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

[Malacoda]

3)     ADDITION OF PRODUCT CODE.

All Marvel and DC comics acquired product codes on the covers on the 1^st April 1971.  You can locate the timing of this to a window between March 23^rd and April 6^th by looking at the release dates of Marvel comics, but you can get a lot more accurate with DC.

Action Comics 400, Adventure Comics 406 & Detective Comics 411 all have release dates of March 30^th 1971 and do not bear product codes on the cover (as do no DC comics before them).

Forever People 3, House of Secrets 92, Our Army at War 233 & Swing with Scooter 34 all have release dates of April 1^st and do have product codes (as do all DC comics after them).

So (assuming the usual caveats about Mike’s dates), you can reasonably assert that WCP in Sparta went live with product codes on all Marvel & DC comics on April 1^st 1971.  It could have been March 31^st but that would be odd, business wise.

(In case House of Secrets 92 is making your brain chime, it’s the first Swamp Thing). 

So it has a very specific date attached and both Marvel & DC acquired coding on the same day and this coincides with both the DC PV’s and with Marvel’s change of distributor.  This seems too coincidental to be coincidental.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

4)     PRINTING PROCESS

At one point, I wondered if it was a change to the printing process i.e.  as we know the covers were printed completely separately to the innards (different paper, different process) and married up afterwards, as each comic had its own product code, was it a means of marrying up the outsides to the insides?   I don’t think this is likely because (a) the product numbers don’t seem to be recorded anywhere inside the comics (b) they had been marrying up the insides to the outsides perfectly well for 23 years by this point and (c) the speed of the process – 40, 000 comics per hour – means that the process by which the covers got allocated to the insides cannot have been something that required manual intervention. There must have been a long-since-perfected automated system in place.

So the product codes have nothing to do with printing and, whilst the product codes probably do have something to do with the DC PV’s, the printing does not.  

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

5)     DISTRIBUTOR

The fact that Marvel & DC were both distributed by IND for years without the codes, and then Marvel changed over to Curtis still without the code numbers and DC continued without them tells you that it was neither Curtis nor IND that demanded the product codes  (unless they were responding simultaneously to a change in legislation, but then all of the other distributors would have to have jumped simultaneously).

So nothing to do with the US distributor.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

6)     OWNERS

Likewise changes in ownership were not, I believe, relevant. Kinney took over DC/IND in 67, Perfect took over Marvel in 68, the product codes were added in 1971.

So nothing to do with the ownership.

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

Product Codes

So have we established what was not the cause? Different publisher, different owner, different distributor…but same printer.

I think the fact that the other comic publishers changed around that time (Charlton Sept 71, Harvey Oct 71, Archie Dec 71, Dell June 72) tells you that it was something not only common to all publishers but it was also industry-wide at that time, but not a legal stipulation.

The fact that Marvel & DC both acquired product numbers at the exact same time (same day as far as I can tell) tells you that whatever the industry wide change was, Sparta embraced it first which was no surprise (they were generally at the forefront of new ideas).

Change of UK distributor.

T&P had a national team of salesmen and operated a fleet of vans.  World had nothing like this and outsourced haulage to local hauliers. The reps were primarily concerned with the book business.   That said, I suspect the decision was more a financial one than an operational one.  World could easily have arranged transportation from the docks to Manchester, but with the profit margins being down to a penny or two per comic, it would have been increased cost.   T&P on the other hand already had a massive sunk cost and fixed overhead in the pool fleet, so by taking on more publishers, they weren’t adding additional cost, just increasing profit by spreading the existing cost over more revenue.

[Malacoda]

Part Three:   Metal Boxes.

I think this brings the list of suspects down to 2 things:  computerisation and containerisation. 

As you're all now experts on containerisation, let's dock that one and move on. Clearly, the new coding is computerisation. This is products being reduced to 5-digit number codes in 1971. Obviously, it’s for benefit of computer punch cards. However, it seems very unlikely to me that every comic book publisher went computerised and chose a 5-digit code (or code that could be reduced to 5 digits) pretty much ALL at the same time and started printing them on the covers, unless an external industry requirement made them all jump more or less together.

WCP computerised during the 60’s, so although it was without doubt a computer code for their distribution, equally clearly, these codes were not put on the covers at the point of computerisation.  Therefore there must be some other change to Sparta’s distribution in 1971 which required them to be put on the covers.

I think this was containerisation.  It must have made shipping so exponentially cheaper (remember: one thirty-sixth of the cost) that once Sparta flipped to it, their competitors had to follow suit to stay in the game.  As Sparta were shipping not only by road and by ship, but also by rail (they had a bespoke rail stop literally at the distribution centre), containers would have been a no brainer for them.

There is another thing that makes me think it was containerisation:  the flip from T&P to World in the UK.  To be clear:  I don’t think that the coding was put onto the comics for the benefit of UK distribution, nor the flip to containerisation for the UK’s benefit.  However, I think it’s likely that the flip to containerisation facilitated the change of UK distribution for Marvel and was the thing they had been waiting for. It’s not only the likely cause because it makes sense in terms of World’s distribution set up, but also because the timing is spot on, practically to the day.  

Marvel must surely have wanted to get away from T&P (who were owned by IND/DC and Marvel had finally got away from IND in the US in 1969).  I think there were two reasons they were stuck with T&P: one was financial, which changed in the late 60’s and the other was logistical.  World Distributors printed Marvel’s hardback annuals in the UK beginning in 1968 so lines of communication were provably open then if not before.  Given that Marvel were looking to expand into the UK, start their own line of reprints, expand the yearly annuals and get a new distributor for the imported US comics, it’s inconceivable that they weren’t having this conversation with World in 1969 & 1970 (keep in mind that Comag did not exist and Moore Harness were a tiny, recently-formed niche distributor).

Sydney Pemberton used to travel to the US personally to negotiate the reprint rights to cartoon & comic book characters (including Superman & Batman).  He died at only 60 in 1968, so the 1968 Marvel annuals (published in autumn 1967, presumably negotiated considerably before this) may have been the last ones he did, but the lines of communication were clearly open between Marvel and World.  It can’t be the case that the topic of distributing the monthly comics didn’t come up. That would be like the Man from Del Monte not asking about the oranges.  So why did it take 4 years or more to happen?

I think the impediment to moving to World may have been the logistics of importation.  T&P were geared up to the old methods of importation where the cargoes were slowly and painfully offloaded by longshoremen. T&P Senior Manager George Jones, an ex-copper, used to drive down to the docks to supervise the offloading and make sure nothing went awry. T&P also maintained a pool fleet of lorries, so would have managed onward transportation from the docks to Thurmaston and then had the warehouse facilities to break the batches up and had teams (of Ethels)  to rebatch (and stamp) every comic for their sales reps, who then distributed directly to the retailers.

World didn’t have anything like that set up. Not one part of it.  World did not self-distribute comics, they had deals with national & local wholesalers.  The offices which arranged all the admin were separate to the circulation team which broke everything out into batches for onward delivery to the local wholesalers, which were ferried by local hauliers.  It was a much physically (though not financially) smaller and more streamlined operation.

World most definitely received Marvels by container.  I don’t know when this started but I have no evidence to suggest it wasn’t day one (Felixstowe opened as the UK’s first container port on July 1^st 1967, so container shipping was well established by 1971). 

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

Part Four:  So what are the questions after all that?

1)      As Steve pointed out, there are stamped issues right through this period, including these very issues, so clearly T&P relocation was not an issue (and I don’t believe there actually was a relocation).  So not that.  

2)     Clearly the tiny numbers of comics printed over just a few days were not a financial / commercial experiment by IND.  Particularly as the experiment ended months before any results could have been collated (by which time the stamped returns would also have been in circulation, surely muddying the waters).  So not that.

3)     Production of PV’s stopped before these comics had even reached the UK, let alone gone on sale, let alone the results been collated, so it clearly wasn’t a commercial test initiated by T&P.

4)     T&P bought comics on a final sale basis, so it made no difference to IND either way. Therefore, whatever the experiment was designed to test, it was not the impact on IND’s sales to T&P.  

5) T&P had also been distributing alternating first run Marvel PV’s with first run Marvel stamps during the hiatuses AND Marvel stamps and PV’s together for the last 28 months AND DC stamped cents returns for 12 years by this point, so even if T&P had wanted to assess any impact of PV’s vs stamps, they already had vastly more data than these 5 comics were going to give them.    

6) Likewise, IND had been Marvel’s distributor throughout the 60’s while they had done PV’s and stamps of new issues vs DC’s returns, so it wasn’t as if DC or IND needed to experiment with PV’s to see how it all worked or what the costs were.  They had all that data, 12 years’ worth of it, millions of comics, so printing PV’s of 5 DC titles was not going to give them any fresh information about anything.

Except one thing.

There is one thing that makes sense.  DC must have been incurring a substantial transportation cost to round up all the returns from across the US, collate them into mixed, saleable batches and export them to T&P in the UK.  What if Sparta’s new system for Marvel – printing PV’s and then exporting them directly to the UK via container shipping – was such a massive money saver on shipping costs that it had the potential to be a game changer for DC? If it was potentially more cost effective to print & ship new comics direct from Sparta to the UK than to gather up all the returns and send them however far from wherever, then that would be worth looking into.  However, there would be three issues with this:

(1)   Container shipping was brand new and Marvel had long since left IND, and were now leaving T&P as well, so whatever the cost / operational issues to ship new comics from Sparta to the UK,  IND/T&P’s 12 years of experience with Marvel was all irrelevant as none of it was based on containerisation. That is the one thing that had changed. The one thing for which they had no data or experience.

(2)  If they were going to print new comics which were to be shipped directly from the printer to the UK, it made no sense to print cents copies (then requiring stamping) for UK export.  As long as they were returns obviously they had to be cents copies for US distribution that had to be laboriously and expensively re stamped by the Ethels at T&P, but if they were new comics being dispatched straight from Sparta to the UK, it would be madness not to simply print PV’s (Sparta could knock off 10,000 PV copies of Flash or Jimmy Olsen in 15 minutes flat once the plate was amended;  even working at 2  seconds per cover, stamping nonstop, it would have taken Ethel five and half hours to do that and made a right mess of the covers in the process).

(3)  If T&P were now getting new comics, not returns, presumably now at similar  rates to those US wholesalers were getting them, they would surely have demanded printed PV’s like they had for Marvel. There would be no reason not to.  

Keeping in mind that WCP could not divulge to IND any company confidential information about Marvel’s deal, the only way DC/IND could ascertain if this was worth doing (for them) was to try it out.

It could be a three-way coincidence that Marvel transferred distribution to World exactly at the same moment that the product codes started appearing AND that they started appearing on DC comics at exactly the same time, AND that DC experimented with PV's at exactly that moment for some other reason, but the balance of probabilities would suggest not. 

Assuming it’s not a coincidence and that we know that Marvel and World started a business relationship in 1968, we can infer that Marvel wanted to transfer their distribution from T&P to World ( not least because they did exactly that!) and that the dialogue had presumably been going for some time (it clearly wasn’t arranged overnight). However, given that they had been in communication for at least 4 years before it happened, it seems reasonable to conclude that something else needed to happen before World could take over. It can’t have taken 4 years just to agree a price and a date.

World had the circulation department, the warehouse, the relationship with the national & local wholesalers and the retail chains all set up. They were owned by the News of the World Group which had then been taken over by Murdoch, so they certainly had access to the investment capital (if they needed any). 

The one thing I know for sure that was different about T&P in the 60’s and World in the 70’s is how the shipments arrived at the docks.

The product code itself clearly had no relevance to UK distribution.  It was added to all US comics, in one form or another, regardless of whether they were distributed to the UK. Demonstrably the code was not added for the benefit of the UK. However, a key point is that because print & on-sale dates differ by title (some had a 2-month lead time, some a 3 month, some a 4 month), so for this theory to be right, there would have to be a lag, a period of 3 months where the product codes began to appear on each month’s titles, but they weren’t ready to flip distributors until everything being distributed was within the new system. 

The last ever issues of any Marvel title that still had no product code were cover dated July 1971.

The last time the T&P stamp appears on any Marvel comic is July 1971.

Special Marvel Edition 3 is the only exception to this, but it still doesn’t break the rule….because it went on US sale 5 months in advance of cover date.  The moment everything has a product code on the cover, the T&P stamps disappear.

Something else that may not be a coincidence:  the month that DC have this flirtation with UKPV’s is that same month that Marvel go over wholly to PV’s.  Up to this point, Marvel’s order for T&P from Sparta has been made up of X amount of PV’s and Y amount of cents copies.   We don’t know the proportions, but it seems like the cents part of the order was significantly varied from month to month (there are some comics of which you will find a hundred surviving stamped issues before you find even one of another). Clearly, if something went wrong with the PV order up to this point, there was a plan B. From cd July 1971, no PV = no UK order.  It seems possible to me that PV’s were from this point given more focus and possibly more resource? They certainly became more important. It’s possible that the increased focus required by Marvel led WCP to suggest trialling it to DC.          

At any rate, it seems very likely to me that (1) DC’s experiment with PV’s (2) Marvel going all-PV all-the-time (3) Marvel’s transfer from T&P to World and (4) the addition of the product codes to the covers of both publishing houses ALL HAPPENING SIMULTANEOUSLY is NOT a coincidence.  

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

Conclusion.

1)      I think WCP, having built their Effingham plant for containerisation, completed the swap over to container shipping at the Sparta plant (where the comics were printed) in Q1 1971.

2)     The different method of shipping where manifests contained the customer’s product codes rather than the name of the contents (as in the break bulk days) meant that product codes had to be added to all the covers. 

3)     They went live with the new system for both domestic and export distribution on April 1^st 1971.

4)     Container shipping facilitated Marvel’s long discussed move from T&P to World as UK distributor, but meant a PV only export run for Marvel at Sparta beginning with comics cover dated August 1971.

5)     This led either DC/IND to trial a copycat run or Sparta to suggest it, as this was a new system for which they had no experience.

6)     The experiment was either a straight up proof-of-concept for DC of the new system at Sparta or, more likely, a test to see if the cost efficiencies of that system (new comics, PV’s, container shipping) were so great that it outweighed the benefits (a) T&P were getting compared to returns or, more likely (b) that IND were getting from selling them returns.   

We would logically assume that the cost-benefit didn’t hold as T&P carried on having returns for the next 7 years, however, it might also be bad timing.  Sparta proposed the experiment at the only time they could (Q2 1971), when containerisation was rolled out, but that coincided with T&P’s head office being shut down and the management rolled into Warner Communications based in London. If that was the case, it seems quite plausible that T&P didn’t so much take their eye off the ball as there were no eyes left to look at it.  The once mighty T&P was just an imprint at Warner’s.

(I told you we’d come back to that last point).   

Edited October 24, 2023 by Malacoda

[Yorick]

On 10/24/2023 at 3:33 PM, Malacoda said:

Let’s assume he’s right about everything ( …..God, that was painful, I think I need a lie down….).

Terrific write-up.  When will I be able to buy a print copy? 

[Get Marwood & I]

@Malacoda

Well done Rich. Lot's of research effort summarised there.

Before I give you my thoughts, and to ensure I'm understanding you, are you saying, in a nut shell, that the five 1971 DC UKPVs were an attempt to see if UKPVs were cheaper to distribute in the UK than cents returns?

[Get Marwood & I]

I know you're online Rich, and I'm hoping for a shortish answer 

[Malacoda]

On 10/25/2023 at 9:37 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Before I give you my thoughts, and to ensure I'm understanding you, are you saying, in a nut shell, that the five 1971 DC UKPVs were an attempt to see if UKPVs were cheaper to distribute in the UK than cents returns?

 

On 10/25/2023 at 10:08 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

I know you're online Rich, and I'm hoping for a shortish answer 

Yes.

[Get Marwood & I]

On 10/25/2023 at 10:19 AM, Malacoda said:

 

Yes.

That's what I thought. 

[Malacoda]

On 10/25/2023 at 1:43 AM, Yorick said:

Terrific write-up.  When will I be able to buy a print copy? 

I know. It was a bit much for a chat room, wasn't it?

[Malacoda]

On 10/25/2023 at 9:37 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Well done Rich. Lot's of research effort summarised there.

Less a summary, more a dump of my entire hard drive on the subject, but I thought there was so much juicy detail in there it would be a shame to delete it all out. 

Edited October 25, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

On 10/25/2023 at 9:37 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

the five 1971 DC UKPVs were an attempt to see if UKPVs were cheaper to distribute in the UK than cents returns?

Cheaper being the motivation, but basically a test run of the new system.  I think the key point is that we don't know how much effort/cost was involved in retrieving all the unsold returns, sorting them into batches of so many Supermans, so many Batmans to make a logical shipment for T&P, but we do know (a) that Marvel never did it and always found it cheaper to print & export fresh copies and (b) that the reason T&P wanted the returns is that they could get them dirt cheap - significantly lower than even the wholesale price.  

So let's assume it was incredibly marginal for IND. 

We also know (though we find it hard to believe) that Marvel, DC & all the publishers printed vast amount of comics that were never sold, were never going to be sold, so clearly distribution costs were the driver (see what I did there), not printing costs.  

Also, however they got all the comics back in from the thousands of local & national distributors who in turn got them back from the retailers, it can't have been on container lorries for most of the ride, so the process of getting everything back in to ship to T&P must have been far more expensive than the process of sending them out once containerisation arrived. 

Now, if containerisation offered DC/IND the possibility to reduce their shipping costs by an unimaginable figure (if the cost to distribute domestically was reduced to one-thirty-six of the old cost, the international export cost saving must have been even greater), it seems entirely possible to me that with container shipping, it was cheaper to just print a few hundred thousand extra as PV's and send them straight to the docks in a container.  It would certainly be worth knocking out a few batches to find out. 

Edited October 25, 2023 by Malacoda

[Get Marwood & I]

On 10/25/2023 at 10:37 AM, Malacoda said:

Now, if containerisation offered DC/IND the possibility to reduce their shipping costs by an unimaginable figure (if the cost to distribute domestically was reduced to one-thirty-six of the old cost, the international export cost saving must have been even greater), it seems entirely possible to me that with container shipping, it was cheaper to just print a few hundred thousand extra as PV's and send them straight to the docks in a container.  It would certainly be worth knocking out a few batches to find out.

And you think five comics were enough to prove that? 

Why would they not already know the costs, or be able to predict them by simply adding each component part up? What are the unknowns here?

[Get Marwood & I]

What I'm struggling with is why UKPVs existed well before your proposed DC five book cost / system experiment. Charlton, Dell, King, Marvel, all had long periods of UKPV production. Marvel did so alongside stamped cents copies. If the crux of your argument is that those activities preceded the addition of the Product Identifier, which you say facilitated the container shipping process, then why did Marvel stop the stamps but DC continued (by that I mean the distributors of them)? Why does DC differ? 

 

[Get Marwood & I]

In the early 1960s, Marvels were printed as cents copies, and pence copies. The pence copies were sent to the docks and shipped to the UK, and then distributed. Costs known. The distributor was Thorpe & Porter. Still in the early 1960s, DCs came over as unsold cents returns, and were stamped up by the distributor, Thorpe & Porter. Costs known.

In your Product Identifier / New Container Shipping model, what exactly is different? There would have been a quoted cost associated with the container shipping. Why did the distributor of DC need to have five pence copies printed to establish E2E costs, comparative to their ongoing returns model?

And who were these people at this stage, that existed to solicit the new DC shipping experiment, but then were not around to establish whether it worked? Why did Marvel go one way (UKPVs only) post PI and DC the other (stamped returns)? If the costs were wildly different, was one of them an idiot?

If costs are a deciding factor, why would the distributors of Marvel and DC be using different models at that stage of the distribution game?

[Get Marwood & I]

By the way Rich, a series of coincidences do not themselves always make a case. They can be just that - coincidences.

Remember when I said this was a coincidence?:

You argued it wasn't the reason that one UKPV existed and the other didn't.

Taking the helicopter view, my simply presented coincidence above looks a hell of a lot more plausible to me than your PI/Container test one currently does. And remember when I pointed out that the DC UKPVs coincided with the US cover price increases? 

I'm not trying to be unkind mate - you did say in our PMs that you prefer robust challenge!

One other thought, it's clear the the DC UKPVs weren't a market test of pricing, because the stamped copies were already 5p. So they weren't testing a higher price. Charlton did 15c variants for 2 cover months. So there was no time to get the data in, surely, as you noted in your posts above re these DCs. There are lots of things that don't make sense in the hobby, and the answers to some of these mysteries might not follow any logical analysis pattern.