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

[themagicrobot]

What are we to make of these two comics. One has the 2/- stamp (but no 10d one as is often the case) and one has a 5p sticker. Both comics must have been lying around for years (or come back as returns) before returning to circulation.

 

[Mr Thorpe]

T&P seemed to have a glut of these Wonder Woman #163's back when I was a lad stalking the newsagents. A lot of them ended up in Double Double Comics.

The top one stayed stored in a box until its time came to be stamped with the diamond. The 5p stickered copy is very unusual in that, in my experience back then, it was very rare to find a comic that was more than 2 years old in a newsagent. This one would have been 4 years old when the 5p sticker was stuck on over the 10d.

Other 1966 excessive glut comics that T&P had included Superman #188, Worlds Finest #163 and Batman #186. They turn up all the time in Double Doubles.

[Malacoda]

On 2/20/2024 at 8:55 AM, Mr Thorpe said:

Thanks Malacoda for kicking the tyres of the 'Priced in Shillings for Export' theory.

Re your points

Wow.  This little lot is going to need some chewing over.

But first off.......FIVE shillings??????

[Malacoda]

On 2/20/2024 at 8:55 AM, Mr Thorpe said:

Your observation about the price being too high for the average Ugandan child is taken. However, what if these comics and magazines were not aimed at Ugandan kids but perhaps they were for sale in more elite outlets -airports, high end shops in Kampala or even the equivalent of Ugandan NAAFI type stores? 

Very possible. Uganda had a very affluent Indian population until Amin expelled them. It may have just been somewhere else that still used shillings, but they would have to have used the symbol as well i.e. 2/-.  

Edit:  whoops, sorry, you went on to make exactly that point.  I was going line by line. 

Edited February 20 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

On 2/20/2024 at 8:55 AM, Mr Thorpe said:

I think the Avengers 25 is an example of a random box of cent priced Marvels turning up with the rest of the month's DC shipment from the US distribution hub. T&P, would have been stipulating 'no Marvels' (as they were getting them as PV's), no DC romance or humour titles and, sometimes, no war titles. The occasional box did show up and it probably ended up in the corner of the warehouse. 

Agree. There were always going to be randos.  At first consideration it seems weird that a single rando would out-survive a substantial number of normally distributed comics, but actually it's not at all.  If a collector / avid fan went down to the newsagents to get the latest copy of the Avengers and found a single (needed) copy of a comic from 2 years ago had shown up from nowhere, he would undoubtedly buy that and come back for the latest issue (of which there were many copies) later.   

[Malacoda]

On 2/20/2024 at 8:55 AM, Mr Thorpe said:

The dumping of stock as Double Doubles had stopped by the early 70's. Possibly they weren't selling so well or T&P realised they were cannibalising their own market as they were selling them through the same newsagent outlets

I think both the creation and cessation of Double Doubles happens due to changes in ownership / management structure at DC, IND and T&P between 1962 and 1971.  It's hard to prove but the dates tie up remarkably neatly.  

[Malacoda]

On 2/20/2024 at 8:55 AM, Mr Thorpe said:

Don't know about the seaside 'dumping' and when that may have stopped.

Not sure about DC, but I suspect Marvel stopped when Comag took over distribution in 1981.  Both T&P and World were independent distributors with a 100% sale or return policy.  I don't know what the deal was with Comag, but Comag were maybe 8 times the size of the others, backed by Conde Nast and Hearst so I imagine their returns policy with their retailers was a lot less preferential. Certainly their relationship with Marvel was very different. All that 'we're not giving you our marquee titles so as not to compete with the UK reprints' malarkey disappeared immediately, which is odd considering that they owned Marvel UK, but did not own Transworld.  I think Comag were playing in a different league. 

[Malacoda]

On 2/20/2024 at 8:55 AM, Mr Thorpe said:

Note they are all '5's! Does this tell us anything? Were T&P trying to mimic their stock control method abroad? I acquired these diamond stamped comics from various sources in the mid to late 70's when I restarted buying comics again and I was buying back issues. 

The 5's are definitely more prevalent than anything else, however we also have 1, 2, 4, 7 and 8, so I'd imagine 3, 6 and 9 are out there somewhere.  The idea that this somehow mimics the T&P numbering system is more than my tiny brain can cope with.  I'm like Milla Jovovich at the end of Resident Evil right now. 

 

Edited February 21 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

On 2/20/2024 at 8:55 AM, Mr Thorpe said:

We've been talking about Uganda as a possible destination for these comics, but it could have been Kenya or Tanzania. They still use shillings, apparently.

The problem with all of this is the distribution deal. Marvel in the US had deals with T&P and World to distribute to the UK.  The rest of the world excluding Canada was handled through Transworld, going back to before Marvel was Marvel. This means that it was impossible that comics were shipped to the UK for onward distribution to other countries (though Ireland could easily have been an exception to this). 

That said, the reason the other comics needed to be reprinted by Transworld was for translation and other edits to make sense to non US readers.  For the UK and Ireland they didn't need to worry about that and when the ban lifted they simply imported the US comics as-was. Not via Transworld. 

However, the way the Transworld deal worked, they sold comics to different distributors based on language rather than on geography, so, for example the French language translations were also sold in Belgium, Tunisia and Morocco as well as France. But these were printed with different prices for these destination countries in local currency. 

This makes it seem very unlikely that these comics which turn up in the UK were bound for African countries, and though it's possible due to historic trade links existing since colonial times, it's kind of weird that the other countries were all part of the Transworld deal but there were these post-colonial exceptions.  Even more unlikely once Al Landau became Marvel president. 

 

Edited February 21 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

On 2/20/2024 at 5:46 PM, baggsey said:

How about comics destined for Ireland? According to Wikipedia, although Eire decimalized along with the UK in 1971, the old shilling coin was kept in circulation until 1993.  @Malacoda - did T&P have a distribution centre in Ireland. If we have any Irish lurkers on this forum, perhaps they can confirm if the stamp is familiar?

Not as far we know.  We have strong suspicions that T&P offloaded some unsold returns to enterprising Irish distributors on an ad hoc basis, but I have it on good authority that Marvel comics were as scarce as rocking horse droppings in Eire in the 60's and 70's and if a kid you knew had Marvel comics, it meant he had English rellies who had sent them over.  I think this changed as part of the Comag deal. I haven't done the homework, but I think that up to the 60's English was not so much the lingua franca, so translations and the Transworld deal made sense. I think that by the early 80's, due to the spread of computer and other technology which required English (because if you waited 18 months for the translation, the tech had moved on), and, of course, the spread of television (as opposed to movies which had been dubbed & subtitled), English was far more spoken among the young in first world European countries.  If you look for US comics in France, Germany, Spain etc,  you find translated ones from the 60's and 70's, but from the 80's onwards there's a huge amount of English language originals kicking about. I think this stems from when the distribution deal changed in the early 80's and Comag took over and this applies to Ireland too.  

[Mr Thorpe]

Fascinating info re Marvel and Transworld, but we are talking primarily DC's here with the diamond T&P stamp. Did Transworld have any involvement with DC distribution?

I bought this book a while back hoping to find out more about DC distribution in the UK, but Thorpe and Porter and the UK do not feature at all. Plenty on South America and Europe. I was also hoping to find out a bit more about Gordon and Gotch and the Aussie DC reprints, but again nothing. The book is a print on demand job, fulfilled by Amazon. 

 

 

[Malacoda]

On 2/21/2024 at 2:48 PM, Mr Thorpe said:

Fascinating info re Marvel and Transworld, but we are talking primarily DC's here with the diamond T&P stamp

We are, but I think considering the other publishers is important in determining that this was a T&P thing.  We don't actually know if the diamond stamp was a re-saler, a distributor, a bin-end Steptoe or even a single outlet, but if it was then it would surely have taken supply from more than one distributor.  The fact that these stamps appear on the publications of multiple publishers, but the common denominator seems to be that they were all distributed by T&P seems key in substantiating that this was some sort of T&P distressed inventory final sale material.  So I think the fact that Marvel, DC', Warren and Lou Kimzey Senior (though I might have made him up) were all featured, but all of them funnelled through T&P is an important factoid. 

[Malacoda]

On 2/21/2024 at 2:48 PM, Mr Thorpe said:

Did Transworld have any involvement with DC distribution?

Not that I know of.  To be clear, Transworld were not a distributor of the actual comics (like IND, Curtis, T&P, World etc), but of the content.  They held a library of photos, stories and articles that were sold around the world to publishers to be re-packaged in magazines and journals.  This was the basis of their relationship with Martin Goodman, but not originally for the comic piece. They supplied articles for the magazines he published through Magazine Management Ltd.  The comic piece got tagged on in the Timely years, so they became the re-packagers for Marvel abroad.  This got very entangled when Al Landau, son of the founders of Transworld, became the President of Marvel as well.  This has another layer of complexity in that when the Martspress deal collapsed in 1971 and Stan was looking for a new company to reprint Marvel in the UK, Landau suggested the UK arm of Transworld.  This meant that rather than supplying the material to be re-packaged, Transworld UK themselves became the re-packager, and indeed the publisher.  We all called them Marvel UK as if that's exactly what they were, and they certainly plastered Stan over everything at every opportunity.   

It's possible that DC did some outlying business that involved Transworld.  It's possible that Transworld supplied material to some of the comic repackagers, some of whom were distributed by IND, but I would say that's the limit of it.  Certainly nothing to do with distribution. And certainly not the licensing of international publishing rights.....I think your friend Mr. Rheinstrom did for DC exactly what Transworld did for Marvel (though by the sounds of it, a lot more successfully). 

DC-heads, please correct me.  As far as I'm aware, DC was fundamentally a comic publisher.  They published a wide variety of comics, including science fiction, mystery, westerns, humour &  romance as well as super heroes, but they didn't publish magazines and didn't have any equivalent of the Magazine Management side of Atlas's business.  

 

[Malacoda]

On 2/21/2024 at 2:48 PM, Mr Thorpe said:

I bought this book a while back hoping to find out more about DC distribution in the UK, but Thorpe and Porter and the UK do not feature at all. Plenty on South America and Europe

That's disappointing but not surprising. Rheinstrom was licensing the international rights to re-package DC content with translated text, re-editing, new covers and what usually looks like re-colouring too.  In the UK, DC weren't even reprinting content in a UK-stylee like Odhams, TV21 and later Transworld, they were flat out exporting the physical US comics, without so much as a pence variant cover.  

Nonetheless, you would think that would be covered in a book which is all about how DC was sold around the world.  A couple of pages explaining why the UK was an exception would have been nice. 

[Malacoda]

On 2/21/2024 at 2:48 PM, Mr Thorpe said:

Plenty on South America

Is there any DC equivalent of the Mexican Spider Man comics? (the Mexican license holders ran out of content and just published their own original Spider Man stories for years).  

[themagicrobot]

Thorpe and Porter distributed Warren's Famous Monsters of Filmland from the beginning. But (asking for a friend) who brought Creepy and Eerie to the UK??? You would have assumed The-Company-Once-Owned-By-Fred, at least in the 1960s, along with the FMOFs. I have a hundred Eeries and more Vampirellas than are sensible. Not one of them display an inky Gladys-style price stamp. And then, like Buses, these two (well four actually) come along.

 

[Albert Tatlock]

Another unsold and repriced Kid.

And a different (to me, anyway) PBS stamp.

How unusual is it?

[Malacoda]

On 2/22/2024 at 9:27 AM, themagicrobot said:

But (asking for a friend) who brought Creepy and Eerie to the UK???

Mmmm.  Good question.  Warren are tough to get much info about.  If we consider Warren and Skywald in the same breath - they were both horror magazine publishers, used a lot of the same writers & artists, had the same customer base, had the same printer (in fact the printer once accidentally printed a page from Eerie in a Skywald magazine). Al Hewetson, who was editor and chief writer for Skywald, but was also Stan Lee's personal assistant before Allyn Brodsky, wrote for Warren, and in fact always worked personally with Warren himself. Warren was later infuriated that Skywald started up, tried to poach Hewetson back and never spoke to him again when Hewetson declined. 

My reason for writing all that is that if you can't find out something about Warren, it's a pretty safe bet the same was happening at Skywald.  They had different US distributors - I believe Warren were with Publishers Distributing Corporation and Skywald were with Kable.  ( Side note, if anyone knows anything about Kable, I'd love to hear it -  they were Timely's distributor until Goodman founded Atlas in 1952.  I wondered why Goodman didn't go back to them in 1957 when ANC bit the dust, but I read that Kable went out of business in 1957, which seemed likely as ANC took a lot of distributors down with them. However, I subsequently read that Kable didn't fall over in 57 and indeed, I believe were Skywald's distributor, so that's another one on my long list of questions). 

Still, I digress.  According to Hewetson, which is about as good a source as you could have, Skywald did first distribution to the US, and then returns were sent to the UK (where, according to Al, they completely sold out).  Now, given what these magazines were (glossy, expensive, your-mum-wouldn't-approve kind of mags), my money would have been on Gold as their distributor, however, if they were all returns, I'd say they had to be T&P all along.   As you've shown, some of them definitely did come from T&P and we also know that, despite being owned by IND, T&P distributed returns from Charlton, Harvey and the others, so there's no reason they wouldn't have been the distributor for returned Warrens. 

 

 

 

Edited February 22 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

On 2/22/2024 at 10:20 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Another unsold and repriced Kid.

And a different (to me, anyway) PBS stamp.

How unusual is it?

We've definitely seen those elliptical stamps a few times.  I do like a nice re-priced PV return though.  TGK 68 was on sale in the US in Dec 63 with a cover date of March 64.  It presumably got UK distributed in Feb/Mar 1964, but wouldn't have been re-priced like that until the first hiatus, which means Oct/Nov 1964.  TGK was bi-monthly, so 68 might have been taken out of the rack in April with the April deliveries or might have been taken out in May when the next TGK arrived, but the fact that it didn't get re-priced and sent for a second lap for at least another 5 or 6 months is interesting.  Maybe it wasn't re-priced until the following summer and it was actually a seaside special.  Or maybe it fell down the back of the dresser and only got sent out for the first time months after its cover date.  We will probably never know.  

[FoggyNelson]

On 2/20/2024 at 9:29 PM, Malacoda said:

The problem with all of this is the distribution deal. Marvel in the US had deals with T&P and World to distribute to the UK.  The rest of the world excluding Canada was handled through Transworld, going back to before Marvel was Marvel. This means that it was impossible that comics were shipped to the UK for onward distribution to other countries (though Ireland could easily have been an exception to this). 

That said, the reason the other comics needed to be reprinted by Transworld was for translation and other edits to make sense to non US readers.  For the UK and Ireland they didn't need to worry about that and when the ban lifted they simply imported the US comics as-was. Not via Transworld. 

However, the way the Transworld deal worked, they sold comics to different distributors based on language rather than on geography, so, for example the French language translations were also sold in Belgium, Tunisia and Morocco as well as France. But these were printed with different prices for these destination countries in local currency. 

This makes it seem very unlikely that these comics which turn up in the UK were bound for African countries, and though it's possible due to historic trade links existing since colonial times, it's kind of weird that the other countries were all part of the Transworld deal but there were these post-colonial exceptions.  Even more unlikely once Al Landau became Marvel president. 

 

❤️ these foreign covers‼️❤️all of them👍