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

[Get Marwood & I]

On 4/23/2023 at 11:01 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Has this one cropped up before?

That's a new one on me Albert. I have two examples of a stamped #41 in the Fantastic Files, but no #51 until now. eBlag seems to be a bit glitchy lately doesn't it - the first image seems to be compressed in every listing now. I hope that isn't going to continue. Plus the second page of listings seems to replicate the first page in certain searches. Someone needs to turn it off and on again I suppose....

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/125897769959

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html

[rakehell]

A bit off topic, possibly -

Thought the stamp might be interesting...

[Get Marwood & I]

On 4/24/2023 at 9:00 AM, rakehell said:

A bit off topic, possibly -

Thought the stamp might be interesting...

It's not actually possible to go off topic in this thread Daphers - its tentacles reach to every corner of Comicdom (he's a bit of a square, is Comic Dom. And he's cornered the market).

Anyway, the book has a pee on it so it's bang on target. And it's a stamped one, thankfully 

[themagicrobot]

Oddly Eerie 66 to 70 (and presumably Creepy and Vampirella from the same period of 1975) were dual priced. Dunno if any other issues before or since were dual priced. I bought Eerie every month and don't recall it being defaced with stamps or stickers very often. How did I or the newsagent know how much to pay?

So the Goldstar Eeries were a bargain at a mere 20p. Why is this one marked down tuppence?

 

 

Edited April 24, 2023 by themagicrobot

[Get Marwood & I]

On 4/24/2023 at 10:13 AM, themagicrobot said:

Oddly Eerie 66 to 70 (and presumably Creepy and Vampirella from the same period of 1975) were dual priced. Dunno if any other issues before or since were dual priced. I bought Eerie every month and don't recall it being defaced with stamps or stickers very often. How did I or the newsagent know how much to pay?

Do you think this was him then?

  

 

[rakehell]

On 4/24/2023 at 10:01 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

It's not actually possible to go off topic in this thread Daphers

Though it is surprisingly easy to get lost, Velma. I left a trail of carrot tops on my way down this rabbit hole. Why can't I find my way back to the surface? 

On 4/24/2023 at 10:01 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

And it's a stamped one, thankfully 

Smells good, too. 

[Malacoda]

On 4/24/2023 at 8:26 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

That's a new one on me Albert.

Me too. This is the moment when T&P actually go bankrupt, but before IND bought them out, so maybe not a surprise that IND were already flirting with the B team.  The 2nd hiatus is a really hot mess, isn't it? 

For fans of the dock strike theory (any that I haven't killed by this time), this issue actually could have been affected by the dock strike, though I believe it shipped about 2 months before.  And there were PV's of it.  So it really wasn't.  But it is actually possible, which is more than can be said for the Oct-Dec issues that are usually attributed to it. 

@Albert Tatlock  great catch. 

[Malacoda]

On 4/24/2023 at 10:37 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Do you think this was him then?

Wow, never seen that GSP logo with his mush on it. That's new and exciting. That 70's pic you've posted of him (on his way to trial....what are the odds?) is a rare pic.  Given what a relentless self-publicist he became later, he was definitely in the Witness Protection Program back in the day. 

David  Gold divorced his first wife due to her adultery.  What do you reckon the first clue was? 

 

[Albert Tatlock]

On 4/24/2023 at 8:26 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

That's a new one on me Albert. I have two examples of a stamped #41 in the Fantastic Files, but no #51 until now. eBlag seems to be a bit glitchy lately doesn't it - the first image seems to be compressed in every listing now. I hope that isn't going to continue. Plus the second page of listings seems to replicate the first page in certain searches. Someone needs to turn it off and on again I suppose....

The FF # 51 would have been well out of date when it arrived, the # 41 even more so.

Working on the assumption that Goldstar entered the fray when T & P unexpectedly dropped the ball in late '66, only to get their act back together after a couple of months, thereby shutting the porn baron out again, is it reasonable to assume that Mr Gold, having tasted a bit of extra wonga, did not want to leave the arena?

I would guess that the out of date stuff was supplied to him by a Stateside scavenger rummaging the unsold warehouse items, but we will probably never fully untangle the history of this episode.

Worth keeping an eye out for similar remnants, though.

[Albert Tatlock]

On 4/24/2023 at 4:07 PM, Malacoda said:

David  Gold divorced his first wife due to her adultery.

And their daughter Jacqueline, who ran Ann Summers, survived her father by only a few weeks, passing away last month.

[Albert Tatlock]

On 4/24/2023 at 3:50 PM, Malacoda said:

For fans of the dock strike theory (any that I haven't killed by this time), this issue actually could have been affected by the dock strike, though I believe it shipped about 2 months before.  And there were PV's of it.  So it really wasn't.  But it is actually possible, which is more than can be said for the Oct-Dec issues that are usually attributed to it. 

There was never a shortage of Marvels of this period until they unexpectedly went AWOL at the end of '66.

Dock strikes came and dock strikes went, but the comics always seemed to get through somehow,

I used to believe in the dock strike theory, it was prevalent among the little gang in my neck of the woods at the time, as we could think of no other rational explanation, but it has now joined its colleagues phlogiston and Piltdown Man in the dustbin of history.

[Malacoda]

On 4/24/2023 at 9:00 AM, rakehell said:

A bit off topic, possibly -

Well, we were sticking rigorously to the point, but as you've completely derailed us now , I might as well ruthlessly exploit the opportunity while we're on the magazines. 

As we know, in the Mid 70's Marvel changed gear, went heavily into the B&W magazines and used their Curtis muscle to swamp competitors (primarily Warren and Skywald)  off the newsstands. According to Al Hewetson, Skywald was run into the ground by..... 

    "...Marvel's distributor [Curtis Circulation]. Our issues were selling well, and some sold out. Such returns as we received were shipped overseas, mainly to England, where they sold out completely... When Marvel entered the game with countless [black-and-white horror] titles gutting [sic] the newsstand, their distributor was so powerful they denied Skywald access to all but the very largest newsstands, so our presence was minimal and fans and readers simply couldn't find us. ... The Waldmans and I had a business lunch with our distributor in the fall of '74 and we were given very specific information about the state of affairs on the newsstands — which had nothing to do with Warren's or Skywald's solid readership base."

 I always thought the ads Marvel ran promoting directly to the retailers were the smoking gun on this.  This is Planet of the Apes #1 from 1974, note the note to retailers bottom left and then inside. 

The thing that interests me here is that, whereas Hewetson says Marvel used Curtis to batter the competitors off the newsstands, this is (rather surprisingly) a direct deal between Marvel and the retailers, circumventing Curtis and having the retailers sign a separate promotion deal directly with Marvel.  Surely you'd expect that sort of thing to be co-ordinated by the distributor, particularly as both Marvel and Curtis were owned by Cadence, so it was effectively in-house anyway. 

But the plot thickens. 

Back in (cd) November 1968, ASM and FF had similar notes addressed directly to the retailers.  In this case, as you'd perhaps expect, the offer was from the distributor (IND) not the publisher.  What's really odd is that these offers were only published in FF & Spider Man not other Marvel titles (although maybe these were the flagship titles), but also there was no such offer on DC.   Given that IND had had a policy of strangling Marvel to death at the newsstand for the previous 9 years, this is a strange offer.   It looks to me like having been bought by Perfect film in 1968, Marvel finally had a big stick. Ever since Kinney bought DC, the personal vendetta of the Donenfeld era was over.  Kinney had already allowed Marvel to publish a whopping 8 new titles, so doing some retail promotion doesn't seem out of logic.  However, I think the real reason was that Curtis Publishing were in hock to Perfect for $5m.  At this point, IND can't have known that Ackermann's behind the scenes machinations would end with Perfect actually owning Curtis Circulation, but it was a perfectly logical call that the relationship of Marvel's new owner to a company which owned it's own circulation company was only going to lead to one thing. I think IND were trying to keep Marvel on board and subsidising a sales push both strengthened their relationship to Marvel and to the news vendors all at once (the latter being a very good idea if Marvel, which was beginning to outsell DC, was now going to have its own distributor). That's why the offer didn't extend to DC comics: because it was strategic, not commercial. 

All of that said, have a look at the wording of the offer that IND put out for Marvel comics in 1968 compared to Marvel's offer in 1974 above.  It's not only the exact same offer, it's the exact same wording, obviously except for the necessary tweaks to names & addresses.   And if you look along the top line, you can see that Magazine Management Co, Inc, has been cut & pasted into a space designed for a longer name.  

 

 

Any thoughts? 

[Malacoda]

On 4/24/2023 at 5:29 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

phlogiston

Oxidisation is a fad. Phlogiston will be back. 

[Malacoda]

On 4/24/2023 at 5:29 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

There was never a shortage of Marvels of this period until they unexpectedly went AWOL at the end of '66.

Dock strikes came and dock strikes went, but the comics always seemed to get through somehow,

I used to believe in the dock strike theory, it was prevalent among the little gang in my neck of the woods at the time, as we could think of no other rational explanation

Indeed. One tends to focus on the (reported) disruption, but it's actually the continuity that is the key, I think.  The piece of the puzzle that confused me was not 'how come there was a disruption to Marvels in Oct-Dec 1966'  so much as 'if T&P went bankrupt, how come there wasn't a massive, T&P-wide hiatus'. 

You pointed out at the time that not only was there no problem with Marvel until the end of the year, but there was no disruption to DC (apart from the usual chaos) at all.  This meant it can't have been shipping. The two key points are: (1) why didn't T&P disappear or have any kind of company-wide hiatus, to which the answer is that the comic distribution part of the business never went bankrupt. It was other parts of the business that fell over and it was their LP supplier who had them declared bankrupt, so when the receiver arrived, he simply put the comic distribution piece under one of the company's subsidiaries, floated it off and sold it as a going concern to IND, so it never stopped for a day. I suspect that IND were the chief creditor of that part of the business, so it was never in doubt who would become the owner and  (2) why did it affect Marvel and not DC? and the answer is that DC were fishing returns out of the pulping machine and shipping them over at T&P's expense, so the only thing they had to lose was the pulp value.  Marvel were printing bespoke, pence-priced variants for T&P, so unpaid invoices were direct cost.  Also, Marvel, being strangled by IND, probably needed the money more and, of course, IND would have known they were planning to buy T&P, Marvel surely did not, hence they restricted supply. 

I think your memories are actually spot on to what happened.  

[Malacoda]

On 4/24/2023 at 5:13 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Working on the assumption that Goldstar entered the fray when T & P unexpectedly dropped the ball in late '66, only to get their act back together after a couple of months, thereby shutting the porn baron out again, is it reasonable to assume that Mr Gold, having tasted a bit of extra wonga, did not want to leave the arena?

I think this is it, except the chronology is not quite right.  FF 51 is before the 2nd (1966) hiatus, so I think that as T&P were circling the drain, IND were looking for alternate UK distributors.  The PV's were still being created exclusively for T&P, but nothing to stop IND pinging some cents copies over.  But yes, as DG was already distributing nationally to newsagents, this must have looked like pure gravy to him.  In fairness, of course, he had identified American comics as the way forward back when he was selling buttons. 

[themagicrobot]

[Albert Tatlock]

On 4/24/2023 at 7:10 PM, Malacoda said:

I think this is it, except the chronology is not quite right.  FF 51 is before the 2nd (1966) hiatus

I prefer to think that the 10d oblong stamps were first applied to FF # 56, 57 and the rest of that shoal.

The FF # 41 and # 51, I reckon, arrived later, when Goldstar were casting around for supplies after T & P were back up and running.

There are quite a few examples of the Oct-Dec 1966 batch, but only oddments of earlier stuff. If Goldstar had been importing before the T & P hiatus, there should be more of their stamps around, also T & P were, at the time, fond of printing 'SOLE DISTRIBUTORS' on their stock, so there would have been repercussions if someone else were muscling in.

 

[themagicrobot]

[Malacoda]

On 4/24/2023 at 7:34 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

I prefer to think that the 10d oblong stamps were first applied to FF # 56, 57 and the rest of that shoal.

The FF # 41 and # 51, I reckon, arrived later, when Goldstar were casting around for supplies after T & P were back up and running.

There are quite a few examples of the Oct-Dec 1966 batch, but only oddments of earlier stuff. If Goldstar had been importing before the T & P hiatus, there should be more of their stamps around, also T & P were, at the time, fond of printing 'SOLE DISTRIBUTORS' on their stock, so there would have been repercussions if someone else were muscling in.

 

Right, gotcha.  Sorry, I thought when you said that 51 would have been well out of date, you meant therefore more likely it came at the time.  But you're saying it actually did rock up months later.  41 would have been well out of time - it's actually from the first hiatus. I've seen loads of 41's with both sizes of T&P stamp, and this oddbod which looks like a retailer stamp, but I've not seen a 41 with an oblong stamp. 

[Malacoda]

On 4/24/2023 at 7:32 PM, themagicrobot said:

Ahhhh. Pence variants with stamps on them. And the stamp is the same price. Thanks Ethel.