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

[Malacoda]

On 10/19/2023 at 8:02 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Original was black and white?

You're just trying to get me to do this, aren't you?

 

Edited October 20, 2023 by Malacoda

[themagicrobot]

I still have the pre recorded Avengers VHS tape that contains that particular episode. Saved that and just a handful of others. Pity the VHS player is in the loft. Too wet to go out so I opened a box this morning that was last seen a decade ago. In fact it does say "2013" on the lid. And it did indeed contain comics and magazines published that year along with a few older ones I'd "lost" or in the case of Alan Class cover plates had no recollection of purchasing. This Spidey was a nice find even though Gladys gave it an unnecessary stamp.

Edited October 20, 2023 by themagicrobot

[Malacoda]

Lovely find.  I think my first Marvel comics were SMCW 26, 27 & 28, so I am heavily bonded to this issue. 

[Albert Tatlock]

On 10/20/2023 at 1:36 PM, Malacoda said:

You're just trying to get me to do this, aren't you?

 

Her whalebone corset is even tighter than Ethel's.

[themagicrobot]

As today is saturday, from Crikey! number 8 we learn that TARDIS stands for Time Allotted Remembering Distant Interesting Saturdays..

 

 

 

Edited October 21, 2023 by themagicrobot

[Malacoda]

On 10/21/2023 at 12:47 PM, themagicrobot said:

As today is saturday, from Crikey! number 8

Nope, don't recognise any of that. Apart from loving comics, daydreaming at school, trading comics with friends (in deals that usually involved other treasures), desperately needing money for unexpected treasures at the newsagents, Saturday morning pictures (though this was killed by TISWAS, sorry everyone, that happened on my watch. Literally), going off to places that would have given my parents a heart attack (in my case, Soho), hunting in dingy back street junk shops, having wild dreams, drawing my own comics (badly) and sitting outside the pub with a lemonade reading comics.  

Apart from that, it was a different world. 

[themagicrobot]

It remains a mystery to me why Mike's The Cloak isn't as famous as place your favourite character here. 

https://www.crazedchimp.co.uk/cloak.htm and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Higgs which led me to my time period of searching for comics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Mart

[Albert Tatlock]

Yes, the bloke hawking comics round the pub was mentioned by Ralph Gold in his autobiog.

That was in London, but maybe Miller's tentacles extended as far as the watering holes of the Black Country.

Possibly these were the British reprints from T & P, though. That would have been before T & P began importing the real deal.

[Malacoda]

On 10/21/2023 at 8:27 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Yes, the bloke hawking comics round the pub was mentioned by Ralph Gold in his autobiog.

Yes, I assumed he was an enterprising individual who bought comics and books from a Brummie distributor like the Golds did in London rather than an actual rep, but maybe that's a more blurred line than I think it is. 

On 10/21/2023 at 8:27 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

That was in London, but maybe Miller's tentacles extended as far as the watering holes of the Black Country.

I'm never too sure what Miller's distribution network was like.  They had the comics printed all over the shop (Basingstoke and as far afield as Ireland) but it's been said that they never had a distribution network to compete with the likes of DC Thomson. 

On 10/21/2023 at 8:27 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Possibly these were the British reprints from T & P, though. That would have been before T & P began importing the real deal.

Don't forget that the Pemberton boys were distributing reprint comics too, primarily westerns and other stuff licensed from Dell. 

[Albert Tatlock]

On 10/22/2023 at 12:17 PM, Malacoda said:

Yes, I assumed he was an enterprising individual who bought comics and books from a Brummie distributor like the Golds did in London rather than an actual rep, but maybe that's a more blurred line than I think it is. 

I'm never too sure what Miller's distribution network was like.  They had the comics printed all over the shop (Basingstoke and as far afield as Ireland) but it's been said that they never had a distribution network to compete with the likes of DC Thomson. 

Don't forget that the Pemberton boys were distributing reprint comics too, primarily westerns and other stuff licensed from Dell. 

This was quoted as very early 1950s, the dark ages as far as our research goes.

3 for a shilling is a good discount on the cover price of 6d, and presumably Comic Man would still have room for manouvre, as, according to Ralph Gold, Millers, and presumably their competitors, supplied the trade at 2d per comic.

The drinkers in the hostelry depicted would, in the Coronation year of 1953, have been able to wet their whistles for less than 2 shillings a pint, so 3 comics for the nipper would only mean half a pint or so less down the hatch

And a packet of 10 cigs (although packets of 5 were also available) would cost about the same as a pint.

Nobody back then could have enjoyed their pint without a frequent drag on a (usually untipped) coffin nail.

Junior presumably paid little heed to the nicotine stained edges of his literature of choice.

[Malacoda]

I wasn’t going to post this mad epic of detail until I could summarise it down, but as we’re hitting page 250 and post 5,000 at the same time, I feel justified in going substantial! 
What follows is my (current) explanation of the DC UKPV’s in the summer of 71.  However, there was quite a long swerve about containerisation in the middle of it, so I’m going to post that first. As a prologue.  Which you can ignore.    
 

[Malacoda]

Prologue One:  Containerisation. 

Containerisation is quite fascinating.  I don’t think any change has ever taken place in any single industry that has transformed it and the industries around it so completely, with the possible exception of Henry Ford developing the assembly line to make cars.  The invention of the internet would be on the same scale, but that affected pretty much all industries & commerce.

BREAK BULK CARGO

The two main types of dry cargo are bulk cargo and break-bulk cargo. Bulk cargoes (e.g. grain) are shipped unpackaged in the hull of a ship in large volume. Break-bulk cargoes are transported in separate packages and were traditionally loaded, lashed, unlashed and unloaded from ships one piece at a time by stevedores (longshoremen).  Historically, the average crew to unload a cargo ship would be 20 – 22 men and could take anywhere up to a week to unload and another week to reload.

This method of shipping had remained almost unchanged since the Phoenicians at end of the Bronze Age (the actual Bronze Age!). Goods would be transported by horse and cart or on water to a port warehouse until a boat was available. When the empty vessel arrived, these goods would then be moved from the warehouse to the side of the docked ship. Goods would typically be loaded into sacks, bales, crates and barrels in all shapes, sizes, and weights, and then they would be loaded by hand onto the ship. This was hugely labour-intensive. A typical ship would have around 200,000 separate pieces of cargo onboard.

During the industrial revolution, this became a problem. Trains replacing horses & carts had massively speeded up distribution once the goods were loaded, but the process of transferring cargo from ships to trains had actually slowed down the process at the docks and caused major delays and blockages within many ports.  This got worse as ships and cargoes got larger and international shipping grew exponentially.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

Prologue Two:  MALCOLM MCLEAN

Malcolm McLean was born in North Carolina in 1913. In 1935, he, his sister, Clara, and his brother, Jim, bought a second-hand truck and founded the McLean Trucking Co. which initially hauled empty tobacco barrels. By 1937, they were hauling cotton from Carolina to New Jersey.  At the docks, McLean would witness the cotton bales being offloaded from his trucks and onto ships which took many hours.

He became convinced that the way to streamline it was to drive the trucks straight onto the boats and then simply drive them off at the other end, but this was impractical due to the huge amount of stowage consumed by the trucks. The trick, he realised, was to just load the container parts of the truck, not the truck itself and he began developing the idea of the modern container.  Containers had been used for luggage aboard passenger ships, so why not commercial cargo?

By 1955, McLean’s company was the 4^th largest haulage company in the US.  He sold it to invest in his new venture of container shipping.  It’s variously stated that he did this because he was so convinced of the venture, or that it was simply the only way to generate the huge required start-up capital, but actually US competition laws made it illegal for a haulage company to own a shipping line.  He bought an existing shipping line rather than creating his own because it came with pre-existing docking rights.

Mclean’s breadth of vision was astounding. Most astounding was that he fully understood what it was going to take to realise that vision:  that everything (trucks, lorries, trains, rail yards, docks, cranes, storage facilities, ports, ships, laws, lading, customs procedures, everything involved in the transportation of goods) was going to have to change all over the world, pretty much at once, to deal with it. And that those changes were going to cost billions of dollars and that the cost of entry for any company wanting to participate was going to be tens of millions of dollars. And he still went for it.  

He bought a small steamship company and converted 2 WWII tankers into vessels capable of carrying containers. The first, the Ideal X  sailed from Newark to Houston in April 1956 carrying 58 containers. His first loan to refit the Ideal X was $22m (nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, adjusted for inflation) and his second was for $42m ($464m in 2023 money).

In 1956, it cost $5.86 per ton to load & unload ships.  McLean container shipping cost 16c per ton, one thirty sixth of the cost and it was strong, standardized, stackable, easy to load and unload, and lockable, which made it theft-resistant, so the benefits were instantly recognised  (however, the on-going costs of development meant that it took another 5 years before the company went into profit). 

 

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

Prologue Three:  1960’S DEVELOPMENT OF CONTAINER SHIPPING

It took 10 years of development, investment and legal battles before the first transatlantic container line opened between the US and Holland (Rotterdam) in 1966.  The UK’s first container port opened in 1967.  You might imagine that it was plain sailing from there, but the period around 1967 – 1970 was the wild west days of container shipping with no standardisation of sizes, dimensions, weights or facilities, many different companies entering the fray and many failing at enormous expense.  At this point, the future for international shipping companies was clear: go big or go home. Unfortunately, the big in this case was so big that it was virtually impossible to go big enough.

A great example of this is two German shipping companies:  Hamburg-American Line (HAPAG) and  Norddeutscher Lloyd.  Hapag was founded in 1847, Norddeutscher in 1857 and the two companies had competed with each other for over a hundred years.  By the 1960’s, it was clear that you couldn’t be an international shipping company without handling containers, but neither company had the funds for the kind of investment it would take.  In 1967, they established a joint-venture container line, the Hapag-Lloyd Container Line, however by 1970 it was obvious that this business was going to completely replace traditional shipping, so the two companies fully merged in 1970.  This story is pretty representative of what was going on.

(Incidentally, if the name sounds familiar to you, in Agents of Shield, Series 2, Episode 11, when Cal and Raina meet aboard a container ship, it’s a Hapag-Lloyd ship…. that’ll be what you’re thinking of). 

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

Prologue Four:  1968 ONWARDS

Though containerisation developed hugely from 1956 to 1968, it was held back by the lack of standardisation.  The big change came in the period 1968 – 1970 due to the Viet Nam war.  The US govt needed to continuously ship an almost unprecedented quantity of munitions and supplies very quickly and securely over 8,000 miles by sea. This required US-wide standardisation and also drove the globalisation of container shipping as the US used Japan as a base of operations.

Probably the single key and most surprising moment in standardisation came in the mid 60’s.  By this point, it was clear that the lack of standardisation was the single greatest element holding container shipping back.  The investment needed in ships, ports, cranes, hinterland and transportation all over the world was so huge that multiple different standards of operation were not possible.  In the 1950’s, McLean had lured a genius engineer called Keith Tantlinger away from Brown Trailer to work for him at SeaLand (not the amusement park).  Tantlinger created the corner castings that enabled containers to be stacked securely on top of each other.  These used a twist lock mechanism that was then replicated on cranes to lift the container from above and on trailer chassis & train boxcars to hold the container from below.  One single mechanism would lock the container in place through thousands of miles and every mode of transport and loading/unloading. 

As you can see, those puppies will hold one container to another, no matter what….

 

The extraordinary moment was what McLean & Tantlinger did with their copyright on one of the most important devices of the twentieth century:  they gave it away for free. 

This act of amazing foresight enabled the standardisation of container transport across all media across the world, and instead of being a huge fish in tiny pond, McLean became a very big fish in a global ocean.  It led in  January 1968 to ISO 668 (which defined the terminology, dimensions & ratings for containers) and in July 1968 to ISO 790 (which defined how containers should be identified).

 

These standards led to the 20-foot and 40-foot shipping containers we have now and the 20-foot containers, called Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs), went on to become the industry standard for referencing cargo volume.

From this point, containerisation begins to immediately dominate global shipping, particularly due to its uptake by the US government for shipping to Viet Nam.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

Prologue Five:  WORLD COLOR PRESS, SPARTA.

WCP was always at the forefront of technological advancement and latest methods of distribution, including web offset presses, pool shipping, rotogravure printing, computer technology, digital registration systems and flexography.  They computerised the business in the 1960’s not only to upgrade the printing technology, but to facilitate better distribution. 

They invented the "pool shipping" concept, whereby publications from different customers going to the same destination were shipped together, reducing freight costs and increasing the speed & timeliness of deliveries. They established the first major pool shipping network directly to newsstands and thereby offered the lowest distribution costs in the industry.

They would, unquestionably, have moved over to container shipping as soon as it became standardised (there would have been no point in converting to multiple different systems & sizes of container when they were shipping all over the country as it would still involve lading and unlading from one container to another to another to another).   

For this reason, I think they would have been an early adopter of container shipping from late 1968, but I think the actual moment is 1969/70.   In 1969 they began construction of the new plant at Effingham, 120 miles northeast of Sparta.  This plant was state of the art, both in terms of the web-offset facility and distribution technology.  Effingham was specifically chosen for its distribution advantages.  Sparta was built in 1948, 8 years before the highways started to be built and the existing roads linked into the network . The Federal-Aid Highway Act also known as the National Interstate and Defence Highways Act was enacted on June 29, 1956.  The addition of the term "defence"  was (a) because some of the finance was diverted from defence funds and (b) because one of its stated purposes was to provide access to defend the US during a conventional or nuclear war with the Soviet Union.  Most U.S. Air Force bases have a direct link to the system.

At the time WCP Sparta was built, Illinois just had Route 154 which was part of the 1920’s system of state funded road building and was only about 60 miles long. Effingham however was built in the era of the interstate and the container vehicle.

Effingham billed itself as "The Crossroads of Opportunity" because of its location at the intersection of two major Interstate highways: I-57 running from Chicago to Missouri and I-70 running from Utah to Maryland. It’s also served by Route 45, which runs from Michigan to Alabama, Route 40, which stretches from New Jersey to Utah, and state routes 32 and 33 also run through the city. It is also a major railroad junction, the crossing of the Illinois Central main line from Chicago to Memphis with the Pennsylvania Railroad line from Indianapolis to St. Louis.  Please check out this map.  Effingham, by size, should not be on this map  (this lists the 17 most important towns in terms of road access, Effingham is the 192^nd largest town in Illinois by population, yet top 10 for transport access). Sparta which is literally and metaphorically not on the map is about 120 miles south west of Effingham.

Effingham was clearly chosen for its transport links.  Ground was first broken in 1969 by which point it was absolutely clear that container shipping was already replacing conventional shipping. I believe it was built with container docking stations from the get go, but within 2 years the plant was doubled in size, so definitely during this process.

Sparta was built in 1948, so predates the existence of containers.  There would have been no point in converting to container ports for pan-US distribution prior to 1968 as multiple different container systems were in use.  I believe Sparta was converted to container distribution during the period 1969 – 1971 to standardise distribution across both locations and across the country.  This is a more recent photo of the container docking ports at Sparta which I believe were installed circa 1970.

 

 

 

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

Summary:

Container shipping was invented in 1956, but didn’t start taking over the world until 1968.  I believe World Color Press went over to container shipping when they built their plant in Effingham  in 1969 (in fact, I believe it’s the reason they built in Effingham) and then upgraded Sparta to container docks in 1970. 

And with that extremely brief introduction, we're ready to get back to....

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

DC PV 2:  Electric Boogaloo.

Part One.  The Story So Far.

For the benefit of new readers (hey, you never know…), the story so far….

Mysteriously, there are 5 UK PV’s published by DC in July & August 1971 (Jimmy Olsen #139, Adventure Comics #408,  Action Comics #402, Detective comics #413 (all cd July 1971, price 5p) and The Flash #208, which is a GS issue (cd Aug 71, price 7.5p)).

 

 

Back on page 133, I floated a theory about why this might be and got a light-to-medium kicking, but this was all good dialectics. In 1971, Warner Communications consolidated their European publishing businesses and centralised the administration from Wardour Street in London.  I theorised that T&P were anticipating a potential disruption to distribution, particularly stamping, and that preparation for this may have been a factor both for Marvel’s move to World and DC’s puzzlingly brief flirtation with pence variants, all three things having occurred simultaneously.  

There were of course a number of problems with this theory: the DC experiment with PV’s was so small & so brief, it could not possibly have yielded any measurable results before it was shut down, so what was it for?  As Steve pointed out, DC comics continued to be stamped during this period (and there were even stamped cents copies of the very issues that had PV’s….though obviously we would expect to see returns of those being exported to the UK months later), so it seems there was no hiatus.  In fairness to my original theory, given that the printing window runs 3 months ahead, the theory never depended on there being an actual hiatus, just contingency plans being made in the event that there might be one.  However, as Steve also pointed out, it would be ridiculous for T&P to relocate and not take care of this (relatively simple) matter.  He further makes the point that with DC being completely haphazard in delivery (to the UK) why would DC need to print PV’s to cover any shortfall? Comics from previous months would be floating back in from across the US and getting shipped to the UK anyway. He concludes  “To me, the five UKPVs have an experimental air about them. They don't feel forced, to me.”

Let’s assume he’s right about everything ( …..God, that was painful, I think I need a lie down….). These are great points and set me up with the questions that needed answering.  I think additionally that whatever explanation we have for this has to explain:

1)      why it started & stopped before it even got to market – what could possibly be learned from that?

2)     the timing

3)     the small number of titles

4)     the extraordinary coincidence with Marvel’s exactly-simultaneous change of distributor

5)     the exactly-simultaneous appearance of the product codes on all DC & Marvel comics.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

 Part Two: Possible answers to those questions.

1)     CHANGE OF HQ

As stated, T&P relocated their headquarters in 1971, but as far as I can now tell, this was mostly on paper.  The warehouse at Thurmaston remained the base of operations & distribution. Later, when the GBD brand was created to partition off the porn, the warehouse became the GBD warehouse.  The non-UK European operations were all subsumed into the Williams brand. So, I don’t know exactly what part of T&P relocated to Wardour St. in 1971, but I suspect it was just a change of HQ on paper as the brand got subsumed under Warner Communications and therefore acquired Warner’s address as its head office.

(Uncharacteristically) I will now contradict myself, as one thing that might be a consequence of this is the disappearance of the Double Doubles.  T&P had stacks of DC returns from 1959 onwards.  As they owned a bookbinding company (Jenson’s) only a few streets away, rebinding the returns in this format was a no brainer.

So why didn’t they do it from 1959?

Because it was a breach of their terms with IND, as laid out in the indicia.

 So why did it suddenly start happening in 1967?

Because IND bought T&P in 1966, and someone at T&P (my money would be on John Gibbins or Dennis Juba) had a lightbulb moment and either officially got permission to start stripping the covers off or (more likely, given it was T&P) just did it as they were hardly going to be prosecuted by their own parent company.  So that’s why they started. 

Why did they stop?

It can’t have been a shortage of material. But it does coincide pretty much exactly with the change of HQ to Wardour St and the seeming rolling of T&P senior management positions into Warner Communications.  Is it possible that whoever was in charge of it left the company and it either fell through the cracks or was simply terminated? Or was it a historical connection to Jenson’s, which had been part of T&P but which IND did not own? It does seem plausible that the changeover of head office is related to the end of the double doubles, at least coincidentally if not causally.  

 

So…. the change of HQ may have had something to do with the demise of T&P’s Doubles Doubles, but probably nothing to do with DC’s 1971 PV’s.  We’ll come back to that.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

2)     TESTING THE MARKET

According to Carmine Infantino, it took months to get enough data back to know when something had been a hit. Even Showcase #4, the resurrected Flash that kick started the silver age, which sold-through about 59% of its 350k copies wasn’t known to be a success until 2 or 3 months later, when the sales data began to be collated.

So whatever the purpose of the PV’s was, it wasn’t any kind of market or sales tester.