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

[Malacoda]

On 1/19/2022 at 11:24 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

I'm going to say it again, Rich - that's staggeringly good work  

 

Thanks, the TTA 62 thing was the cherry on the icing on the cake. After we've spoken about that one many times, and Albert singled it out too, it was incredible that it just put its hand up and said 'finally, something makes sense of my absence' 

[OtherEric]

Thank you for this.  As I try to say every few months, I love this thread... I just almost never have anything useful to contribute.

[Malacoda]

On 1/19/2022 at 11:59 AM, OtherEric said:

Thank you for this.  As I try to say every few months, I love this thread... I just almost never have anything useful to contribute.

Thanks Eric. Reading it is a contribution. If no one was reading any of this, we'd all look pretty silly.  (Admittedly it's touch and go sometimes as it is). 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 1/19/2022 at 12:13 PM, Malacoda said:

Thanks Eric. Reading it is a contribution. If no one was reading any of this, we'd all look pretty silly.  (Admittedly it's touch and go sometimes as it is). 

One thing to consider Rich - create a journal here, and add the summaries of your gap / hiatus discoveries there, like I've done with my variant research. That way, there's a more easily accessible record of what you have established. Things get buried in threads quite quickly and I've forgotten most of what I have posted now, here and in the other threads. Your research piece is too good to just sit on page 108 of this thread.  I'll help you with the doing of it, if you want. 

Either that or write a book, like I've been threatening to do for the last 5 years  

[Get Marwood & I]

On 1/19/2022 at 8:59 AM, Malacoda said:

And, what do we find? Well, our old friend DD#4 is, as usual not playing well with others, but I don’t see that as the big revelation. Let’s keep in mind that release dates are not the same thing as print dates. 

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

[Albert Tatlock]

On 1/19/2022 at 9:06 AM, Malacoda said:

Tales To Astonish #62. 

The only non-distributed Marvel (aside from Romance) in the first 7 years of importation.

Wish I could add more than 1 Like to this.

[Albert Tatlock]

On 1/19/2022 at 8:55 AM, Malacoda said:

X-Men #6 is noticeably Scarce in the UK.”

Xmen #6 is actually cover dated July, so let’s eliminate that immediately. 

Probably a typo. X-Men # 8 was the scarce one.

[Albert Tatlock]

On 1/19/2022 at 9:00 AM, Malacoda said:

Marvel and DC comics originally cost 10c when they were pegged at 9d in 1959.  They increased US prices to 12c in 1962.  DC in January, and Marvel following the leader in March, presumably as fast as they could.  T&P did not increase the price of the UK copies in step. 

Because they were getting them at the old price? Maybe there was a contract with the price stipulated?

[Malacoda]

On 1/19/2022 at 1:35 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Wish I could add more than 1 Like to this.

The TTA 62 bit was just for you Albert. I remembered your tales of cycling around trying to find them at the time and then many years later finding a massive stack of them at an airport (in Israel, I believe). 

Of course, this isn't proof positive, but TTA 62 does have the uniquely longest gap between printing / US distribution and cover date / UK distribution of any comic in scope.  Even if I had no idea that TTA 62 was ND, but someone said to me 'right, here's every Marvel comic from October to December 1964. One of these is going to get accidently missed off the distribution manifest because its dates don't line up with anything else'  I would pick TTA 62 without blinking. 

I mean, irony of ironies, it's actually even missed off those tables I presented above, because those are Oct/Nov cover dates sorted by US release dates. TTA 62 actually should be on that list because it was released on 1-9-64, but it even got missed off my list which was designed to show how things got missed off the list.  It got missed off because it's the only one cover dated December.  I unintentionally replicated exactly what I think ECP did. 

You couldn't make it up.  

[Albert Tatlock]

On 1/19/2022 at 2:14 PM, Malacoda said:

finding a massive stack of them at an airport (in Israel, I believe). 

About a dozen. They were trimmed. I no longer have any, unfortunately, but I do still have a couple of TTA 61, will dig them out later.

[Albert Tatlock]

And the DCs are unaffected because T & P knew they would need them eventually, and could stamp them at the market price of the day.

Somewhere in a newsagents' trade journal of the time there will be coverage of the consequences of the new tax.

[Malacoda]

On 1/19/2022 at 2:06 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Probably a typo. X-Men # 8 was the scarce one.

Good call, but I still don't think that a stamped Xmen #8 is anywhere near as rare the Missing 3.  You can find a few on ebay within a few minutes.

[Malacoda]

On 1/19/2022 at 2:14 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Because they were getting them at the old price? Maybe there was a contract with the price stipulated?

Quite possibly. I think it was more of  question of what the market would bear. They were already charging 9d when UK comics ranged from 2d to 5d so they were way above the market. There must have been some ceiling.  Also, I reckon with their 40%, 50%, 60% discounts for their no return deal, they were making plenty of profit.

Timely & DC had been keeping the price at 10c since the 1930's by making the comics narrower and then thinner. By the time they got down from 64 pages to 32 pages in the early 60's, so much of the cost was printing & distribution that they reached the point that they couldn't save any more money cutting costs and had to increase prices. 

I don't think that applied to T&P.  If the Beano could make a profit at 2d, including printing, imagine what T&P were making at 9d. 

[Malacoda]

On 1/19/2022 at 2:25 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

And the DCs are unaffected because T & P knew they would need them eventually, and could stamp them at the market price of the day.

Somewhere in a newsagents' trade journal of the time there will be coverage of the consequences of the new tax.

Yes, that Superman I pasted in amazed me. I was expecting to paste some examples of different comics with October cover dates, some at 9d and some at 10d, but to find 2 copies of the same comic at both prices was just perfect.  Might even have been from the same batch, stamped on different days. 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 1/19/2022 at 2:41 PM, Malacoda said:

Yes, that Superman I pasted in amazed me. I was expecting to paste some examples of different comics with October cover dates, some at 9d and some at 10d, but to find 2 copies of the same comic at both prices was just perfect.  Might even have been from the same batch, stamped on different days. 

Here are some DC / Marvels I plotted for the number cycle review - note how the DC stamped 10ds all begin on the 5th stamp cycle but a couple of Marvel 9ds slip in:

There are 5 x Action 317's stamped a 5 / 10d, and only one stamped a 3 / 9d.

From the examples I gathered, at least. 

[Malacoda]

On 1/19/2022 at 1:34 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

I have to confess, I'm never too sure what those dates are. A dispatch date from ECP? A receipt date from the wholesaler? A receipt date from the local wholesaler? A receipt date from the retailer? 

Nevertheless, this is spot on.  On my table, it looks crazy because it looks as if the October DD was printed after the November Two Gun Kid & TTA,  but actually it was just released at the same time, and could easily have been printed before them.  But who knows? The relationship between release dates and cover dates is not only madness, it's not even the same madness from one title to the next. 

 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 1/19/2022 at 2:52 PM, Malacoda said:

I have to confess, I'm never too sure what those dates are. A dispatch date from ECP? A receipt date from the wholesaler? A receipt date from the local wholesaler? A receipt date from the retailer? 

Nevertheless, this is spot on.  On my table, it looks crazy because it looks as if the October DD was printed after the November Two Gun Kid & TTA,  but actually it was just released at the same time, and could easily have been printed before them.  But who knows? The relationship between release dates and cover dates is not only madness, it's not even the same madness from one title to the next. 

 

The Library of Congress date for DD4 was the 4th August - Mikes Comic Newsstand refers to it as the 'on sale date'. The dates on the covers could be arrival, removal, and be by retailer or someone else in the distribution chain. But they are an indicator that, if correctly applied, the comic existed - and was therefore printed - prior to the 28th July.

When found in numbers, these date stamps can really help place when a comic came out. In the case of Charlton, the dates on Mikes CN are miles out. I'm not saying they are for Marvel, but they are a potentially informative piece of any research jigsaw, even with all the inbuilt flaws. If you found a few examples all with the same date, obviously by different retailers / distributors, and you could match that same date to a book that was supposedly released later or earlier, then you can potentially prove theories that online reference data otherwise corrupts. If that made sense. 

[Malacoda]

On 1/19/2022 at 2:49 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Here are some DC / Marvels I plotted for the number cycle review - note how the DC stamped 10ds all begin on the 5th stamp cycle but a couple of Marvel 9ds slip in:

There are 5 x Action 317's stamped a 5 / 10d, and only one stamped a 3 / 9d.

From the examples I gathered, at least. 

Right. You've got a real spread in the 5's from October to January (and bizarrely one July). This gets harder to compare where DC have double months (Nov-Dec) and the Marvel have bi monthlies. 

[Malacoda]

On 1/19/2022 at 3:01 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

The Library of Congress date for DD4 was the 4th August - Mikes Comic Newsstand refers to it as the 'on sale date'. The dates on the covers could be arrival, removal, and be by retailer or someone else in the distribution chain. But they are an indicator that, if correctly applied, the comic existed - and was therefore printed - prior to the 28th July.

When found in numbers, these date stamps can really help place when a comic came out. In the case of Charlton, the dates on Mikes CN are miles out. I'm not saying they are for Marvel, but they are a potentially informative piece of any research jigsaw, even with all the inbuilt flaws. If you found a few examples all with the same date, obviously by different retailers / distributors, and you could match that same date to a book that was supposedly released later or earlier, then you can potentially prove theories that online reference data otherwise corrupts. If that made sense. 

Yes it does, but wow. That's a lifetimes work.  I assume that those stamps were probably only put on the top comic of a bundle? 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 1/19/2022 at 3:02 PM, Malacoda said:

Right. You've got a real spread in the 5's from October to January (and bizarrely one July). This gets harder to compare where DC have double months (Nov-Dec) and the Marvel have bi monthlies. 

I concentrated on the first four cycles of DC, to prove the salient point regarding the sequential 1-9 numbering system. I did plot some titles - Marvel and Charlton - beyond, and it gets messy. Lots of bunching, for Marvels, and rarely a correlation between Marvel and DC cover dates. You'd have to spend a lot of time fleshing those out, to make some informed guesses as to what was going on.