish Sea.

Or possibly the extra 1d the Irish customers had to fork out was a result of the Irish distributor receiving their supply direct from T & P and having to meet extra shipping costs.

All idle speculation, but we have to start somewhere.

In the 1960s, the Irish Pound was held at parity with Sterling, the exchange rates diverged in 1979 when Dublin joined the European Monetary System.

The wife has Irish ancestry and we pop over there from time to time. I'll see if anyone has any recollections. You never know.

[Get Marwood & I]

On 1/14/2022 at 2:11 AM, Malacoda said:

Wow . I just pulled 'Marvel comic' into ebay and location Ireland and got literally 838 results of which about 4 were silver age and a couple of dozen were bronze.  318 total for DC comic (if you do the same for the UK, you get 240k).  We may have the answer to who distributed comics in Ireland. No one. Ever. 

You get more results in Germany, to be sure 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 1/14/2022 at 12:20 AM, Malacoda said:

This, of course, may all be total cobblers and there may have been a direct deal with an Irish distributor, but Ireland had massive protectionist trade barriers with the rest of the world up to 1958. Thereafter most of the trade was still with the UK (they abandoned their bid for EU membership when we didn't get in because there was no point), so it would make a lot of sense for the comics to come from Leicester. Would also explain why it specifies no duty – because although it was American it was actually imported from the UK. 

 

Cobblers or not, I love how you piece all that together 

On 1/14/2022 at 12:20 AM, Malacoda said:

One thing that would surely be a big clue is if we can find a Marvel comic with this stamp during the period when Marvels had T&P indicas. That would be a smoking gun, either way.

You know how often I look Rich, and I save an image of any and every stamp type I see - don't have a one in the files for Marvel.

[Malacoda]

On 1/15/2022 at 9:56 AM, Albert Tatlock said:

Quote from Tony Roche:

TR: Yes, American comics were always available for sale in Ireland when I was growing up. I remember them from the late 1950s, when I began buying the Superman and Batman titles. I would have been six or seven. The earliest actual title I remember buying was a Mystery in Space with Adam Strange on the cover. Then I got each of the Julius Schwartz edited new super-hero titles as they debuted, first the Flash and Green Lantern, then the Atom, Hawkman, JLA, etc. There was a newsagents in Monkstown entitled Hewett’s (it’s still there, opposite the Catholic church) where I bought the British weeklies. The British war comics were hard to get – your best bet were the little boxy newsstands in railway stations, where the monthly war comics were used to wallpaper the glass walls, covers outward.What a collage that was!The regular newsagents did not appear to stock the American comics. I got them from a shop called The Mart, which was just around the corner from our house,on 72 Mounttown Road Upper (Monkstown,Dun Laoghaire) – there’s a Cartridge Stop shop there now, where I buy the ink cartridges for my computer. The Mart was one of a little constellation of shops near the 46A bus stop – which included McMurroughs’ Chemist, McCormacks’ pub and The Mart, which was run by a very nice lady called Mrs. Grier. All of these shops were neighbourhood shops run by families, where in each case we would know the families and so got treated very personably when we went in. The Mart was more in the nature of a local grocery shop – I remember fresh vegetables and a large fridge full of ice creams. But just inside the door, on the left hand side, against the wall, was an elaborate rack filled with American comics. They were replaced on a monthly basis, and the date on the cover pages happened to coincide with the month in which they were sold (which meant they had come out three months earlier in the States). The price was approximate to what was on the cover – 10 cents was 9 pence, 12 cents a shilling, and so forth.

Thanks Albert. This is absolutely 100% what I would have expected i.e. exactly the same kind of joyous, Hovis commercial memories we all have from childhood. I was utterly gobsmacked when I looked on ebay and saw zilch. I'm even more bewildered now. What happened to them all?  

[Malacoda]

On 1/15/2022 at 10:13 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Cobblers or not, I love how you piece all that together 

That's how we roll. We're both Hank Pym, but you're Ant Man and I'm Giant Man.  (But without the wife-beating and psychosis, obviously....)

[themagicrobot]

Adventure 313 has an "E" stamp. Adventure 314 has a "H" stamp. So that blows the sequential theory. There is always the unlikely option that Ethel had an "E" stamp and Hilda wielded a "H" stamp?

Edited January 15, 2022 by themagicrobot

[themagicrobot]

Quote

 I was utterly gobsmacked when I looked on ebay and saw zilch. I'm even more bewildered now. What happened to them all?  

There might only ever have been a few hundred of each title that found their way over there perhaps? Here is some more colour for this thread. If the first number is a "C" and the other is an "I" then the sequential theory is back on.

[Malacoda]

On 1/15/2022 at 10:13 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

You know how often I look Rich, and I save an image of any and every stamp type I see - don't have a one in the files for Marvel.

Indeed, and if you don't have it, it's not there to be had.  I know you always say you look for years for examples before something turns up, but given that virtually all of the imported comics from 1960 -1964 had the T&P indica ( and I only know that because you did a ton of research on it and published a pretty definitive list on here, so   by the way),  there would have to be an example.  The fact that there is not one suggests either that these were not T&P, not Irish or that the period when these stamps exist does not coincide with the indica period. But if they are T&P, that's one Hell of a long stretch of indicas with not one corresponding cover stamp. And, as you point out, these stamps date back to 1956 at least, so they were definitely in play right through the indica phase. 

The fact that these stamps are so scarce and that there are bugger all comics in Ireland is a potentially interesting coincidence but might be a false syllogism (there are bugger all comics with this stamp, there are bugger all comics in Ireland, therefore these stamps are Irish.  Hmmmm.....). 

If you think about it, it does actually have one self-certifying facet: if these stamps are Irish (rather than anything else) and there are virtually zero silver age Marvels left in Ireland, then it neatly explains why there are virtually zero of the stamps, but that is a MASSIVE stretch and we need more examples of the stamp to put some sort of time period on them. 

What happened to all the silver age Marvels in Ireland? Did St. Patrick drive them out?

Time for me to be Ant Man for a moment: 

On the topic of whether these went via T&P or not, the dates might be suggestive. I have a TOS 71 from November 1965. It's a cents copy with this kind of stamp and an F.  November 1965 is between the 1st and 2nd Hiatuses. This is before the period when T&P sold both PV's and stamped copies. All the copies sent to T&P would have been ( I believe???) pence copies. Yet this stamped one is a cents copy.  It is also priced at 1/-.  This is years (26 months to be precise) before the UK price increased to 1/-.  So this comic is a cents edition, priced at a price seemingly not for sale in the UK, for a destination where the currency was pounds shillings and pence and was presumably English speaking.

This has got to be Ireland, although Albert raises the intriguing possibility that it might have been Northern Ireland. Albert postulates this might have been an easy distribution route to Ireland, but maybe it these comics were just for sale in NI?

Either way, the Ireland/NI thing would sit nicely with why these are cents copies at a time of UKPV's.  If T&P needed to sell at a premium in NI (or Ireland)  to cover the adding shipping costs, the most logical thing to do would be to get some cents copies along with the PV's and re-stamp them. Much less confusing for vendors than re-stamping 10d copies with a shilling price stamp and less messy than putting stickers over the cents price. 

I also note your Charlton one. The fact that that pre-dates the ban is pretty mid blowing ( ballast-era, presumably?). But I also notice it's 10d, which again is a premium price. 

[Malacoda]

On 1/15/2022 at 6:42 PM, themagicrobot said:

There might only ever have been a few hundred of each title that found their way over there perhaps? Here is some more colour for this thread. If the first number is a "C" and the other is an "I" then the sequential theory is back on.

 

Thanks for posting these. Very cool.

It could be that they came over with batches of other magazines and publications as make-weights and therefore there were small and inconsistent numbers of them.  I'm not sure the second lot does put the sequential theory back on the table does it? Not consistently anyway. 

CI....oh brother, please don't tell me we're getting separate pricing for the channel islands now. 

One thing that is completely amazing is that the price is 1/-.  DC's weren't even 10d at this point, let alone 1/-. This is a really mad price.  They wouldn't cost 1/- for over 4 years.   This is like a comic turning up in 1973 and costing 12p instead of 6p. 

[themagicrobot]

If the comics were destined for Northern Ireland, being part of the UK surely they wouldn't have had the need to display "No tax" or "No duty"? So that is why I lean towards these books being originally sold in the Republic of Ireland. Didn't I post an image of a Doom Patrol comic with an "Ireland" sticker? That was from the same eBay seller as the above scans came from. In fact a few weeks ago that same seller had a number of early 1960s DCs for sale that looked as if they belonged with these images posted above that had NO price stamps on at all so perhaps not all comics in the batch received a stamp. Once the newsagent knew the price of the things he wouldn't need to keep looking for a stamp anyway.

 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 1/15/2022 at 6:45 PM, Malacoda said:

I also note your Charlton one. The fact that that pre-dates the ban is pretty mid blowing ( ballast-era, presumably?). But I also notice it's 10d, which again is a premium price. 

The comic pre-dates the ban, but that doesn't mean the stamp on it does. It could have been applied long after, as the T&P stamps clearly were on the 1958 dated Charltons.

Let's not forget that T&P were the "sole distributors in the UK", and the UK comprised England, Scotland, Wales and NI. So the books they imported should have been distributed to NI too, if we assume full UK distribution. That to me makes the other stamps for somewhere else, and the obvious place is Southern Ireland.

I'm going to let you and Robot battle this one out as I'm knee deep in Charlton, Harvey, IW and Murray at present 

[themagicrobot]

By 1966 the price had increased to 1/3. Isn't that another "Ireland" sticker?? I  rest my case.

 

PS If T & P comics made their way to Northern Ireland (and I can't see why not ) comic fans near enough could cross the border and save 3d on each and every comic

Edited January 15, 2022 by themagicrobot

[Get Marwood & I]

 

[themagicrobot]

It always was more expensive to live in the Republic of Ireland. I'm pretty sure my British comics like Lion and Valiant showed prices for numerous other countries that worked out higher than the 7d (for example) I paid.

[Malacoda]

On 1/15/2022 at 7:36 PM, themagicrobot said:

By 1966 the price had increased to 1/3. Isn't that another "Ireland" stamp?? I  rest my case.

I'm probably being thick here, but if our point is that comics distributed to Ireland are defined by having a round inkstamp at 1/- price with no actual indication that they're for Ireland, and then, as proof of this, we present comics which have a square sticker priced at 1/3 and clearly marked for Ireland, surely this does more to disprove that the earlier stamps are Irish? I mean, obviously they could have changed to a completely different system and price by this point, but I don't understand how these stickered ones being Irish help to prove that the earlier stamped ones were Irish when they have no points of similarity.  I'm not being argumentative here, it just looks more like they prove something different?  Is there also a stamp on these I'm not seeing? 

[Malacoda]

On 1/15/2022 at 7:45 PM, themagicrobot said:

It always was more expensive to live in the Republic of Ireland. I'm pretty sure my British comics like Lion and Valiant showed prices for numerous other countries that worked out higher than the 7d (for example) I paid.

I agree and the higher price is indicative of our Irish theory, but it's an amazing jump, isn't it?  Given that the Irish currency had parity with Sterling, this makes these 1966 comics 15d in Ireland at a time when they were 10d in the UK.  Given that Ireland is a poorer country than the UK,  I wonder how many kids had the 1/3 for a comic.  I mean, come to that, 10d was an outrageous price for a comic in the UK as well.