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

[Malacoda]

Hey, Hive Mind.....am I right in thinking that Tower Comics were distributed by Publishing Distributors Corp, who also distributed Harvey?

(or would you prefer an obscure question?) 

[themagicrobot]

 

That's what it says top left?!?

[themagicrobot]

 

 

How much they cost depended if it were Gladys or Ethel weilding the stamper thingy.

Edited March 15, 2022 by themagicrobot

[Malacoda]

On 3/15/2022 at 7:21 PM, themagicrobot said:

 

 

How much they cost depended if it were Gladys or Ethel weilding the stamper thingy.

Thanks Robot, you're a gent.  Yes, the giant size thing clearly eluded Ethel as the stamping went on.  Still,  bargain for someone at the time.  10d instead of 18d. 

[Malacoda]

One thing that never gets less baffling is Martin Goodman’s decision to get into bed with IND in 1957.  Obviously, he decided to shut down his own distribution company in 1956 because he was predicting a crash post-Wertham and the economies of scale to distribute comics would no longer be there (personally, I’m still not convinced on that one…none of the other comic publishers thought that).  However, he shut Atlas down and got into bed with ANC even as they were hurtling over a cliff, and ended up needing another new distributor.  As far as I can see, the conversation went like this:

Martin Goodman:  We need a new distribution company. What are the options?

Circulation Director:  Well…..Fawcett, Hillman, MLA, Empire, ICD, Popular, Select & Ace are all options.

MG: Great, who else would you recommend?

CD: Well, we could approach Kable. They distributed us up to 1952, so we know they can do it.

MG: OK, who else?

CD: Curtis also have national circulation and need more volume.

MG: OK. Who else?

CD: MacFadden Bartell Corporation distribute on behalf of Archie, so they could definitely do us too.

MG: OK who else?

CD: Publisher's Distributing Corporation do Harvey, so they’re another option.

MG: OK….

CD: Dell Distributing are the largest comics distributor in the world and their target audience and business model are both very different to ours, so they’d probably be up for it.

MG: OK who else?

CD: Capital are Charlton’s distributor and they are based only 18 miles from our printers.

MG: Perfect.  Who else?

CD: Well, apart from those 14, the only other option is IND, who are our direct competitors, hate our guts and would undoubtedly use the opportunity to destroy our business for the next 10 years.

MG: We have a winner!!!!!

[themagicrobot]

Martin Goodman thought he could save money by switching to American News. When that option went away perhaps IND were the next cheapest option available??

marvel.fandom.com says:

Atlas shrugs

From 1952 to late 1956, Goodman distributed this torrent of comics to newsstands through his self-owned distributor, Atlas. He then switched to American News Company, the nation's largest distributor and a virtual monopoly—which shortly afterward lost a Justice Department lawsuit and discontinued its business. As historian and author Gerard Jones explains, the company in 1956.

"...had been found guilty of restraint of trade and ordered to divest itself of the newsstands it owned. Its biggest client, George Delacorte, announced he would seek a new distributor for his Dell Comics and paperbacks. The owners of American News estimated the effect that would have on their income. Then they looked at the value of the New Jersey real estate where their headquarters sat. They liquidated the company and sold the land. The company ... vanished without a trace in the suburban growth of the 1950s."

Stan Lee, in a 1988 interview, recalled that Goodman:

"...had gone with the American News Company. I remember saying to him, 'Gee, why did you do that? I thought that we had a good distribution company.' His answer was like, 'Oh, Stan, you wouldn't understand. It has to do with finance.' I didn't really give a damn, and I went back to doing the comics. Later, we were left without a distributor and we couldn't go back to distributing our own books because the fact that Martin quit doing it and went with American News had gotten the wholesalers very angry ... and it would have been impossible for Martin to just say, 'Okay, we'll go back to where we were and distribute our books.' [We had been] turning out 40, 50, 60 books a month, maybe more, and [now] the only company we could get to distribute our books was our closest rival, National (DC) Comics. Suddenly we went ... to either eight or 12 books a month, which was all [that DC's] Independent News Distributors would accept from us."

For that and other reasons, including a recession in the overall economy, Atlas retrenched in 1957. 

 

[themagicrobot]

Perhaps we should be asking Stu. He works for the law firm Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg and Holliway. I believe they're at Timely Plaza.

[OtherEric]

On 3/15/2022 at 12:21 PM, themagicrobot said:

 

 

How much they cost depended if it were Gladys or Ethel weilding the stamper thingy.

Here’s a question :  I’ve heard reports that some Thunder Agents stories were published in UK books (I think Alan Class, but not positive) that were never published in the US.  Has anyone else heard that or have any ideas where they appeared, assuming they exist at all?

[themagicrobot]

Alan Class reprinted a fair number of the Tower stuff. Thunder Action from 1986 is what you're thinking of. I'm sure I posted some cover images here previously. There were indeed new stories in the 4 issues published along with Tower reprints (that may or may not have been licensed).

https://www.comics.org/series/67112/covers/

There is an issue currently for sale on eBay as we speak. 

[Malacoda]

On 3/16/2022 at 6:31 PM, themagicrobot said:

Martin Goodman thought he could save money by switching to American News. When that option went away perhaps IND were the next cheapest option available??

You would think that, wouldn't you, but I'm not sure the facts support it.  ANC famously charged the most obscene tariffs to the news vendors (which was why Goodman was so reviled by them because shutting down his own distribution company and using ANC saved him a bundle and effectively put the costs back onto the vendors). The other distribution companies were, I believe, nothing like as brutal on the vendors - mostly they distributed only their own product, so if they had been,  the vendors could simply cease to display their comics and send them back sale or return.  ANC did a lot of tie-in, so if you didn't shift your quota, you got penalised on everything, including the bread-and-butter best sellers.

I think the post-Wertham/Senate hearings era killed a lot of comic books, but only about 5% of Atlas' output would have been impacted by the demonising of 'weird, sensational and crime' stories, so they could have weathered it  The issue was:  did the demonisation of comic books overall cause such a downturn in all comic book sales that the economies of scale no longer made it viable to run Atlas Distributing?  I think this is demonstrably not the case.  EC  comics got out of the business altogether because so many of their comics fell foul of the Senate, but Atlas were not in that boat. 

Additionally, you can tell in the facts you quoted above that ANC shut down because George Delacourt removed Dell Comics from their business – which tells you what huge business comic distribution still was – and his response was to found his own distribution company.  Goodman did the absolute reverse. 

Did IND offer the cheapest/best deal?  I can’t imagine how that could stack up. Up to 1957, Atlas were publishing on average 36 titles per month.  This dropped to 8 titles per month in 1957, wiping out 78% of their line.  For IND to have been offering the best deal per comic or per title, it would have to have been at literally a quarter or a fifth of the cost of anyone else and there is no way IND would have offered their mortal enemy the best deal in the industry.  I think we can take it that they offered them the absolute worst. 

Even if there was some reason why they went with IND in 1957, why the Hell did they stay there until 1969?  The most baffling moment to me is 1962.  At this point, Western publishing took back all of its properties from Dell and founded Gold Key comics.  So, at this moment, Marvel is exploding with million dollar ideas that they can’t get onto the newsstands because IND won’t let them, and Dell has literally the largest national distribution set up for comics and no comics to distribute. 
How did that conversation not take place? Goodman, Delacourt, Helen Meyer, these were savvy business people who never missed an opportunity. So what happened?

I am going to figure this out if it kills me. 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 3/19/2022 at 10:43 AM, Malacoda said:

How did that conversation not take place? Goodman, Delacourt, Helen Meyer, these were savvy business people who never missed an opportunity. So what happened?

I am going to figure this out if it kills me. 

Maybe it was the reverse of the "it's nothing personal / strictly business" scenario. There was a personality element that dictated what happened. Or didn't happen. Somebody fancied someone enough. Or hated them enough. Would it be the first time that a boss made a questionable decision based on matters of the heart? At the end of the day, it gets dark, and everything is personal.

[Malacoda]

On 3/19/2022 at 2:18 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Maybe it was the reverse of the "it's nothing personal / strictly business" scenario. There was a personality element that dictated what happened. Or didn't happen. Somebody fancied someone enough. Or hated them enough. Would it be the first time that a boss made a questionable decision based on matters of the heart? At the end of the day, it gets dark, and everything is personal.

I fully agree with the facts of this statement.  Both DC and Atlas were incredibly nepotistic. Martin Goodman hired 3 of his brothers to work there. The shell companies bore the names of family members. He fully imagined, even after he sold it, that his son would take over.  People imagine that Stan got the job there because he was Goodman’s wife’s cousin, but far more likely because Robby Soloman was his uncle. The first time Goodman saw Stan he reportedly said ‘what are you doing here?’ which was surprising considering the place was crawling with outlying family members. Likewise at DC, Harry Donenfeld hired Jack Liebowitz because he had known his father growing up on the Lower East Side.  The other key employee later was Donenfeld’s son, Irwin.  Both companies were run very much on the principle of ‘Bob’s your uncle’ which was literally how Stan got his job. 

However, Harry Donenfeld seems to have really disliked Goodman and felt that Marvel had stolen their ideas and were just an inferior copy of DC. All the more infuriating that Marvel were killing them at the newsstands (though I'm not sure Harry knew that, Irwin seems to have done a pretty good job of keeping the sales figures to himself).  Donenfeld could have made a fortune out of Goodman, but he preferred to crush him.  As soon as both Donenfelds and Jack Liebowitz were gone from DC, and Kinney turned the whole place corporate,  the first thing they did was opened up the printing presses for Marvel, which tends to suggest there was no business reason for not doing it. 

So I agree, there were a lot of personalities involved, but it just makes it more mysterious. Marvel were direct competitors for DC in a way that Dell, Archie, Charlton, Harvey and the others were not, and Harry Donenfeld seemed to have some personal animus towards Goodman in a way that I don’t think the bosses of the other companies did.  It seems like they both got into bed with their worst enemy & cut their own noses off to spite their faces.  This went on for 10 years and the minute the 2 companies were sold, it all changed. When Kinney bought DC, they immediately turned the presses on and let Marvel expand and when Perfect bought Marvel they said ‘why the Hell is our distribution in the hands of our competitors?’ and promptly acquired Curtis.  I can believe that Donenfeld preferred to crush Marvel and make DC dominant rather than make money out of distributing Marvel, but what was in it for Goodman? 

[Malacoda]

On another matter:  I assume there is not a list anywhere of all the Marvel comics that were reprinted by Marvel UK - exactly which US Marvels were reprinted in which issues of MWOM, SMCW etc? 

Know you of such a list?  Anyone? Anyone? 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 3/19/2022 at 3:31 PM, Malacoda said:

On another matter:  I assume there is not a list anywhere of all the Marvel comics that were reprinted by Marvel UK - exactly which US Marvels were reprinted in which issues of MWOM, SMCW etc? 

Know you of such a list?  Anyone? Anyone? 

It wouldn't surprise me to hear if there was one - someone has bound to have done something by now - but I haven't happened across anything on my travels so far. Not that I've been looking that hard. The GCD should have most issues and their contents recorded, I would've thought Rich.

[OtherEric]

On 3/19/2022 at 8:31 AM, Malacoda said:

On another matter:  I assume there is not a list anywhere of all the Marvel comics that were reprinted by Marvel UK - exactly which US Marvels were reprinted in which issues of MWOM, SMCW etc? 

Know you of such a list?  Anyone? Anyone? 

There's always the Grand Comics Database; but any individual issue depends on a) has somebody indexed it and b) how good they were at tracking down sources.  Here's the Marvel UK publisher page:

https://www.comics.org/publisher/3174/

[Malacoda]

Thanks Both. 

Yes, where the GCD has indexed it properly, it's brilliant.... 

 Daredevil (Marvel, 1964 series) #5 (December 1964) [pages 1-10 with panels 1 and 2 deleted from page 10 with panels 1-3 of page 11 moved to the bottom of page 10] 

I love the notes of which panels have been re-formatted to create the UK reprint.  They also list all the people who wrote letters in and there are links to US originals, indica information, creator info,  it's just what you'd want, but a huge amount of it hasn't been done yet and also there's no simple table of what was reprinted from where, you have to go into each individual comic.  

As you've said many times, Steve, things only jump out when you put everything into a table.  For instance, here's something I had never noticed before: 

 I was always fascinated by the decision, given the rate that Marvel UK was burning through the US content, to create the Titans & SSM&TSH in that landscape format that ripped through more than 60 pages of content per week.  This meant that, for example, the Titans alone was burning through about 13 comics per month.  

 I had always assumed, as was the norm, that the Titans re-printed half of a US story per week, but when you look at how it started this is exactly what it didn't do.  It started with the Inhumans from Amazing Adventures (split book), Cap from TOS (split book), Subby from TTA (split book), Nick Fury from ST (split book) - so these were all titles where the US story was only half a book long and therefore the perfect length for a UK reprint on a 1 to 1 basis.  The other title in there was Captain Marvel, where they reprinted a whole issue every week at the start, so nothing was half a US issue.   

It then further occurred to me that Cap, Subby & Fury were kind of the leftovers.  IM had been reprinted in SMCW, leaving the Cap half of TOS unused, Hulk had been reprinted in MWOM leaving the Subby half of TTA unused and Doc Strange had been reprinted in Avengers leaving the Fury half of ST unused, so Titans was predominantly sweeping up the leftovers. 

 So, was this perhaps because the continuity was drifting so far that it was getting beyond any semblance of continuity in the UK reprints?  

For example, the Avengers fished Cap out of the water in Avengers #4  (Mar 64) and he starts doing his ‘man out of time’ ‘what shall I do with my life?’ thing in TOS 59  (Nov 64), so there’s only 6 issues between the two.

In the UK, Cap defrosts in Avengers 1, but doesn’t get his own strip in Titans until the Avengers have hit issue #111 ( which reprints Avengers #73), so for UK readers, the gap between Cap defrosting and wondering what to do next is five and a half years of US issues or 110 UK issues. Massively longer than in US continuity. 

The Inhumans stories in Titans were only 4 years old, so relatively new, but the Cap stories were 11 years old, and Subby & Fury were over 10 years old ( Captain Marvel = 7 and a half years).

Maybe it was getting to where the old material didn’t make any sense continuity wise, or maybe some of the older material was getting so old, it was looking creaky vs the likes of Starlin & Kane?

Maybe there was some method in the madness. Or maybe Transworld were just cranking out the backlog as hard and fast as possible until the music stopped playing. Even if that’s the case, it interested me that Titans printed no half stories (that weren’t halves to begin with). Never noticed that.  

[Get Marwood & I]

A rare romance book ticked off the DC T&P stamp missing list - Falling in Love #35 (June 1960):

That's only the third stamped issue I've found for that title within the first four stamp cycle issue range (#30-48).

I quite like it. 

 

[Get Marwood & I]

I bought this blind on eBay as it has been known to have the first Batgirl in it:

Contents vary though, from copy to copy, so I'd need to be lucky.

Drum roll please 

 

Spoiler

 

Hooray for me! 

 

[Garystar]

On 3/19/2022 at 3:31 PM, Malacoda said:

On another matter:  I assume there is not a list anywhere of all the Marvel comics that were reprinted by Marvel UK - exactly which US Marvels were reprinted in which issues of MWOM, SMCW etc? 

Know you of such a list?  Anyone? Anyone? 

I believe this is exactly what Rob Kirby’s “From Cents To Pence” intends to do - if it ever gets published;

https://a-distant-beacon.blogspot.com/?m=1

 

 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 3/20/2022 at 5:48 PM, Garystar said:

I believe this is exactly what Rob Kirby’s “From Cents To Pence” intends to do - if it ever gets published;

https://a-distant-beacon.blogspot.com/?m=1