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

[Get Marwood & I]

On 8/24/2022 at 7:07 PM, themagicrobot said:

I know stickers don't really count as there is probably a Shilling price beneath but here's a sticker anyway.

They don't count, but an of the time UK sticker on a copy where no UK stamped issue is available indicates something, I think. If you see a few of them, it adds to the feel that they may exist with stickers because the stamped copies don't. They add to the pattern.

On 8/25/2022 at 9:06 AM, Garystar said:

There a a couple of stamped FF #102 on eBayUK sold, slightly better pics. 

(i’ve no stamped copies of your list in my collection but I’ll look in attic at my small box of doubles). 

Cool. I'm fairly confident that Rich's missing Spideys will turn up. Before I really got into all this UK distribution stuff I foolishly sold many of my cents stamped copies for clean, unstamped ones. I did have images on disk, but lost them. I'm as certain as I can be that I had #94 and #76 in cents with UK stamps. Oddly, for me, I can remember buying them in Gosh! all those years back.

Never get rid of your comics. Even when you hold them in your hand and objectively conclude that they serve no purpose in your collection, the day will undoubtedly come when they will! I've grown to love and appreciate these 'ugly' T&P stamps and I wish I'd kept every copy I owned now. In my mind at least, they now have their own status - cents copies, UKPVs, stamped cents copies. Love them all. 

[Get Marwood & I]

How about this for a sequence. Redelephantman has an OO collection up on eBay, and I just plotted 16 consecutive issues of T&P stamped My Greatest Adventures as follows:

Note how every stamp is in the same cover location, top right. Ethel was on her game. And apart from the consecutive missing '9' and '1', the sequence is perfect. If we believe the stamp numbers broadly represent each monthly UK arrival cycle, the experience for the collector would have been a nice regular monthly purchase for this title with just one two month wait in the middle. Waits like that might explain the gap between the cover months and plotted stamp number months that I did earlier in the thread where there were more stamps than cover months. Factor in a few gaps in arrivals, and the numbers - already broadly consistent - start to close still further.

Either way, that cover month to stamp number sequence is inescapable.

Over to you, Richmond 

 

 

[Get Marwood & I]

Missed it! 

[Get Marwood & I]

Guys, any of you want to play in Point Five's grading contest?

https://boards.cgccomics.com/topic/511833-point-fives-3rd-annual-grading-contest-signup-thread/#comments

It's a nice and easy one, and we can have a laugh seeing how badly we all do. Or well! 

Over ten spots left, I think - deadline approaching!

@Kevin.J @Malacoda @themagicrobot @rakehell @Yorick @Albert Tatlock @Redshade @OtherEric @Garystar

[Get Marwood & I]

  Channel Five, tomorrow at six, Excalibur's June auction:

   https://www.channel5.com/show/cash-in-the-attic/season-1/episode-20

[rakehell]

On 8/25/2022 at 11:52 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Channel Five, tomorrow at six, Excalibur's June auction:

Oh no. Could go either way, really. It'll either be a load of Silver Age gems that some old dear has been hanging onto since Herbert popped his clogs, or it will be...ummm...a pile of Excalibur. 

[rakehell]

On 8/25/2022 at 11:45 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Over ten spots left, I think - deadline approaching!

I'm out. Off for a long, tech free break.

Good luck, Velma. 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 8/25/2022 at 12:15 PM, rakehell said:

I'm out. Off for a long, tech free break.

Good luck, Velma. 

I'm supposed to be on one 

Enjoy Daphers! 

[Malacoda]

On 8/24/2022 at 5:48 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

I'd be surprised if the stamped cents copies ever outnumbered the UKPVs but I'm often surprised in this hobby. Keep us posted.

I may have a go, but I think I'd have to sample all/most/many of the titles over maybe 4 or 5 years on ebay and other sources.  That said, if a comic did consistently show substantially more surviving stamps than PV's over that period, I think you'd have to conclude that there were more stamps in the first place.  Obviously, it's possible that there were 10,000 PV's that all got binned and 2,000 stamps that all survived, but you'd really have to want to believe that to raise it as an objection.  The good thing about the late 60's is that there were a lot of collectors by this point, so there is hard core of comics being retained from first purchase. 

[Malacoda]

On 8/24/2022 at 5:48 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

I'd be surprised if the stamped cents copies ever outnumbered the UKPVs but I'm often surprised in this hobby. Keep us posted.

Not a TEE&PEE stamp, but still interesting...

I've seen this stamp a few times.  What's interesting is that Marvels never cost 6p in the T&P era. I've catalogued it as stamping mystery number 2,378,892 and I have top men looking into it. 

Top. Men. 

[Malacoda]

On 8/24/2022 at 7:07 PM, themagicrobot said:

I know stickers don't really count as there is probably a Shilling price beneath but here's a sticker anyway.

 

 

Stickers are always interesting. This one seems to be replacing the shilling price, which is odd as this is April 1970 when pretty much everything was double priced and certainly no one was confused about what a shilling was.  If it was going round for a second time when 5p had largely supplanted the shilling it would make sense, but then it would have to have spent a year under Ethel's desk. 

But you're absolutely right, this is definitely a shilling PV with a 5p sticker over the shilling not a cents copy.   I can tell by taking off my Clark Kent glasses and looking straight through the sticker. 

The rest of you will just have to notice that the Curtis logo is missing. 

 

 

Edited August 25, 2022 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

On 8/25/2022 at 9:43 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Cool. I'm fairly confident that Rich's missing Spideys will turn up.

I agree, I now think all the super hero ones will.  From the perspective of my personal bent (leave it), the Tower of Shadows / Chamber of Darkness type titles are actually more interesting at this point because you can see T&P flexing their import order for the first time. It's the first time you ever get non D titles. 

[Malacoda]

On 8/25/2022 at 11:36 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Either way, that cover month to stamp number sequence is inescapable.

Up to a point. And then everything changes.

[Malacoda]

On 8/25/2022 at 11:36 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

there were more stamps than cover months

Did you get any sense of a pattern?  E.g.  if the shipping was every 28 days rather than every month, you'd get a constant regression i.e. the stamping dates would fall progressively earlier through each month until the cycle went round again.  Then we'd have to match a 13 month year to a 9 stamp cycle. I'm not sure anyone would be turned on at the thought of having to plot that out. 

I stand corrected. 

 

 

 

(you probably went into this in great detail at the time which I've failed to retain,,,,apologies if so).  

Edited August 25, 2022 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

On 8/25/2022 at 11:45 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Guys, any of you want to play in Point Five's grading contest?

https://boards.cgccomics.com/topic/511833-point-fives-3rd-annual-grading-contest-signup-thread/#comments

It's a nice and easy one, and we can have a laugh seeing how badly we all do. Or well! 

Over ten spots left, I think - deadline approaching!

@Kevin.J @Malacoda @themagicrobot @rakehell @Yorick @Albert Tatlock @Redshade @OtherEric @Garystar

I'm useless at grading.  The fact that you can still have tanning, corner blunting, spine roll, creases up to a quarter of an inch with colour break & discoloured staples with tearing on a 7.0 FN/VF is bonkers to me.  The system should take account of an accumulation of defects (I know good graders do, but it's not inherent in Overstreet's grading tables). 

[Malacoda]

On 8/25/2022 at 9:06 AM, Garystar said:

There a a couple of stamped FF #102 on eBayUK sold, slightly better pics. 


Fantastic Four #102

Fantastic Four #102-106 Marvel Original Comic Books x5 - 1970

(i’ve no stamped copies of your list in my collection but I’ll look in attic at my small box of doubles). 

Hi Gary, 

Great to see you  When you previously sent me your work on this, I  took it as Gospel and went from there (i.e. I didn't repeat any of your work). Over the year+ of searching. I've obviously stumbled onto most of the ones you sent me, but there are a few of yours I've never found.  If you have any scans, these would be lovely as they'd complete my record.  The ten that you have that I still don't are: 

Thor 167, Hulk 125, Avengers 84,  X men 63, DD 57,  Iron Man 16, 17 & 18, 23, 25. 

At the start, I was finding scans of your ones all the time, but obviously as my focus has tightened, I'm not stumbling across these ones any more (and I was always focussing on the ones that neither of us had).  If you (or anyone) has scans of stamped copies of these, it would great to have a full record of all the covers. 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 8/25/2022 at 2:01 PM, Malacoda said:

On 8/25/2022 at 11:36 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Either way, that cover month to stamp number sequence is inescapable.

Up to a point. And then everything changes.

I know, I've been telling you that for the last year 

[themagicrobot]

Time for your regularly scheduled interlude.

How did those Prize/Crestwood Black Magics of 1960/1961 get to the UK? They never have any UK ink price stamps. They weren’t very exotic so I can’t see collectors importing them from dealers as happened with ECs.

There are only 9 available in the appropriate time frame so wouldn’t exactly make someone a lot of money.

Perhaps someone like Woolworths? They had a fair amount of comics for sale in the 1960s always priced at 6d. That’s where I got all my King comics from.

 

 

 

[Malacoda]

On 8/25/2022 at 3:25 PM, themagicrobot said:

Time for your regularly scheduled interlude.

How did those Prize/Crestwood Black Magics of 1960/1961 get to the UK? They never have any UK ink price stamps. They weren’t very exotic so I can’t see collectors importing them from dealers as happened with ECs.

There are only 9 available in the appropriate time frame so wouldn’t exactly make someone a lot of money.

Perhaps someone like Woolworths? They had a fair amount of comics for sale in the 1960s always priced at 6d. That’s where I got all my King comics from.

 

 

 

We also tend to forget about John Menzies but they were absolutely massive, not only as a high street newsagents/stationers, but also importers/exporters, to the point that they started their own freight airline, which is the only bit of it left these days. 

I think the date you site is the most telling thing.  Whereas comics in the US were only just coming out of the post-Wertham trough in 60/61, the UK import ban had recently lifted and the likes of Fred Thorpe were standing by the UK docks with the engine running, so I'd imagine an absolute ton of leftovers and returns got unearthed and sent over at very short notice in that period.  

[Get Marwood & I]

On 8/25/2022 at 2:27 PM, Malacoda said:

(you probably went into this in great detail at the time which I've failed to retain,,,,apologies if so).  

Probably, but I can't remember now either. I looked at the chart I did and the fog descended.