pemart1966

"Newbie Comic Collecting Questions" at the top of the main page.

eBay will find some way to ball this all up...

Right up my alley so let's discuss! We may be the only two doing so but let's see what happens. Fire away!

Good point - as a kid, I never paid sales tax though, as all of my purchases were $.25 or less.

Makes sense because no kid would have bought those. Money was hard to come by (used pop bottles mostly were my source of comic purchasing money) - 47 cents was BIG BREAD - almost the cost of 2 giants/annuals!. Ala kart was the way to go - you could select the titles that you wanted and didn't get stuck with unwanted titles.

He should have stuck to the plotting...

I remember the ones from '67. Same deal - 4 for 47 cents. You saved a whopping 1 cent off of cover if you bought the pac but what was the incentive? You would end up with 1 or 2 that you didn't want so much better to buy a la carte. Here in Ottawa, I only saw them for sale at K-Mart. I can't remember them any where else. Certainly my local corner store, where I bought all of my comics, never had them. I remember a number of Batmans and Justice Leagues from '67 in those packs but it was just the 12 cent ones - never any of the giants.

Right, BUT Vintage_Paper specifically referenced the MARVEL COMICS #1 CHECKING copy which I've never seen or heard of. When the Pay Copy surfaced, I don't recall any mention of a CHECKING copy. So the question remains - has anyone seen or heard of it?

Never heard of the "checking copy" but would like too...anyone else heard of it?

No - he didn't.

Not too sure what you mean by "checking copy". Do you mean the "Pay Copy"?

Absolutely!

Some sort of sales information must have triggered the 2nd and 3rd printing. They weren't just done on a whim...

According to GCD, Superman #1 went on sale May 18, 1939. This would have been the 500,000 run I assume. Superman #2 went on sale August 19, 1939 (no mention of a second print run that I could see). That's almost 3 months to the day. So during that 3 months: 1. Superman #1 first print was released. Sales data was collected and it was determined that it was a runaway hit. 2. A second shorter run was issued with slight changes Sales data was collected and It too was a sell out or close to it. 3. An even shorter third print run was issued with slight changes. Sales data was collected...and by that time nearly 1 million copies had been printed and it was time for Superman #2 to be printed and distributed. I would have loved to see how that communication chain ran considering it was 1939.

I COULDN"T afford to pay the tax ANYWHERE...