Charlton Print Run vs Sales Numbers 3 3

[catman76]

beginning in 1960 all comic publishers were required to print their USPS annual report in the comic itself. There is a site that compiles most of these here...

https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales/postaldata.html

[shadroch]

At a time when magazines were offering 80% or more discounts to subscribers, DC charged more than cover for theirs. The crazy thing is they wasted full and half pages trying to get subscribers. Selling that space for advertising would have brought in more revenue.

The Legion had taken over Superboy  somewhere around issue 197, after being the back up for three years, but DC couldn't change the title until issue 258, about seven years later, supposedly because of the postal permits. 

[the blob]

On 1/28/2021 at 10:00 AM, the blob said:

I don't think the charltons got pulped. I see plenty of the same issue, maybe with a paint or ink splash on the top. I guess they got sold to someone. Some of the war titles in the 70s and 80s were so generic and cruddy I can't imagine who bought them. The monster stuff was ok. It is a shame they were so lame. Even good books like e-man and doomssday+1 failed.

I was perusing a seller who had a bunch of 70s charlton war and I have to say, some of the covers are pretty decent. I feel like the ones i may see tons of that were some part of return/unsold book swindle are often the more generic cruddy covers.

Anyway, I want to know how they were able to pump out these bland generic war books for decades but E-Man and Bionic Man could only last a few issues (I assume Doomsday+1 might have ended because Byrne left?). 

 

[shadroch]

10 hours ago, the blob said:

I was perusing a seller who had a bunch of 70s charlton war and I have to say, some of the covers are pretty decent. I feel like the ones i may see tons of that were some part of return/unsold book swindle are often the more generic cruddy covers.

Anyway, I want to know how they were able to pump out these bland generic war books for decades but E-Man and Bionic Man could only last a few issues (I assume Doomsday+1 might have ended because Byrne left?). 

 

Didn't most of the war books feature eight page stand alone stories, mostly by hacks who must have worked dirt cheap. Bionic Man cost licensing fees and full issue books are harder to produce than just grabbing stories out of inventory.  It seems  a lot of their titles in the late 70s/80s were reprinting earlier stories so almost no payroll and no royalities.  I think they owned their own presses or shared them, and they also used their own distribution system.  They used cheaper paper and seemed content to be an after-thought in the hobby.

 

[sagii]

Great read 

[southern cross]

Maybe I'm wrong but I've always thought that Charlton had their own inhouse printing presses.

The quality of their printing was below par on the odd book which I think gives them a certain charm. Any publisher wouldn't accept the printing quality unless they were printed at bargain prices or what I suspect Charlton printed their own. As long their was a cover and a price printed on the cover. It went out the door regardless of the interior quality.

If this is the case then printing 200k books maybe equivalent to printing 100k cost from another outside printing company?

 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 3/19/2023 at 3:39 PM, southern cross said:

Maybe I'm wrong but I've always thought that Charlton had their own inhouse printing presses.

They did, yes. I believe they were cereal box printers or something like that. 

On 3/19/2023 at 3:39 PM, southern cross said:

The quality of their printing was below par on the odd book which I think gives them a certain charm.

Definitely. I love all the variations that come with Charlton multiples. No two copies the same! Lippy the Lizard will testify to this @lizards2 

On 3/19/2023 at 3:39 PM, southern cross said:

Any publisher wouldn't accept the printing quality unless they were printed at bargain prices or what I suspect Charlton printed their own. As long their was a cover and a price printed on the cover. It went out the door regardless of the interior quality.

If this is the case then printing 200k books maybe equivalent to printing 100k cost from another outside printing company?

That seems to be a widespread opinion / industry view - printing 200K didn't cost much more than 100K - even more so if you did it yourself 'on the cheap'. But if you know from previous sales figures that you will always sell around X of a given ongoing title, why double that figure? Double the paper cost, double the ink cost, double the time. Storage, delivery - everything potentially twice what it needed to be. Why carry that on for years, knowingly doubling your workload? If a shop gets 10 copies, and always sells around 5, why engineer to have all the additional operational activities that are associated with the production and eventual disposal of the other 5? You probably need to have worked in the industry to understand it all, but on the face of it it seems operationally self defeating. Why not a 10% excess, or 20%? Why 100% (as appears to be the case)?

[lizards2]

On 3/19/2023 at 8:49 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

 

Definitely. I love all the variations that come with Charlton multiples. No two copies the same! Lippy the Lizard will testify to this @lizards2 

 

Check out this pick up from eBay - it is interesting that it is a apparently a printing error on BC. I would have just assumed sun fade.

 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 3/19/2023 at 4:09 PM, lizards2 said:

Check out this pick up from eBay - it is interesting that it is a apparently a printing error on BC. I would have just assumed sun fade.

 

I love the book - got a pence copy of it - but that's classic sun fade. Anyone who ever asks "is this sun fade?" will get asked to see if the colour absent from the front is also absent from the back. And everyone knows red goes first. Apart from CGC, it seems!

[lizards2]

On 3/19/2023 at 9:17 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

I love the book - got a pence copy of it - but that's classic sun fade. Anyone who ever asks "is this sun fade?" will get asked to see if the colour absent from the front is also absent from the back. And everyone knows red goes first. Apart from CGC, it seems!

Well, it was graded way back when the grader's were still in diapers!

[sagii]

Enjoying beginning to put together some of their Bronze Horror output. Other guys 8.5 white pages

[Get Marwood & I]

On 3/19/2023 at 4:27 PM, lizards2 said:

Well, it was graded way back when the grader's were still in diapers!

Nappies, Liz, nappies 

The absent red on the Charlton makes the wording look yellowy. The same affect can be seen on this confirmed sun fade Spidey below:

Here's a nice printing error - front and back affected:

 

[Toz]

On 3/19/2023 at 12:09 PM, lizards2 said:

Check out this pick up from eBay - it is interesting that it is a apparently a printing error on BC. I would have just assumed sun fade.

 

I came sooooo close to bidding on this.It sold for 1 bid  for $79 and came with a run to #16. By the way,only graded copy of #1.

[lizards2]

On 3/19/2023 at 9:46 AM, Toz said:

I came sooooo close to bidding on this.It sold for 1 bid  for $79 and came with a run to #16. By the way,only graded copy of #1.

I figured it was the only copy since no census?? Or, maybe CGC is anticipating me cracking it out.

There were a couple of the other ones that were nice, but they all stink. Not mothball smell, but smelly paper. Or maybe what Florida smells like? I recently got another package from different source in Florida, and the books smell the same. It must be strong for me to smell it too, as I currently have Covid nose/taste again.

The slab was packed well, but the raws were just dropped in the box, where they could slide around, resulting in some corner duns to backing boards. Doesn't really look like it affected grades on any of the books.

[Toz]

On 3/19/2023 at 12:55 PM, lizards2 said:

I figured it was the only copy since no census?? Or, maybe CGC is anticipating me cracking it out.

There were a couple of the other ones that were nice, but they all stink. Not mothball smell, but smelly paper. Or maybe what Florida smells like? I recently got another package from different source in Florida, and the books smell the same. It must be strong for me to smell it too, as I currently have Covid nose/taste again.

The slab was packed well, but the raws were just dropped in the box, where they could slide around, resulting in some corner duns to backing boards. Doesn't really look like it affected grades on any of the books.

My Favorite cover was the slingshot dragster doing a wheel stand.Drag racing way way it ought to be!

[Malacoda]

On 1/28/2021 at 2:55 PM, shadroch said:

Once a company paid for the printing plates and they were set up and the run started, the cost  to run off an extra 100,000 copies was a fraction of the cost of the first 100,000 copies so why not?

Indeed.  It would be fascinating to know the numbers, but to get the final original comic together was months of work in writing, pencilling, lettering, inking, photography, colouring, engraving, hand tooling, reproduction, stereotyping (don't, we're better than that), routing, moulding onto cylinders, plating, registering, printing & binding (i.e. usually stapling in the case of normal comics).  To then knock off an extra thousand copies of the comic took 90 seconds which must have been a small cost relative to everything that went before.  

Of course, that number is based on Sparta and I imagine the speed over in Derby was not the same, but I seem to recall that Charlton ran the presses to do commercial printing and music magazines and then printed comics at night to keep the presses running 24/7, so it really was just gravy. 

Edited March 19, 2023 by Malacoda

[Malacoda]

On 1/29/2021 at 12:45 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

I've still yet to see a logical explanation for printing double what you know you can sell, even when you (presumably) had enough sales data to be able to reduce the numbers significantly without affecting sales

I used to think I understood this.  If you consider it from the distributor's point of view, they have everything to gain from demanding silly numbers of copies and nothing to lose. The distributor doesn't actually get the comics printed, the publisher does.  The distributor then effectively buys the entire print run, but it's SOR, so they only pay for the copies their retailers sell.  The cost of driving 20,000 copies of a comic to the regional wholesaler in Boise, Idaho is the same in terms of transport, time, man hours etc (maybe a fraction more petrol) as driving 10,000.  Then in terms of gathering up the unsold returns, the cost is exactly the same because they didn't do it - the retailers supposedly sent back the covers, later parts of covers, later nothing, to the wholesaler and the rest of it was done on trust (and a signed affidavit). Then only the sold ones are paid for.   

This means that the cost of buying, transporting, distributing and collecting the returns for 20,000 comics is exactly the same as 10,000 except for the cash flow. 

The difference however comes in the opportunity cost. If you have a comic that sells out and you have a thousand little boys with their 10 cents in their hot little hands unable to buy the comic, you've lost a fortune.  If you keep in mind that Marvel, for instance, had sell through of over 80% on some titles, logically it must have completely sold out in many, many places to generate an overall sell-through of 80%+.

So it was completely in the interests of the distributors to cut the throats of the publishers, because all the downside was born by the publishers and the distributors had nothing to lose and everything to gain by demanding high print runs. 

However, there are 2 big problems with this:  (1) sell through that high was practically unique to Marvel, yet they all printed & distributed stupidly high quantities of comics and (2) in reality, they all pretty much self-distributed. IND had the same parent as DC.  Curtis had the same parent as Marvel.  Charlton outright owned Capital Distribution and so on. Clearly no company lets one of its subsidiaries make a moderate buck by costing one of its other ones a fortune. It defeats the whole object of them having their own distribution companies. 

The only thing that makes sense of it is the unimaginable geography of the distribution. To have the maximum possible saleable copies of every comic, everywhere all the time, it required the level of overkill.  But then, exactly as you say, with all the sales data available to them (ultimately decades of it), why didn't they just tailor supply to demand +x%, with the x% determined by the historic propensity of each area to sell close to capacity (or not). It's just basic business practice.  The answer can only be in the fact that they ALL did it for DECADES so there must have been a cost-benefit  reason for that kind of overkill. 

 

[Malacoda]

On 1/28/2021 at 5:27 PM, ThreeSeas said:

I remember reading, years ago, that any publisher that uses the US Postal system to deliver their comics or magazines has to include these statements once a year.

This is where, ironically, Charlton are probably the worst publisher to get into this conversation about.  According to Dcik Giordano, at Charlton, they simply made the figure up.  Bearing in mind that these are numbers that were required by law to be submitted to the Post Office, so it was literally a federal offence to falsify them, you could forgive the people who disbelieve Dcik Giordano when he says the numbers were utter tosh. 

However, although the statements were required by law and were notarised and filed, the Post Office only required publishers to file the statements if they wanted to mail their subscription copies at 2nd class postage rates. This was because unscrupulous junk mailers would otherwise have taken advantage of cheap mailing rates to bombard people with unsolicited junk mail (at cheaper mailing rates, you understand, the post office had absolutely no objection to junk mailers blasting people with their poop 24/7, as long as they were paying top dollar for the stamps). So the comic book publishers had to substantiate that they were sending comics to actual subscribers, people who had requested it, not advertising bumpf to people who hadn't. 

This means that all that recorded data over all those decades actually only exists for the teeny tiny number of people who were subscribers.  And if the post office had ever audited the numbers, it was only those subscription numbers which were within their remit to audit, so as long as those were correct & true, nobody would be fitted for an orange jumpsuit.  For Charlton, the number of subscribers was virtually non existent (as low as 30 per title in the entire US) so it's not really a surprise that they made up the numbers in the way that Dcik Giordano described because it was an exercise in utter futility anyway and they were never going to get audited on it. 

What I find absolutely remarkable about that is not just that Charlton even ran a subscription department for such a tiny number, but also, who the Hell were those 30 people who were so intrepidly determined to lay their hands on their favourite Charlton title that they (presumably) scoured the indicias for the head office address and then wrote to the 'subscriptions department' in the extraordinary hope that there actually was one. I can't help imagining, given the numbers involved, that there wasn't actually a full time subscriptions department at all. Just a Flo Steinberg type lady who printed out a few hundred address labels each month.  

 

 

Edited March 20, 2023 by Malacoda

[themagicrobot]

I used to subscribe to various TwoMorrows publications but got fed up of my bank card being declined in Tesco because the bank couldn't get their head round the fact that I was legitimately buying stuff from across the Atlantic. Funny how I never had that problem 25 years ago buying from Amazon before they even had a presence in the UK. Anyway, as it is by TwoMorrows I'm sure the Charlton Companion will be well researched. If you don't fancy paying £30 for the whole thing there is a preview here.

https://issuu.com/twomorrows/docs/charltoncompanionpreview/1

[themagicrobot]

Off topic really but I never realised/noticed that  Gold Star Books (no relation to the UK Gold Star) were owned by Charlton. My father had a stack of these paperbacks in the mid 1960s reprinting text stories from long-forgotten pulps.

On topic. 7.30pm. Amazon have just delivered my Charlton Companion 24 hours after I ordered it. Bet there's nothing in there about the UK price variants but with 20 pages of notes and references at the back that will be the only fact missing.