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Stripped Cover Returns
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19 posts in this topic

Hi everyone,

 

I have another question for everyone about Stripped Cover Returns.  Does anyone out there know anything about them?  Like the following.

When did they start doing this to comics?

Who did they do this?

I heard that the Mob profited off of this somehow, How?

I have attached n image of what I am talking about.

 

IMG_4970.jpg

Edited by JR Web-Head
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Back in the day, comic books were sold to distributors and retailers on a returnable basis, meaning they sold what they could and were able to return the unsold copies for credit.  Since shipping back comics that would be destroyed anyway was cost prohibitive, retailers were allowed to strip off the covers or in many cases, just the top third or so of the cover and return those as proof of destruction, and receive full credit for the return just as if they had returned the entire book.  Legally, the retailer was then obligated to destroy the remaindered copies.  That probably happened in some cases, but most of the time, the retailer sold the remaindered comics at a discount.  So technically, every remaindered comic book that still exists was supposed to have been destroyed and was reported to the publisher as such.  That's also why most comics from the golden and silver ages have a paragraph in the indicia stating that that book was not to be sold with any part of its markings removed.  It was likely a waste of ink because except for the publishers, no one really cared.    If you were a kid back then, you could likely buy 2, 3 or even 4 remaindered comics for the price of 1 new comic.  The retailer didn't really care how much he sold the remaindered books for, since he had already been reimbursed for them from the publisher, and in essence the remaindered comics cost him nothing, meaning that however much he sold them for was pure profit for him.

 

 

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I don't know about the mob, but the UK distributor Thorpe & Porter got up to some shady dealings with remaindered books. Instead of destroying them, they would repackage them with a new cover and sell them like so:

Crafty buggers. 

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50 minutes ago, JR Web-Head said:

I would love to know if there was a path they got involved trafficking them somehow.

Many small publishers in the 40s/50s were little more than money laundering operations for the mob.  You would have six or seven different companies working out of a single location, with a single receptionist and a single accountant but each company would "pay" them as if they were stand alone operations. The mob run companies would ship product to  mob run distributors who would deliver them to mostly mobbed up newsstands.  Remember, in the days before lotteries, people played numbers, and most newsstands took action as well s booking horse bets.

In the early 1950s, The Senate started looking carefully at the mob and how it made money and also how it laundered its money, turning bad money into clean. Just as they were set to investigate the magazine distributorships relation to organized crime, many distributors declared bankruptcy, closed shop and disappeared, leaving behind shell company after shell company. 

Even after the industry supposedly got cleaned up, mob run distributors still ripped off comic and magazine publishers but sending in affidavits saying they destroyed the unsold product while selling it out the back door. Mile High 2 is the most egregious example, but it was down hundreds of times on smaller scales.

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1 minute ago, shadroch said:

Many small publishers in the 40s/50s were little more than money laundering operations for the mob.  You would have six or seven different companies working out of a single location, with a single receptionist and a single accountant but each company would "pay" them as if they were stand alone operations. The mob run companies would ship product to  mob run distributors who would deliver them to mostly mobbed up newsstands.  Remember, in the days before lotteries, people played numbers, and most newsstands took action as well s booking horse bets.

In the early 1950s, The Senate started looking carefully at the mob and how it made money and also how it laundered its money, turning bad money into clean. Just as they were set to investigate the magazine distributorships relation to organized crime, many distributors declared bankruptcy, closed shop and disappeared, leaving behind shell company after shell company. 

Even after the industry supposedly got cleaned up, mob run distributors still ripped off comic and magazine publishers but sending in affidavits saying they destroyed the unsold product while selling it out the back door. Mile High 2 is the most egregious example, but it was down hundreds of times on smaller scales.

Thorpe & Porter don't seem so bad now, after reading that shadroch. 

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1 hour ago, JR Web-Head said:

So then I wonder how did the Mob get involved in this?

Chuck Rozanski purchased a large mass of comics that ended up being  the Mile High 2 collection.  I believe there were rumor of a mob connection.

http://www.milehighcomics.com/tales/cbg65.html

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13 hours ago, Batman1fan said:

Back in the day, comic books were sold to distributors and retailers on a returnable basis, meaning they sold what they could and were able to return the unsold copies for credit.  Since shipping back comics that would be destroyed anyway was cost prohibitive, retailers were allowed to strip off the covers or in many cases, just the top third or so of the cover and return those as proof of destruction, and receive full credit for the return just as if they had returned the entire book.  Legally, the retailer was then obligated to destroy the remaindered copies.  That probably happened in some cases, but most of the time, the retailer sold the remaindered comics at a discount.  So technically, every remaindered comic book that still exists was supposed to have been destroyed and was reported to the publisher as such.  That's also why most comics from the golden and silver ages have a paragraph in the indicia stating that that book was not to be sold with any part of its markings removed.  It was likely a waste of ink because except for the publishers, no one really cared.    If you were a kid back then, you could likely buy 2, 3 or even 4 remaindered comics for the price of 1 new comic.  The retailer didn't really care how much he sold the remaindered books for, since he had already been reimbursed for them from the publisher, and in essence the remaindered comics cost him nothing, meaning that however much he sold them for was pure profit for him.

 

 

I'd never heard any of that before, thanks for the interesting history lesson.

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The candy store owner around the corner from my house was a notorious tightwad and these were the only kind of comics and magazines he sold. I hated not having the cover, but I did get to read a lot of comics this way. I remember buying the first issue of Tales of the Zombie with the logo stripped from the store for a quarter.  Pretty exciting, because the magazine was filled with pretty naked women. My parents saw it and confiscated it. But the memory never left me and now I have a complete set of the title thanks to that crummy little store.

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22 hours ago, Brian48 said:

They still did this back in the '70s.  I used to buy books like this all the time for a dime a piece.  In fact, I had a Hulk 181 that was like this, which served as my reader to my "investment" copy. 

I worked part-time in a bookstore in the late 1980s/early 1990s and most magazines including comics had the covers removed and returned to the distributor for credit. I'm sure it still happens today to those few unsold comics distributed through news and magazine agencies. Needless to say, I rescued many comics from destruction in my day :wink:. Too bad I sold most of those newsstand copies I used to cherry pick from deliveries every Monday and Thursday. 

Also, the covers from mass market paperbacks were just torn of the books and returned to the publisher for credit. There would be boxes and boxes of unsold books with no covers sent off for recycling. Such a waste.

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I used to work for Time Warner in the early 1990s and our building handled all types of processing and customer service. I worked on the programming for those machines and many others used to process payments, subs, cancellations--  whatever. We had one machine setup to scan in the bar codes of cover returns from paperbacks. So retailers are supposed to only return the covers.

I picked up quite a nice set of books during that time as not all retailers would just send the covers. Some of the items I had access to (i.e.-- took) are coverless or missing the front cover-- some are complete-- no one minded as these were all destined for the recycling anyway. We used to get tons of stuff people would send back that they had no reason to send back (subscribers sending back their magazines or magazine promos). I also was able to buy from the Warner music catalog at cost as well as subscribe to numerous magazines very cheaply (as well as many family members). Got some cool stuff when Warner put out the Batman movies back then as well. Pretty good job -- learned a lot.

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