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

[Get Marwood & I]

On 12/13/2022 at 2:50 AM, Malacoda said:

More than one wave and more than one distributor? I think the Oblong stamps, assuming they’re GSP are one distributor and the shilling stamps are someone else later after the price had increased in Nov 1967.  

So you're suggesting that they split them into two piles, and then sold the two separate lots to two different people at different times? Maybe the one seller (Goldstar) bought them all and sold them in two waves, one pre / one post price increase. A few possibilities there, I think. 

On 12/13/2022 at 2:58 AM, Malacoda said:

This is how exactly those issues turned up later – not by cunning detective work by a collector who temporarily set up his own import business and, from somewhere, acquired back issues of exactly the right comics.  They simply WERE those issues, sat on a shelf in Waterbury and sold as leftovers to the most obvious candidate:  a secondary distributor. 

Sorry, Waterbury? Is that in the US or UK? Keep in mind you know what you're talking about but the rest of us might not - quoting or reminding of your sources might help those of us without total recall 

On 12/13/2022 at 2:58 AM, Malacoda said:

It’s less romantic and fun, but it’s very straightforward. It’s the answer Occum would choose. 

Why, did you know him personally too? 

I like the idea that the books were sent over here in the normal way, but were then held up as a result of T&P's financial difficulties. That does seem more likely than someone else going out of their way to procure the gap issues after the event, either by formally importing or via a few suitcases. What I don't get is why those gap issues were not then picked up by the reinstated T&P network. Would they not have had an obligation to take them, late or otherwise, as they were presumably imported / set aside for them in respect of their ongoing, longs-tanding arrangement? Leaving Marvel with them wouldn't be a good start to their new post-bankruptcy relationship, would it?

And I wonder how the Marvel date stragglers fit in to your theory, Rich, and those issues from other publishers. 

All good fun. 

[themagicrobot]

Re: The above. It seems likely that all those "out of sequence" comics would have been parcelled up and ready to go when first printed. Then having got wind of T&Ps financial difficulties they were held back. Whoever usually sent them across to the UK would actively look for some other Distributer to take them off their hands. I think it was a "push" scenario rather than a "pull" one. I don't think someone in the UK requested those particular issues. Someone already part-way in the loop like GSP or World Distributors could have been offered a bargain to clear a pallet or two of a-few-months-old stock.

[themagicrobot]

Flash 198 cover dated June 1970. It bears the familiar 1/- T&P stamp. An issue appeared in the UK with no stamp. An issue appeared in Ireland for 1 Shilling and fourpence. Some lucky kid here got his copy for a mere 3p.

 

 

 

 

And oddest of all someone in the US was charged 19c instead of the usual 15c?!?

[Albert Tatlock]

On 12/13/2022 at 2:58 AM, Malacoda said:

If I don't believe there was someone taking careful note and going to great lengths to fill the gaps, what do I believe? 

Let’s speculate: some entrepreneur who does not work for T&P, and we believe it’s David Gold, somehow knows that certain Marvel comics were not imported in these months.  How does he know this?  Well, he’s distributing to newsagents, so maybe one of his reps hears it and passes on the info that a handful of Marvel comics were not delivered and David Gold thinks it would be worth his time to get into this for a one-off handful of 10d comics?  

I don’t believe that.

So let’s speculate it’s not an importer: it requires a lot of smart work on the part of someone who does not have access to T&P’s records and is therefore contacting newsagents to find out which ones never appeared, bearing in mind that the T&P reps replenished the spinners, not the newsagents, so the newsagents never really knew what was in the spinners and could not order specific titles, they just had a random batch of American comics whacked into the rack by the T&P rep.

 

Newsagents could not have told anyone which specific Marvel comics didn’t arrive. 

 

So how did this person find out which ones were missing?  Let’s speculate he’s either a collector or comic dealer.

 

There were virtually no comic dealers at this point (and there was not even one comic shop in the UK).  

This person then found out how to contact Marvel in the States, phoned them and placed an order for these back issues. 

Except Marvel didn’t keep back issues – they were gathered back up by the distributors & pulped, so he must have contacted local wholesalers? 

Nonetheless, he/she somehow did this, ordered a batch of very specific Marvel comics by title, number and month and paid for them in dollars, including shipping to the UK.  

The cost of importing this handful of comics would surely have far outweighed the profit. 

So if this scenario happened at all, it would have to have been a dealer who went over there with a couple of empty suitcases. But then if it was a dealer, how & why did they get stamped with the familiar oblong stamp and the other one? You’d only do that if you were distributing to newsagents. If you were an enterprising dealer who had gone all the way to the US to get these, not only would you not stamp them, you would certainly sell them for more than 10d or even a shilling. 

I don’t think any part of this really supports the idea that it was a dealer targeting these specific missing issues.

Far more likely: In 1966, payment to Marvel was getting erratic as T&P slid into bankruptcy.  Marvel restricted the titles for which they were willing to print PV’s, based on T&P’s now-shaky payment record.  Their intention was to send cents copies for the withheld titles for T&P to stamp once T&P sorted their cash flow out.  Bear in mind that Marvel’s shipment to T&P at this point was always made up of cents copies (MT, MCIC, FM and Kid Colt for a bit) and PV’s (everything else), so making a few more of them cents copies was not a change in process at all, just a re-shuffle. 

T&P then actually went bankrupt and there was a short hiatus in ownership, but the comic distribution business was rescued intact by the official receiver – Rothschild – by hiving it off as a going concern into a subsidiary company – T&P (Sales) Ltd – and selling it to IND. This is why you get no break in supply despite T&P going bankrupt.  

By the time the sale to IND was complete, the cents issues that had been put aside were out of date (or more likely just forgotten & rediscovered), so Marvel sold them as a cheap job lot to a secondary distributor.

This is how exactly those issues turned up later – not by cunning detective work by a collector who temporarily set up his own import business and, from somewhere, acquired back issues of exactly the right comics.  They simply WERE those issues, sat on a shelf in Waterbury and sold as leftovers to the most obvious candidate:  a secondary distributor. 

It’s less romantic and fun, but it’s very straightforward. It’s the answer Occum would choose. 
 

Makes sense.

If the publisher feared that T & P would not be able to pay, the late 66ers would not have been sent as scheduled.

What happened to them then? They would have been hawked around to any likely customer. Possibly a few of them were offloaded Stateside, they were cents copies, so they could easily have been filtered in.

The ones which eventually made it across the pond were scarce, by my own recollection, and were noted as such in Alan Austin's Price Guides a few years later.

I would say that the level of scarcity was, at the time, about the same as the late 1964 batch.

Whoever took them would have expected a discount, as they were out of date, but they hit the shelves here at full price. A nice little earner for some East End wide boy.

They turned up in exactly the same outlets as the regular supply, I found them in local newsagents, most customers would have been unaware that they had been delayed, only the serious collectors, who had gaps in the collection, would have latched onto that.

So why were they so few in number? Maybe Goldstar or whoever were not offered the full shipment, or maybe they decided to take only a fraction of them.

[Malacoda]

On 12/13/2022 at 4:06 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

They turned up in exactly the same outlets as the regular supply, I found them in local newsagents, most customers would have been unaware that they had been delayed, only the serious collectors, who had gaps in the collection, would have latched onto that.

Fascinating.  Seems to indicate that whoever they went to was supplying newsagents nationally. I think the chief suspect is still David Gold. 

Are we aware of magazines that were published by Magazine Management that were distributed here?  Apart from the porn, there were celebrity magazines, film review, humour, romance, puzzle books, all kinds of things. My suspicion for how GSP became the distributor for the Marvel B&W magazines in the 70's has always been that they distributed magazines for Magazine Management initially.  Those Marvel B&W's (Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Vampire Tales, Savage Sword of Conan, Planet of the Apes and even Marvel Preview) which we think of as the Marvel black & white magazines, because they featured Marvel characters and were created by Marvel staff and freelancers, familiar names to us, were actually published by Magazine Management, not by Marvel.  If GSP were distributing magazines for MM in the 60's, it's an absolute no brainer that they'd be the most likely recipient  of the leftover 66'ers.  That FM #8 (April 67) which the Robot posted is a bit of a smoking gun, isn't it? 

 

[Albert Tatlock]

If David Gold had known about Frank Dobson's Fantasy Advertiser, he could have got an even nicer little earner, and flogged the lot off at prices up to 7/6d each.

His staff would have know all about sending out overpriced magazines in plain brown wrappers.

Lovely jubbly!

[Malacoda]

On 12/13/2022 at 9:12 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

So you're suggesting that they split them into two piles, and then sold the two separate lots to two different people at different times? Maybe the one seller (Goldstar) bought them all and sold them in two waves, one pre / one post price increase. A few possibilities there, I think. 

No idea what I'm suggesting, tbh. As you say, there a definitely a few possibilities. Why didn't they just give them to T&P?  T&P were flogging DC comics from months ago, out of sync, out of order.  Something quite chaotic happened. 

[themagicrobot]

All this now relies on potentially faulty memories. There were no mobile phones with quality cameras to document every minute of ones life 50 years ago. I do recall spinner racks in 1966 and 1967 that only ever contained DCs. And I regularly visited a newsstand in the old Birmingham Bull Ring shopping centre for my Curtis magazines in the 1970s. They didn't appear to sell the colour comics there though which points to different suppliers for the Black and White magazines and Colour comics. I had to go down into the bowels of the Railway station below where there was a plentiful supply of Marvel comics. They did a roaring trade with the hundreds of thousands of people passing through there. The racks were certainly topped up far more frequently than once a month.

[Malacoda]

On 12/13/2022 at 9:12 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Sorry, Waterbury? Is that in the US or UK? Keep in mind you know what you're talking about but the rest of us might not - quoting or reminding of your sources might help those of us without total recall

Sorry.   Waterbury, Connecticut, home of Eastern Color Printing, Marvel's printer at this point.  

I did have a moment there where I shouted 'Great Scott! That's it!!', leapt out of the bath and ran down the street naked, as we've all done at such moments (no? Just me then).  I thought....the reason these odds & sods got put aside, turned up late and were not distributed by T&P was because the printing changed to WCP in Sparta.  They were on a shelf at ECP, who no longer had a deal with Marvel, so they just offloaded them and someone, probably IND, lobbed them into the next crate.  Of course, I realised pretty quickly that the dates don't tie up.  Printing doesn't move to Sparta until cd Feb 68, but it was a lovely theory while it lasted. Probably not worth the public indecency fine though.  Thankfully, it was so cold I was released for insufficient evidence.  

[Get Marwood & I]

On 12/13/2022 at 6:23 PM, Malacoda said:

Thankfully, it was so cold I was released for insufficient evidence

That's what you get for being cocky. 

[Malacoda]

On 12/13/2022 at 9:12 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

I like the idea that the books were sent over here in the normal way, but were then held up as a result of T&P's financial difficulties. That does seem more likely than someone else going out of their way to procure the gap issues after the event, either by formally importing or via a few suitcases. What I don't get is why those gap issues were not then picked up by the reinstated T&P network. Would they not have had an obligation to take them, late or otherwise, as they were presumably imported / set aside for them in respect of their ongoing, longs-tanding arrangement? Leaving Marvel with them wouldn't be a good start to their new post-bankruptcy relationship, would it?

And I wonder how the Marvel date stragglers fit in to your theory, Rich, and those issues from other publishers. 

Yes, exactly as you say, it feels like those issues were already set aside (and paid for?) by T&P.  I don't think upsetting Marvel was an issue as I imagine it was Marvel who withheld the delivery from T&P in the first place, but as you say, T&P were Marvel's sole UK distributor at the time, so what happened here? I have no idea how the stragglers fit in.  I think the fact that they're stamped is key.  Had they been brought in by a dealer or sole trader, he wouldn't have stamped them. That in my mind definitely indicates it was a main distributor stamping them for the benefit of newsagents, which makes their straggleriness even more peculiar. 

[Malacoda]

On 12/13/2022 at 6:14 PM, themagicrobot said:

I do recall spinner racks in 1966 and 1967 that only ever contained DCs.

Makes sense. T&P must surely have got DC's way cheaper than Marvels, so would have had more of them and made more profit from them, so I'm sure they pushed DC.  Also, DC owned T&P by this point, so no surprise. 

[Malacoda]

On 12/13/2022 at 6:14 PM, themagicrobot said:

And I regularly visited a newsstand in the old Birmingham Bull Ring shopping centre for my Curtis magazines in the 1970s. They didn't appear to sell the colour comics there though which points to different suppliers for the Black and White magazines and Colour comics.

Interesting that this was a newsstand as opposed to a newsagent, as you say, probably different suppliers.  I need to put more time into understanding this.  As posted previously, I always found the railway kiosk at Twickenham station a happy hunting ground for Marvels that you couldn't get elsewhere. They had more choice and seemed to get the next month's shipment later than all the newsagents, 

[OtherEric]

On 12/13/2022 at 10:43 AM, Malacoda said:

Interesting that this was a newsstand as opposed to a newsagent, as you say, probably different suppliers.  I need to put more time into understanding this.  As posted previously, I always found the railway kiosk at Twickenham station a happy hunting ground for Marvels that you couldn't get elsewhere. They had more choice and seemed to get the next month's shipment later than all the newsagents, 

For the yanks in the audience, can you explain the difference between a newsstand and a newsagent?  I had been conflating the two in my mind.

[themagicrobot]

Hi Eric. I'm sure you had Newsstands too. A Newsagents here in the UK was/is a shop rather like your Drug Stores that sold a variety of stuff as well as Newspapers and Magazines. My local Newsagents (many still do) delivered. Each week in the 1960s through the letterbox would appear daily/weekly the Daily Sketch Newspaper, Woman's own Magazine, The Beezer tabloid sized comic for my Brother, my Beano later Valiant later Smash later Pow later Planet of the Apes later I forget (I regularly changed my order). My father paid the paper bill but I'd still visit the Newsagents every day on my way to school to buy some other random comic such as TV21 or even an Alan Class if the cover looked interesting. My local Newsagents didn't stock DC/Marvel etc comics but had a large range of UK weekly comics along with those digest-sized comics few people currently collect but are my tip for the next big thing !?!j 

Not my Newsagents. Just the first image I grabbed.

 

[Malacoda]

On 12/13/2022 at 6:56 PM, OtherEric said:

For the yanks in the audience, can you explain the difference between a newsstand and a newsagent?  I had been conflating the two in my mind.

Whoops, my apologies.  So, a newsstand is exactly what you think it is, like a kiosk you'd see in New York or similar.  Small and cramped with the comics / magazines and newspapers amassed on racks and laid out on the counter.  You'd typically get these in railway stations and busy thoroughfares.   A newsagent is a small store like a 7-11 that sells newspapers and magazines, but also cigarettes, candy, ice cream, cold drinks in chiller cabinets, lottery tickets and a variety of other general items. 

Newsstand....

 

Newsagent interior

Newsagent exterior

 

 

[OtherEric]

On 12/13/2022 at 11:21 AM, themagicrobot said:

Hi Eric. I'm sure you had Newsstands too. A Newsagents here in the UK was/is a shop rather like your Drug Stores that sold a variety of stuff as well as Newspapers and Magazines. My local Newsagents (many still do) delivered. Each week in the 1960s through the letterbox would appear daily/weekly the Daily Sketch Newspaper, Woman's own Magazine, The Beezer tabloid sized comic for my Brother, my Beano later Valiant later Smash later Pow later Planet of the Apes later I forget (I regularly changed my order). My father paid the paper bill but I'd still visit the Newsagents every day on my way to school to buy some other random comic such as TV21 or even an Alan Class if the cover looked interesting. My local Newsagents didn't stock DC/Marvel etc comics but had a large range of UK weekly comics along with those digest-sized comics few people currently collect but are my tip for the next big thing !?!j 

Not my Newsagents. Just the first image I grabbed.

 

Thank you.  That clarifies it quite a bit. 

I assume by digests you mean stuff like DC Thompson's Commando and Starblazer?  From what little I know about them I suspect they have a lot of room to grow as well, although all I've got are about 8 issues of Starblazer.  (The Grant Morrison issues, specifically.)

[themagicrobot]

That's right there were thousands of them from the sublime to the ridiculous. The Marvel Pocket Books are becoming collected now.

 

[OtherEric]

On 12/13/2022 at 11:27 AM, Malacoda said:

Whoops, my apologies.  So, a newsstand is exactly what you think it is, like a kiosk you'd see in New York or similar.  Small and cramped with the comics / magazines and newspapers amassed on racks and laid out on the counter.  You'd typically get these in railway stations and busy thoroughfares.   A newsagent is a small store like a 7-11 that sells newspapers and magazines, but also cigarettes, candy, ice cream, cold drinks in chiller cabinets, lottery tickets and a variety of other general items. 

Newsstand....

 

Newsagent interior

Newsagent exterior

 

 

Thank you.  I think in the US we would call both of them newsstands, although the ones that got big enough to be what you would call "newsagents" that were still magazine & paper oriented enough to not be better called bookstores or convenience stores are pretty scarce.  I can think of at least one I went to back in the late 80's- early 90's, though.  It was simply called Bulldog News, with no stand, agent, or other term appended to the name.

[Get Marwood & I]

On 12/13/2022 at 7:27 PM, Malacoda said:

"Mum! I'm just popping down to Gays"

"OK Dear"

We called them sweetshops in my day