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

[Malacoda]

On 5/8/2023 at 6:01 PM, themagicrobot said:

325.000 for the very first issue sounds feasible, especially with the handful of TV ads at the time. The Beano had print runs in excess of half a million in the early 1960s. It got quite a crowded market later in the 1960s for UK weekly comics but perhaps 200,000 for some of the more popular weeklies wasn't unknown when you see what Look-In was doing even in 1983. Oddly, no mention of the Marvel stuff in this list.

Very interesting, though I don't think you can count La-la-la-la Look In as it had brand recognition for every strip, weekly TV advertising and a seemingly endless stream of free gifts, stickers and posters.  I'd be expecting it to have very atypical numbers.  If you can endure it, someone has unaccountably collected a full five minutes of ads. 

 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 5/8/2023 at 7:17 PM, Malacoda said:

La-la-la-la Look In

La-la-la-la-la Look In 

[Malacoda]

On 5/8/2023 at 7:26 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

La-la-la-la-la Look In 

Well now I just look silly. 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 5/8/2023 at 8:21 PM, Malacoda said:

Well now I just look silly. 

That fifth la is crucial Richmond. Take greater care with your las please. 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 5/8/2023 at 1:58 PM, Malacoda said:

And do we even believe it?

Funnily enough, it's just been updated! 

#6 

a 69er!

 

[Malacoda]

On 5/9/2023 at 11:59 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Funnily enough, it's just been updated! 

Dude! Many congratulations. Given the number of people on here that is no small achievement. You must have caned hundreds of people who actually do this for a living. I'm particularly impressed as I find the rules of grading self-contradictory and hard to apply, so being told by the pros that you're the champ is as cool as it gets.  

[Get Marwood & I]

On 5/9/2023 at 12:50 PM, Malacoda said:

Dude! Many congratulations. Given the number of people on here that is no small achievement. You must have caned hundreds of people who actually do this for a living. I'm particularly impressed as I find the rules of grading self-contradictory and hard to apply, so being told by the pros that you're the champ is as cool as it gets.  

Cheers Rich!  I've got five hundred Earth dollar grading credits to squander, so I may send in two thousand Charlton pence copies. That'll teach em. Not sure what I'll do with the other $489 though 

[Malacoda]

It would probably make a nice break for them rather than endlessly appraising Hulk 181, WBN 32, Star Wars 1, ASM 129 and all the other Bronzers that are insanely valuable but not actually rare. 

I wonder if winning these competitions is a good audition for getting a job as an appraiser?  Not that you'd necessarily want to do that. I imagine the first 10 times you handle Hulk 1 or Showcase 4 it's a buzz, but goes a bit smooth after that and it's just hours of poring over microns of staple rust.

I tell you what though, being the Galactus of Grading will be bloody handy for selling stuff on ebay.  It's the ultimate fly swatter really, isn't it?

(I was trying to find a panel to go with that that is just Starhawk saying "accept the word of one who knows" but I couldn't find one).

Edited May 9, 2023 by Malacoda

[LowGradeBronze]

On 5/9/2023 at 12:57 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Cheers Rich!  I've got five hundred Earth dollar grading credits to squander, so I may send in two thousand Charlton pence copies. That'll teach em. Not sure what I'll do with the other $489 though 

I think the tie-breaker should have been a bar fight on Tatooine with laser pistols, but congrats anyway! 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 5/9/2023 at 1:49 PM, LowGradeBronze said:

I think the tie-breaker should have been a bar fight on Tatooine with laser pistols, but congrats anyway! 

"He doesn't like your grading. I don't like your grading either!"

[OtherEric]

On 5/9/2023 at 3:59 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Funnily enough, it's just been updated! 

#6 

a 69er!

 

Congrats on winning this one.  From your choice of image, I guess you're saying we'll be seeing you in the next one?

[Get Marwood & I]

On 5/9/2023 at 5:02 PM, OtherEric said:

Congrats on winning this one.  From your choice of image, I guess you're saying we'll be seeing you in the next one?

That would be telling.....

[Get Marwood & I]

On 5/8/2023 at 9:33 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Back to comics, I've got that DD #34 in the files by the way. It differs to the 'regular' Gold Star shilling stamp so could be someone else's. Or, like Miller and T&P, it could still be Gold Star's and they could just have used different stamp types.

Further to Robot's irregular shillinged DD#34...

My working assumption on the various stamps that exist in the second UKPV hiatus is that they are likely to be the work of Gold Star. I think they were responsible for the 10d oblong and this one shilling in a circle version given how often they cross paths:

So these two stamp styles, for me, are Gold Stars:

Why there are two, who knows. I think I speculated once that it could be geographical but that seems a bit iffy as there are no other examples of it that I can think of.

Robot's DD#34 shilling stamp has a different font to the one we see the most of above, but that version also turns up often enough in the 'Gold Star' window - here it is again on DD#33:

I have it on many others. So could that also be a Gold Star stamp? The Gold Star 10d oblong isn't branded, so would it matter?

Here again is the DD#29 that has both the alleged shilling and oblong Gold Star stamps:

On this Charlton of mine below however, the Gold Star 10d oblong overlaps the other shilling version:

I have other examples on this theme. 

So what do we think? Are all these shilling variations in and around the second UKPV hiatus likely to be Gold Star stamps? Or maybe just the most common one. Or none of them, for that matter? We see T&P over-stamping their own prices, after all, so why not Gold Star? The only other explanation is a second distributor but who could that be, if so, and why would they be competing on the same books? And is it likely that one would overstamp the other's price? And who won the FA Cup in 1963?

Tis a mystery. 

And let's not forget the O.P. stamps:

As I said in an earlier post, I think I need to expand the search dates and start capturing all the stamp types, not just the three in the graph above. 

See you in five years! 

[Malacoda]

On 5/9/2023 at 7:51 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

So what do we think? Are all these shilling variations in and around the second UKPV hiatus likely to be Gold Star stamps? Or maybe just the most common one. Or none of them, for that matter? We see T&P over-stamping their own prices, after all, so why not Gold Star? The only other explanation is a second distributor but who could that be, if so, and why would they be competing on the same books? And is it likely that one would overstamp the other's price? And who won the FA Cup in 1963?

I'd be fascinated to know how many comics there are with these stamps outside the 2nd hiatus. 

I still think these 2nd hiatus comics were taken out of the PV runs by Marvel as T&P grew delinquent in their payments in Q1 and Q2 of 1966.  I could never quite follow how, if T&P went bankrupt and various clients never got paid (including the Golds) how come there was no actual break in distribution?  The answer is that it was never the comic distribution piece that went bankrupt. The receivers determined that part of the company to be viable, transferred into over to one of the subsidiary companies and sold it to IND (probably because IND was its biggest creditor, so it also moved a lot of debt off the books as well as potentially generating some capital). 

We know from the extracts of Ralph Gold's book that @Albert Tatlock  supplied, that Gold were actively targeting T&P business so buying up some of the latecoming leftovers cheaply that were supposed to be T&P stock would have been very attractive to them. That said, we know from the same source that they always picked up remaindered comics months out of date and flogged them on, so maybe it wasn't that targeted at all. Either way, I think they're still the lead contenders. 

The fact that the shilling stamps seem to date from a year later indicates that some of these sat around for a long time.

Exactly as you say, we need to jointly collect up as many examples of the two kinds and all other kinds as we can, but I think the ones that fall outside the 2nd hiatus may be more telling than the ones that fall in it.  

[Get Marwood & I]

On 5/10/2023 at 2:24 AM, Malacoda said:

I'd be fascinated to know how many comics there are with these stamps outside the 2nd hiatus. 

I still think these 2nd hiatus comics were taken out of the PV runs by Marvel as T&P grew delinquent in their payments in Q1 and Q2 of 1966.  I could never quite follow how, if T&P went bankrupt and various clients never got paid (including the Golds) how come there was no actual break in distribution?  The answer is that it was never the comic distribution piece that went bankrupt. The receivers determined that part of the company to be viable, transferred into over to one of the subsidiary companies and sold it to IND (probably because IND was its biggest creditor, so it also moved a lot of debt off the books as well as potentially generating some capital). 

We know from the extracts of Ralph Gold's book that @Albert Tatlock  supplied, that Gold were actively targeting T&P business so buying up some of the latecoming leftovers cheaply that were supposed to be T&P stock would have been very attractive to them. That said, we know from the same source that they always picked up remaindered comics months out of date and flogged them on, so maybe it wasn't that targeted at all. Either way, I think they're still the lead contenders. 

The fact that the shilling stamps seem to date from a year later indicates that some of these sat around for a long time.

Exactly as you say, we need to jointly collect up as many examples of the two kinds and all other kinds as we can, but I think the ones that fall outside the 2nd hiatus may be more telling than the ones that fall in it.  

Indeed. A lot of example gathering and a lot of plotting, over a long period would be required to do it justice. All Marvel titles would be needed, hiatus / UKPV bearing or not, then the examples from other publishers and their dates would need to be considered. Also, those books in the window that remain T&P stamped or stickered. Unlike other exercises I've done, my instinct tells me there will be no clean pattern here. We may end up with a much larger body of data but with no new or significant conclusions to those we can already draw right now. And I say that understanding as well as anyone the 'you won't know until you look' concept.

When I set out on one of these exercises - and I've done so many of them over the last ten years - I need to have a sense or instinct of the reward that may come. The best exercises for me are those that allow you to show the world what exists and the date ranges, or those which prove a conclusive pattern, like the T&P stamp number plotting. There's value in the end product. My feeling at the moment, based on an already quite extensive set of saved examples, is that all we will prove with the 'Gold Star' work is that there was a cover date window of about a year or so in which a host of unbranded stamp types appeared in significant numbers in and around the second Marvel UKPV hiatus window. One or more of those stamps may be attributable to Gold Star given the written evidence unearthed so far but a smoking gun discovery linking their name to any of the available stamps feels unlikely. We're unlikely to be able to demonstrate whether the books arrived sequentially (as the T&P stamp numbers indicated), on time, or whether they all rocked up together after the event. So I'm personally leaning towards not taking this any further as I have other comic searches ongoing which already show that they will prove something 'worth knowing' (threads / journal entries for another day). 

To illustrate, when I first happened across a Harvey 15 cent variant, whilst looking for Miller price stamps, I was excited as I thought I'd made a new discovery having heard nothing about them at that point. Initial online searches came up with nothing. Not one comment to be found anywhere. Subsequent extensive research concluded that they were known about albeit with very little documented. A chap in the USA was a Harvey expert and he'd found a few of them but did not know why they existed. At that point I could have left it - he was the expert on Harvey. But then I found another and another. So on I went. A year later, I'd found scores of them, identified the date ranges, established beyond reasonable doubt that the books were UK distributed (hence our American friend's limited exposure) and then discovered a variant second indicia within the 15c books that itself would act as an indication as to whether the outstanding books in the date range would exist. That was a very satisfying piece of work for me, identifying for the first time, 50 years after they were published, a definitive statement of what exists backed with an unassailable reason as to why.

I have had these Gold Star folders sitting in my UKPV Marvel folders for years and I add to them when I see copies:

But I don't feel the reward at this stage to spend the dedicated hours and hours that would be needed to bulk the examples out. I think the Spidey / Daredevil quick reviews that I posted earlier proved that the cover date ranges covered a year or so of issues. If all the other titles follow suit - or don't, for that matter - what more have we learned? I currently plot Roberts & Vinter stamps for Charlton as there is an end in sight that I can attribute to them and which sits neatly within a greater overall research piece. Gold Star stamps aren't branded, so we can only speculate an attribution to them in the absence of a definitive piece of information. If we found one snippet of historical data that allowed us to know what stamps were Gold Star, that would be more useful that a thousand plotted examples. So my focus, if any, would be on looking at those old fanzines to see if anything could be found.

In the meantime, this simple chart below has value as it shows that pretty much all the missing UKPVs have copies extant with the 10d oblong and shilling circle stamps, which can't be coincidental:

The fact that none of the non-UKPV bearing titles have stamps is telling and indicates a link to them. Only previously UKPV bearing titles appear to have been picked up and 10d oblong / one shilling circle stamped which indicates conscious decision making.

The Gold Star attribution remains speculative however - which is why it is in inverted commas - albeit historical evidence clearly puts them as the front runner.

[themagicrobot]

This odd "House Ad" appeared within a DC comic cover dated March 1992. If they had actually namechecked the comics they were talking about, or better still, shown cover images the advert might have been more use. The small print is interesting though as it quietly marked the end of an era.

Here are eight of the ten comics in question. Perhaps the first time, and far from the last, when entire comics would be reprinted in their original format rather than just individual stories from significant issues.

[Get Marwood & I]

[Malacoda]

On 5/10/2023 at 7:45 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

We're unlikely to be able to demonstrate whether the books arrived sequentially (as the T&P stamp numbers indicated), on time, or whether they all rocked up together after the event.

Agree, though I think the ones that have the 1/- stamp rather than the 10d probably rocked up later.  I can't imagine that a distributor in 1966 got hold of a crate of 6 month old distressed inventory and thought 'haha, these will claim a 20% premium.  Even though the racks are full of new comics at 10d, kids will definitely shell out a shilling for these old ones'.  It seems more likely to me that they were stamped 1/- at a point when comics cost 1/-.  

Despite that being the case, it seems more likely to me that they turned up en masse as a bunch of forgotten men rather than in any kind of sequence.  I think Albert has said he remembers then turning up suddenly 6 months after the event.  This is obviously a contradiction as they (probably)  can't have turned up all together yet been distributed 6 months apart.  At times I feel like we're just retroactively superimposing order on the chaos. 

And, to your point, neither anecdotal evidence nor well formed theories are the same as demonstrating what happened, when and why.  And by whom. 

Note to self:  in true Claremontian style, this is a note to remind future me that when I finally publish the U.S.T.  ( Unified Stamp Theory....yup, it has a name, an acronym and, by the time I get there, probably merchandise) to include the possibility that the non-branded shilling stamps might even have been T&P. 

[Malacoda]

On 5/9/2023 at 7:51 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Here again is the DD#29 that has both the alleged shilling and oblong Gold Star stamps:

Is it just me or does this really look like the 10d was stamped over the shilling, not vice versa? 

[OtherEric]

On 5/10/2023 at 9:11 AM, Malacoda said:

Is it just me or does this really look like the 10d was stamped over the shilling, not vice versa? 

I don't think so; mostly from the bottom of the 1/.  But it's hard to tell.