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

[Malacoda]

On 6/5/2022 at 9:35 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

You could speculate that the possibility of 'bunching' - a run of issues turning up in the same shipment - might have something to do with the stamp numbering. That number one in the four images above tells someone that those four books all arrived at the same time. But that assumes that they did of course - attributing sequential stamp numbers to sequential shipments is just our collective theory in this thread. If it were the case though, for the sake of argument, what would the benefit of that knowledge be to anyone, anyway? 

Indeed, and how also do we explain the opposite phenomenon i.e. the same comic being stamped with multiple batch numbers as if it arrived 3 months in a row....?

[Get Marwood & I]

On 6/5/2022 at 1:50 PM, Malacoda said:

Indeed, and how also do we explain the opposite phenomenon i.e. the same comic being stamped with multiple batch numbers as if it arrived 3 months in a row....?

That's what the comics show, and that is what the DC tables I plotted show - as well as bunching up, the same issues also often straddle two to three consecutive stamps. If we believe the stamp numbers correlate to consecutive shipment periods (with months being most likely) then that supports the theory that the DC books were returns - different copies taking different times to be returned in the US prior to being amalgamated for shipping to the UK. Some copies make the cut off date, some don't and travel in the next shipment. That makes sense to me.

DCs with dual indicia months may have stayed on US shelves twice as long as the monthly publications. That also affects the mix of what arrived and when, in the UK.

The only certainties we have currently, to my reading, are those that the comics themselves provide. Unless, of course, you have some new info Rich.... 

 

[Malacoda]

On 6/5/2022 at 1:48 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Yes, I posted it to show that the ink did transfer. The massive absence of examples indicates that they must have had drying time and puts the scale of the operation into focus as you said. That was one big table they had in Leicester, wasn't it 

Yes it's hard to fathom. The ink must have dried very quickly and they must have fanned them out, but even so. At the end of the 60's they were getting somewhere between 2% to 5% of the Marvel print run ( so e.g. ASM would have been between 10k and 25k copies)  and they were distributing up to 19 Marvel titles by the end, so you're looking at 200k + Marvels.  DC were operating at 70% returns in the US, across 30+ titles,  so the potential number they were sending to Oadby is Christ-knows-what. Half a million? It was enough that when T&P went bankrupt, they just bought the company.  So between that and all the other comic publishers, I have no trouble believing they were distributing a million comics per month.  Ethel and her team would have had to stamp 47k comics per day.  I assume that a lot, really a lot, of the others were PV's? If the warehouse in Oadby was only 17,000 square feet, you could only have laid less than 200 comics end to end.  Fanned out, maybe 3 times that depending on where the stamp was.  So they must have gone into floor-to-ceiling racks, but even then the numbers are mind bending.  It must just be that the ink dried exceptionally quickly, leaving only the few smudgy ones we've found.  Of course, I guess if a stamp was a super mess, they just binned the comic, but that would surely have been the exception. The logistics of this part of the operation have always defeated my imagination. 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 6/5/2022 at 3:00 PM, Malacoda said:

Yes it's hard to fathom. The ink must have dried very quickly and they must have fanned them out, but even so. At the end of the 60's they were getting somewhere between 2% to 5% of the Marvel print run ( so e.g. ASM would have been between 10k and 25k copies)  and they were distributing up to 19 Marvel titles by the end, so you're looking at 200k + Marvels.  DC were operating at 70% returns in the US, across 30+ titles,  so the potential number they were sending to Oadby is Christ-knows-what. Half a million? It was enough that when T&P went bankrupt, they just bought the company.  So between that and all the other comic publishers, I have no trouble believing they were distributing a million comics per month.  Ethel and her team would have had to stamp 47k comics per day.  I assume that a lot, really a lot, of the others were PV's? If the warehouse in Oadby was only 17,000 square feet, you could only have laid less than 200 comics end to end.  Fanned out, maybe 3 times that depending on where the stamp was.  So they must have gone into floor-to-ceiling racks, but even then the numbers are mind bending.  It must just be that the ink dried exceptionally quickly, leaving only the few smudgy ones we've found.  Of course, I guess if a stamp was a super mess, they just binned the comic, but that would surely have been the exception. The logistics of this part of the operation have always defeated my imagination. 

Maybe history has forgotten that they had nine regional stamping centres....

[Malacoda]

On 6/5/2022 at 2:46 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

That's what the comics show, and that is what the DC tables I plotted show - as well as bunching up, the same issues also often straddle two to three consecutive stamps. If we believe the stamp numbers correlate to consecutive shipment periods (with months being most likely) then that supports the theory that the DC books were returns - different copies taking different times to be returned in the US prior to being amalgamated for shipping to the UK. Some copies make the cut off date, some don't and travel in the next shipment. That makes sense to me.

DCs with dual indicia months may have stayed on US shelves twice as long as the monthly publications. That also affects the mix of what arrived and when, in the UK

Yes, I agree. It makes perfect sense with DC would make no sense otherwise. Both Monroe Frohlich and Carmine Infantino are quoted as saying that the returns took months and months to roll back in (more on that shortly), so it would be possible for DC to have just drawn a line under it ("OK, whatever we have back in by June 24th, that's what we ship to the UK and that's it"), but it's bloody unlikely they cared that much and would kind of have defeated the object if the object was to just get rid of the mountain of returns, any way, any how. 

However.....it's a more complicated question with Marvel, isn't it? 

[Malacoda]

On 6/5/2022 at 3:03 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Maybe history has forgotten that they had nine regional stamping centres....

Funny you should say that. Brace yourself. 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 6/5/2022 at 3:09 PM, Malacoda said:

Funny you should say that. Brace yourself. 

[Malacoda]

On 6/5/2022 at 2:46 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Unless, of course, you have some new info Rich.... 

Maybe a new theory.  I'm just building up the unbearable tension first. 

 

[Get Marwood & I]

[Albert Tatlock]

On 6/5/2022 at 1:48 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

The massive absence of examples indicates that they must have had drying time

Blotting paper?

[Malacoda]

On 6/5/2022 at 9:45 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

The first T&P stamps were numbered, but unbranded:

When T&P added branding to their stamps, they retained the numbering:

That doesn't sound like a nice to have to me - it clearly served a purpose and that purpose was sufficiently important for it to be retained when the stamps were updated. 

I disagree. For three reasons: 

1) It could still have been a nice-to-have, nice enough to be retained, and not be a prerequisite. It's not as if they were going to use the space on the stamp for something else more important, so why not keep it?

2) Possibly contradicting my previous point, if the numbers were so important, then why, when they added the brand, did they create stamps that just have T&P with an ampersand and no number.  I mean, it could be that they specifically wanted a stamp that stood outside the numbering system (e.g. if Albert's right and the stamps were a signal to the newsagents to send it back, then maybe for something like annuals with a longer shelf life it was important to have a stamp that would not cause it be taken off the shelf). I like that idea, but it doesn't mean it's right.  Also, if there is a system of logical exceptions to the ones with the ampersand, I can't see what it is. 

3) If the numbering served an important purpose, how important can it have been if all the Marvel comics tripped along nicely without it?  We know that the stamping was introduced for price changes, not to bring Marvel into the numbering system. The presence of the numbers when Marvel was stamped is clearly not significant (though, again, it may have served a nice-to-have purpose). 

That said, Marvel may be a red herring here.  It might well be that the stamp numbering system was devised to cope with the chaos of DC and the other publishers.  Because the Marvels were PV's and came in sequentially, more or less in time for the cover-date month, bespoke-printed for T&P, whatever the point of the stamp numbers was, it wasn't needed for Marvels.  Then, when the hiatuses happened, obviously they just used the same stamps for Marvel that they used for everyone else because that was the system for cents comics.   There are a lot of issues with this.  Not least that when they first started getting the PV's printed, they actually removed the month from the cover, which would lead one to think that chronology was not part of the prima facie system. 

 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 6/5/2022 at 3:47 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Blotting paper?

Imagine the mess. 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 6/5/2022 at 3:48 PM, Malacoda said:

Not least that when they first started getting the PV's printed, they actually removed the month from the cover, which would lead one to think that chronology was not part of the prima facie system. 

The suggestion for that has always been to prevent out of date books going on sale in the UK, i.e. past their cover date due to the shipping time. You think it was quick, as I recall, I think it was slow. At least in the early days.

The stamp numbers served a purpose, otherwise they wouldn't have been there. They don't have to be secondary to the price or anything else. They're there. That's it. Chances are, their presence relates somehow to consecutive shipments. Beyond that, guesswork. Enjoyable guesswork, but guesswork all the same. 

[Malacoda]

On 6/5/2022 at 3:48 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Imagine the mess. 

Also, I think you just increased the size of Ethel's team from 5 to about 9 or 10.  Given that the entire company was only 50 people in the 1950's (not sure about the 60's), that would have been a LOT of girls with strong wrists.  Innuendoes aside, I did wonder if the stamps changed to the smaller ones for that exact reason, the original ones were just mental when you had 20,000 comics in front of you. 

[Albert Tatlock]

You sit at your own individual small table,  take the next stack to be stamped, stamp the first one and lay it face up. Then take the second one and lay it face up at 90 degrees to the first. The wet ink does not then come into contact with its neighbour.

And so on. Then you take the whole stamped stack and put it on the big table along with all the other stamped stacks.

After a suitable time, when they are all dry, they are gathered up and shuffled so they are all the right way up.

[Malacoda]

On 6/5/2022 at 3:57 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

You sit at your own individual small table,  take the next stack to be stamped, stamp the first one and lay it face up. Then take the second one and lay it face up at 90 degrees to the first. The wet ink does not then come into contact with its neighbour.

And so on. Then you take the whole stamped stack and put it on the big table along with all the other stamped stacks.

After a suitable time, when they are all dry, they are gathered up and shuffled so they are all the right way up.

Sounds logical. I mean, there are so many, so so so many where the stamp is lower down and more central than it needs to be optimally for this method, but they are predominantly high up on the right, I agree. 

[Albert Tatlock]

On 6/5/2022 at 4:07 PM, Malacoda said:

they are predominantly high up on the right,

Also so that they would be visible in the spinner racks, where only the top half was visible.

[Get Marwood & I]

On 6/5/2022 at 3:57 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

You sit at your own individual small table,  take the next stack to be stamped, stamp the first one and lay it face up. Then take the second one and lay it face up at 90 degrees to the first. The wet ink does not then come into contact with its neighbour.

And so on. Then you take the whole stamped stack and put it on the big table along with all the other stamped stacks.

After a suitable time, when they are all dry, they are gathered up and shuffled so they are all the right way up.

Indeed, you could lay them out in groups like below, then stamp them all in one go - bang-bang-bang-bang-bang - move on to the next laid out group, etc, then go back and shuffle the first lot, start again with the next group....

Maybe that is why so many stamps are sited top right. 

Of course, that doesn't work with stamps located in or near the centre of a book. 

[Albert Tatlock]

And when you get into your stride, it is hard to resist the temptation to really go to town. Why settle for only one stamp?

[Get Marwood & I]

On 6/5/2022 at 4:13 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

And when you get into your stride, it is hard to resist the temptation to really go to town. Why settle for only one stamp?

Whoops!

Red mark against Ethel for double stamping. It wastes ink.