Aman619

i got curious to search for any videos of comics production. Found one. It was shot by Alan Light, founder of the CBG newspaper, on a tour of the Sparta plant in 1977. Sit through the fluff until around the 8 minute mark where the tram arrives at the comics area of the plant. A couple of notes I made relative to our discussions here. Their "new" system could print 42000 comics an hour. Each plate could last for over a million impressions (their previous lead based plates could only mange 350000 before needing to be replaced. You can see piles of pre printed covers with multiple covers on each, he notes that its weird to see covers from different publishers on the same printed sheets! It was all about getting them printed and out the door. The tour guide commented that every Indian Jones sized pile of printed magazines would be gone in 24 hours!, only to be replaced by all new product to skip out. At the 10 minute mark you can see the film negatives being worked on ("stripped"). then the film abruptly ends. Note: this has been posted here on the boards over the years.... but always fun to revisit!

Maybe not from the “Source” — meaning direct from a collector. But it sure put him on the map to dealers as to who to call to to sell expensive books to!

I see your point about Rawhide Kid cover changes. Somehow that makes sense even though Id just argued that they be 2nd printings. But you included a lot of press mishaps that force a shutdown of the press run, but NONE are the same as an intentional stoppage to now print "SOMETHING ELSE". SO its the intent Im speaking to and not just that a delay happened in the printing. In the larger sense though all variant printed same day/time, same place etc could then all be first printings. happy? As for the 4 up, I was winging on memory. The sheets had at least 6 covers as a google search reminded me. With 6 covers on a page, only 16% would have been for overseas etc -- a more reasonable % of the total run. still a bit high though. I can think of various ways to separate the different covers into bundles... all relatively light technology plus manual labor. I just don't know what they did when so I can only point out the potential problem. However, they most definitely ganged up multiple books on one press sheet of glossy paper. Much more economical to print large sheets and cut them down and collate than single press runs on small paper (11x17 is all a comic cover needs! and that a ridiculously small a tediously slow method to bang out 1000s of comics.) We have seen some comics with the wrong covers that came out at same time, which is indicative of the ganged up cover sheets, and that however they sorted them (before or after) mixups did occur from time to time.

I’m on board calling these variants because having been printed at the same time here in the states, then shipped overseas just to be distributed elsewhere, they are like cousins, closely related kin of each other. As opposed to having been printed separately and some time later on IN BRITAIN as was what we suspected before Maywood examined these books more closely. However, I’m unclear how they are “First printings” until we know the printing scenario. "First printings" would mean to me that the printing press never stopped to replace the plates and run off the rest of the print run. Are we confident this was the case? To me, any time the presses have to be stopped to replace and print out a second version, that second batch is a second printing. having said that, it’s gets tricky. I know printing but aren’t 100% sure how the comics business actually processed their books. So here are ideas that would explain how either the US or the UK versions covers might be first printings, or in fact second printings. Covers were always printed separately and on different presses than the web printed newsprint interiors. After both were printed, other machines folded, collated and stapled and trimmed the covers onto the interiors. If the newsprint interiors are exactly identical down to the last detail it suggests ALL US and Thorpe etc copes were printed non stop in one sitting. So far so good. The covers though may have required two printing sessions. Either the larger print order of US covers were run off first, and afterward presses stopped and new UK plates loaded and a second press run produced the UK versions (or in the reverse order, UK first). Or, since the covers were printed on larger sheets 4-up (meaning 4 different covers on each sheet) they COULD have created a sheet with 3 US versions and 1 UK version and printed them all in one pass. If this were the case that’s means they are all first printings with neither having been printed first or second. Because the collating machine would have stapled and trimmed etc all at the same time, and they just separated the bundles afterward. (digression: but here again, Im not sure of each step in the process. In order for all the Thorpe covers to be collated together, they'd have to have been trimmed out of the 4-up cover sheets and separated into their OWN PILE first, apart from the US covers ... but I don't think they did that because films of these comics collators fed in the unfolded newsprint interior which were folded into signatures of 16 pages and the 4-up covers trimmed down as well ALL AT SAME TIME IN SAME MACHINE. or were they? At some point they needed to be able to have separate bundles of EACH different comic! So steps needed to be taken to make that happen, same here with different covers variants.. So -- did England really need that many copies? That would mean Britain's circulation was 1/3 as that of the entire US? Sounds too high. I’d think that England only need 10% as many, and if closer to that % Marvel and Thorpe would not have gone this way because it’s too wasteful. They’d end up with maybe 3 times as many unnecessary UK covers as they kept the presses churning out the much higher print run of US covers they needed. What I’m saying is that IF England only needs 10% of the US total, they would have opted for stopping the presses and swapping plates to print the other covers to save money. And in my mind, that’s a second printing.

I feel like ive been rumplestilskinned, but in a good way! Ok. Hers what I can add to the blue mystery. In printing, black ink is the darkest of the 4 inks. But, even black ink can look NOT dark enough when printed over white paper. The reason has to do with paper stock, even glossy paper, is really at a microscopic scale actually like a lawn of grass. It’s not perfectly flat, but rather “hairy” as the wood pulp resembles a pile of twigs, or as I said, a lawn of grass. when the presses lay down the inks, you don’t get total coverage, some of the white shows and reflects light making the black are look not quite black enough. so printers developed what they called a 4 color black. That is, when they want a large solid black ares, they print 100% black on top of 40% cyan/blue. This gets a richer black. As I describe it, the first ink, the blue presses down the paper fibers, and the they get hit with the black ink and never recover! so the blue circle could have been a case where the strippers cleaned out the circle from the black plate but forgot to get the blue plate done. Then they stripped out a white rectangle with the price in it. whats odder perhaps if how they handled the removal of the ten cents and the month July. They just stripped away the black July, as I’d expect, but used a white box to eliminate the 10C. Which is odd because both were surprinting on the artwork’s light blue dots! They should have used the same solution for each given that they had access to the same film they used to create the US cover printing. And another her thing I just noticed. Both editions have the IND distributor logo. Which is strange ... because IND distributes in the States, and Marvel used British distributor over the pond! Why leave the IND logo on these books?? Easy enough to,fix while fixing the price etc...

experts don't think it is... but Neal knows better.

I hear in the back room new matter is being created every day!

OK I misread that blog post as "highest graded" but he said "finest known". so, what grade is the Salida 83 going to slab at? go downstairs and dig it out and check please! : )

thats what I was looking for. Ive never used such a stamp, but figured they could exist. And having the choice of letters to use, (you know whats coming...) WHY choose the M? Somebody name? : ) Most of my Salidas have the big M stamp so thats MY pedigree marking for them... like the River Citys have grease pencil markings

Good info. Thanx. Not to keep on with this though, the M is a store stamp, and I was expecting the answer for that to be a stamp made by a single store for their inventory. The M is always aligned with the date so must be a single stamp. Also, I didn’t realize that the highest grade OOAW 83 was a Salida copy! Thought it was a random copy in a collection.

That’s what the stamp is for, to help retailer pull books to be returned 2 0r was it 3 months after being for sale on the racks. But the publication month on covers did the same thing. Always dared 2 or 3 months later than arrival/ship date. And no need to manually mark the distributor... the guy who dropped the comics off is same guy who picks up the returns each week. ‘I think the stamped M is part of the store stamp. Just wonder what it stands for.

The distributor code on my book posted is the ID inside North America icon. Isn’t it?

Maybe I wasn’t clear. I meant the M in the store stamp. A distributor code would have been printed like CC, or IND. the M is always stamped with the arrival date. And aside from the white pages or the earlier cookies stamp, when I see that distinctive M I’m thinking Salida!

I’ve got a few Salidas... glad I pulled the trigger.

Anyone know what the M in the stamp refers to? I’ve always wondered...