DC UK Price Variants 8 8

[Redshade]

On 11/17/2022 at 9:08 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

McAlpine's shirt is eye catching, isn't it. Livened the thread right up.  

Definitely a grandad-desperately-trying-to-be-trendy shirt.

[Get Marwood & I]

On 11/17/2022 at 10:02 PM, Redshade said:

Definitely a grandad-desperately-trying-to-be-trendy shirt.

Thanks Stephen. Glad someone around here has got some manners. 

[OtherEric]

On 11/17/2022 at 1:34 PM, Malacoda said:

Superb. Is that a thing or did you just make that up? 

It’s a thing that I did not make up.

[Redshade]

On 11/17/2022 at 9:42 PM, Malacoda said:

 that they're even from opposite ends of the same batch. 

Very likely, or probably an old box/pallet found in the warehouse.

[Malacoda]

On 11/17/2022 at 10:22 PM, Redshade said:

Very likely, or probably an old box/pallet found in the warehouse.

Given that T&P were making up batches of comics, plus other goods, to be sent to the regional warehouses where they would be picked up by the regional sales managers, I would imagine it had to be done in a staggered system. If the regional sales managers from Scotland, Wales, Cornwall etc were heading to their local warehouses, I'd imagine getting the batches ready took precedence over stamping every single one of the comics before any got sent out.  If they'd done it that way (waited until Ethel had every comic stamped by title) then most of the comics would have spent most of their shelf life piled up at Oadby. If you work out the logistics of stacking over a million comics in an 85ft by 200ft warehouse, there's not enough room to swing an ink stamp. When T&P started back in the forties, they did the whole country with 8 vans working centrally out of Oadby. Keeping the vans full and moving in a geographically logical schedule must have been the absolute top priority. 

That said, I think the DC comics were always going to span a price increase. due to them being returns.  I would be very surprised if there aren't a few that flip either side of the 10d to 1/- increase as well. 

[Malacoda]

@Get Marwood & I Steve, when the 78 PV's kick in, what is the overlap with the stamps?  i.e. the stamped ones carry on alongside the PV's for X amount of time before the stamps disappear? You'd expect it to be 2 or 3 months, so it the case that we have stamps, then PV's & stamps for 2-3 months, then a PV hiatus (so only stamps) and then the PV's come back and the stamps are gone forever?  

If you tell me you haven't done this work, I will be taken aback.

Aback, I tell you.  

Edited April 1, 2023 by Malacoda

[Get Marwood & I]

On 3/31/2023 at 9:37 PM, Malacoda said:

@Get Marwood & I Steve, when the 78 PV's kick in, what is the overlap with the stamps?  i.e. the stamped ones carry on alongside the PV's for X amount of time before the stamps disappear? You'd expect it to be 2 or 3 months, so it the case that we have stamps, then PV's & stamps for 2-3 months, then a PV hiatus (so only stamps) and then the PV's come back and the stamps are gone forever?  

If you tell me you haven't done this work, I will be taken aback.

Aback, I tell you.  

Has anyone ever been taken aforward, I wonder? 

I think I've posted this somewhere already Richmond. I'll see if I can find it 

[Malacoda]

On 4/1/2023 at 8:08 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

I think I've posted this somewhere already Richmond. I'll see if I can find it 

Ta. I've got a new theory about the 71 PV's which I think will sit better on the distribution thread (with a link here), but I think I can add something about the 78 PV's which you will like (though it's a bit fuzzy). 

[Malacoda]

On 5/19/2017 at 1:56 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

We have to jump forward 8 years before pence only printed copies recommence in full from the cover date February 1978.

This is where you (Stamp Man) and I (Distribution Man) part company.

Whilst Thorpe and Porter was still a registered company at Companies House, was still an imprint for a few odds and sods of publishing and was probably still referred to as inter-company shorthand at Warner's, it did not exist in any meaningful sense by 1978. In 1971 the head office was relocated to London and the European businesses were restructured under Williams Publishing.  This left the sole remaining piece of T&P as the warehouse in Thurmaston.  This became the GBD warehouse in April 1975.  By a series of contortions that I'll spare you (for the moment ), it was owned by Moore Harness by 1978 and for whatever reason, the model of buying up a scramble of scattergun DC returns cheaply was no longer desirable.  Moore Harness had operated with far fewer reps so I suspect they retained a fair proportion of the old T&P infrastructure when they expanded, but clearly the business model of buying effectively second hand stock from the US, paying whatever they got charged for all it to be re-collated and shipped, getting it over here, re-collating it all to distribute through all the bunching and multi-batching, then sending the chaos out to newsagents in the hope that super intrepid DC fans would scour the land trying to buy issues consistently instead of just buying Marvel or the Beezer, then getting all the returns back and doing God know what with them by this point.....was simply not profitable any more.  It was clearly a lot easier, cheaper, more streamlined, more manageable, less labour intensive, less-dedicated-staff-implied and more economic to just get WCP to print PV's and ship them straight from Sparta to Thurmaston.   I assume it was actually more expensive per comic than buying the leftovers, but if having a consistently delivered, month-to-month supply with a UK price on it massively reduced every other cost AND (key point) actually resulted in you selling the bloody things in newsagents at the end of it all, then I can easily imagine it was far more profitable. 

Just for a giggle, let's for a moment consider the distances involved in distributing comics from Illinois all across the USA (maybe we're only talking about returns from the North Eastern seaboard but even so), then gathering them all back in, shipping them to the UK and then distributing them all over again to the UK and then, when they fail to sell yet again, gathering them all back up and sending them to the pulpers.  It would be 1,000 miles from Illinois to the Eastern Seaboard.  Let's say another 400 miles to gather all the unsold wholesale copies back up, recollate them and haul them to the docks.  Then 3,500 miles from Newark to Felixstowe.  150 miles to Thurmaston (....it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.....).   Let's say a couple of hundred miles of UK redistribution (you can get most places in England & Wales on 200 miles, let's leave Scotland out of it).  And another couple of hundred to gather them all back up and drive them to the pulper (potentially an undercall).

That's about five and a half thousand miles of road, rail and sea shipping.  Just to not sell a comic and make zero revenue. And let's remember that the price of oil quadrupled in the OPEC crisis. Distribution was nowhere near the same cost it had been.  Just for reference, at this point, it took Sparta one-twelfth of one second to print a comic.   

Clearly paying an extra penny per comic (or whatever the difference was) but actually selling the damned thing was a penny well spent. 

You can see how, back in 1959,  when anything American, particularly the long missed 'yank mags'  were flying off the shelves, Fred's credo was 'give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses' but 20 years later, when everyone had a colour TV and every kid could watch cartoons on it, the trick was no longer to just fill a spinner rack with as much brightly coloured, American-looking paper as possible.  Your only chance of a profit was to build a dedicated readership and actually sell a (very high) proportion of whatever you were transporting thousands of miles. 

So my point (yup, there's a point, I'm as surprised as anyone by now) is that the 71 pence variant experiment was not only a different kettle of fish (I'll come to that on the distribution thread), but it was also instigated by a different company.  From my perspective, down here in the bunker,  I think we should be wary of saying that DC experimented with PV's in 1971 and then recommenced in 1978.  It's technically perfectly correct, but it jumps over a lot of stuff. 

PS Have you noticed how GBD carried on using the old T&P stamps up to (cover date) Nov 1977 and then bought a new bunch of non-branded stamps exactly 3 months before they went over to PV's?  If you allow for the production/distribution window, it ties up  i.e.  the Feb cover dated comics were the first PVs and they were on sale in the US in November, so the point at which GBD start using non-branded stamps is the same point at which they must have commissioned the first PV's to be printed.   So this is potentially the point at which MH take over GBD.  Need to do some more work there. 

PPS  It's funny to think, isn't it, that when Fred started up, one of the biggest blockers to printing comics was paper rationing (until 1953).   When the ban lifted, he started buying leftover supply because the US printed hundreds of thousands more comics than they could ever sell.  By the 60's, Sparta were not only printing hundreds of thousands more than they could sell, they were doing it in a matter of minutes. And by the 70's,  it was no longer even a question of how many millions of comics you could print, but whether it was even economical to load them onto a truck and drive them to retailers. 

 

[Malacoda]

On 5/20/2019 at 10:01 AM, rakehell said:

Or a Double Double with something like Conan 1 or Hulk 102 or something.

Sub Mariner #1 do you?  (Don't get excited, the price tag is brutal).  This is the only one I've seen with 3 Marvels.  

Unique DOUBLE DOUBLE COMICS 1968 Sub-Mariner 1 X-Men 44 Spider-man 57 Blackhawk | eBay

 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 4/1/2023 at 11:51 PM, Malacoda said:

On 4/1/2023 at 8:08 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

I think I've posted this somewhere already Richmond. I'll see if I can find it 

Ta. I've got a new theory about the 71 PV's which I think will sit better on the distribution thread (with a link here), but I think I can add something about the 78 PV's which you will like (though it's a bit fuzzy). 

Found it!

I started an exercise a while back to track the final 'T&P' stamped cents copies and used my original UKPV spreadsheet to capture the results. Extract here:

I plotted the stamps as branded (B) and unbranded (U) - not sure how the results fit in with your observations posted earlier. 

As you can see, it was a work in progress....

...and I haven't done it for all titles yet. This kind of thing is quite time consuming - gathering stamped images, filing them and then plotting them - and time is something I seem to have less and less of lately. Well, to potter on comics anyway.

Looking forward to seeing who you think solicited the 71 pence copies and why. I can't look back on it, as you haven't posted it yet....

 

[rakehell]

On 4/2/2023 at 9:29 PM, Malacoda said:

Sub Mariner #1 do you?  (Don't get excited, the price tag is brutal).  This is the only one I've seen with 3 Marvels.  

Got this saved in my watch list. Ewan's prices are pretty steep, but he manages to get hold of some good stuff. 

[Malacoda]

On 4/3/2023 at 9:33 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Looking forward to seeing who you think solicited the 71 pence copies and why. I can't look back on it, as you haven't posted it yet....

It's coming  And yes, it explains why there are still stampey stampies as well as PV's. 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 4/3/2023 at 7:21 PM, Malacoda said:

It's coming  And yes, it explains why there are still stampey stampies as well as PV's. 

 

[Malacoda]

On 4/3/2023 at 9:33 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

I plotted the stamps as branded (B) and unbranded (U) - not sure how the results fit in with your observations posted earlier. 

I hate to tell you, but 

 

There are unbranded ones earlier in the 70's, replacing the T&P branded ones which have nothing to do with PV's or even price changes. 

[Malacoda]

On 4/3/2023 at 8:32 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

 

You're gonna need more popcorn as well.