Marvel January 1962 'Black Circle' Repriced Editions 4 4

[Pinkerton]

On 6/22/2020 at 9:52 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

A new, potentially connected scenario to investigate! 

 

 

On 6/22/2020 at 1:46 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

I've had a quick review of all the December 1961 titles and haven't found any other examples yet. Odd isn't it. I'll keep looking though - I'm in the middle of getting my next thread ready - First Distribution in the UK (don't pretend you're not excited) - so this will have to wait for now.

Hi Marwood

For this kind of hypothetical manual overprinting to work, the area close to the 10c price has to be light-coloured (as in JIM #75). Looking at some other Dec 10c titles they often have very dark surrounds, so overprinting would be useless? They would have to choose a book with a light surrounding area, perhaps they even selected that light grey in order that it could be overprinted?

Geoff

Edited July 1, 2020 by Pinkerton
spelling

[Get Marwood & I]

3 minutes ago, Pinkerton said:

 

Hi Marwood

For this kind of hypothetical manual overprinting to work, the area close to the 10c price has to be light-coloured (as in JIM #75). Looking at some other Dec 10c titles they often have very dark surrounds, so overprinting would be useless? They would have to choose a book with a light surrounging area, perhaps they even selected that light grey in order that it could be overprinted?

Geoff

Indeed, the December Strange Tales and TOS copies are both out for that reason. I concentrated on these three but found nowt:

    

We only have two examples of this printing scenario currently, both on the same book. Whilst the coincidence is strong, in respect of the Dec/Jan JIM sequence, it could just be one random, local seller, who just added their own increased price to his stock. One to keep an eye on though.

[Pinkerton]

13 minutes ago, Get Marwood & I said:

Indeed, the December Strange Tales and TOS copies are both out for that reason. I concentrated on these three but found nowt:

    

We only have two examples of this printing scenario currently, both on the same book. Whilst the coincidence is strong, in respect of the Dec/Jan JIM sequence, it could just be one random, local seller, who just added their own increased price to his stock. One to keep an eye on though.

If there had been only one JIM #75 example (and I can only find one, so you are better at searching than I am) I could easily mark it down as what you suggest - a freak survivor from one locality or even one drugstore, no more significant than a date arrival stamp. Perhaps rather than test-marketing, a bundle of them had got accidentally left in a corner instead of making it to the spinner racks, and by the time they were discovered JIM #76 was already on sale on the racks at 12c. Two cents up from 10c is a huge hike and well worth having for the retailer (particularly as you had paid less for them than for your #76 copies), and maybe the same corner store were used to making their own little pricing stamps for all sorts of small retailer reasons.

But to see two examples? At a rough guess, maybe 100,000-200,000 copies were bought. I've seen one example out of only a dozen on Google images - that suggests a possible 10,000 copies with the overprint, but of course it could be a genuinely very random survival of one of perhaps a dozen copies, and a sample number of one really only shows that that one copy exists, not much more. But with two examples? Suddenly for both to survive out of a small pile is extremely unlikely, and Occam's razor requires that we consider the likelihood that there were indeed several thousand copies in circulation, which could only have been done at distributor level. Hence test marketing?

To find another example of a similar treatment with any other book (or publisher) around that time would be illuminating. As it is, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As I understand it the DC titles (and other publishers) were also transiting from 10c to 12c.

Incidentally where did you find the other stamped JIM #75 (this is a sly way of asking where else one might search for such things!).

BW, Geoff

[Get Marwood & I]

3 minutes ago, Pinkerton said:

Incidentally where did you find the other stamped JIM #75 (this is a sly way of asking where else one might search for such things!).

 

[01TheDude]

9 hours ago, Pinkerton said:

Incidentally where did you find the other stamped JIM #75 (this is a sly way of asking where else one might search for such things!).

I saw @Frisco Larson's copy and noticed the same stamp. This lead me to think - hey did he give me this book as I won it as a March Madness prize. Then I compared the two books and realized -- nope-- my book was different but the stamp seemed so similar but not quite exactly the same. I received the book from forum member @Point Five. Anyway-- I read through your theories and am happy to share my scan of the front and the back again. I think you requested a scan of the back to see if there were trace elements of the purple ink.

Here you go.... enjoy

[Pinkerton]

3 hours ago, 01TheDude said:

I saw @Frisco Larson's copy and noticed the same stamp. This lead me to think - hey did he give me this book as I won it as a March Madness prize. Then I compared the two books and realized -- nope-- my book was different but the stamp seemed so similar but not quite exactly the same. I received the book from forum member @Point Five. Anyway-- I read through your theories and am happy to share my scan of the front and the back again. I think you requested a scan of the back to see if there were trace elements of the purple ink.

Here you go.... enjoy

Hi 01TheDude

This is so kind of you to go to the trouble.

Well, looking at the back cover (top right general area) one certainly cannot see an obvious reverse imprint right up in the top corner, but they were always going to be faint if visible at all. However, to take this chase as deep as possible into the rabbit hole, comparing the rear cover with others on MyComicShop listings, on your rear cover there appear to be flecks of darker material around the rifle-totin' cowboy - to the left of the head, above his hat, and to the right. Not only that, the flecks look kind of purple to me. Whereas on MCS rear covers the area is crisply printed and clear even on a FR copy.

If these are carryover marks, why are they not aligned right to the top right corner? Well, if the books were hand-stamped in quantity one imagines that it would be stamp, toss into a pile, stamp, toss, and so on. It would take ages to stack them neatly while stamping. That would come later when you had a big pile done. The width and height of the stamp on your front cover (on my screen, not true dimensions) is 55mm x 22mm. Looking at the back cover, all the purplish flecks starting from to the left of the cowboy's head to the last clear ones above the left hand edge of the other cowboy's hat lie within a box with those dimensions. Again, suggestive.

Of course it's entirely possible, and even probable, that the marks seen on your rear cover scan are just regular dirt, but looking at the rest of the cover it looks pretty clean, so circumstantially the fact that these purplish marks are the only ones on the cover, and concentrated not far away from where they might be expected, and of the right extent, allows another bent toothpick to be added to support the tottering edifice of post-printing test price marketing. Or as Marwood said, just a drugstore jacking up his prices to make a nice profit once all the other books he had for sale were 12c - and two of them miraculously survived out of a small batch of a huge number distributed. Those kind of miracles do happen.

Thanks again for doing this. Stories like this are keeping me sane. Or are they?

Geoff

 

[01TheDude]

Here is another copy though without the price change posted by @Jasonmorris1000000

and here is Frisco Larson's copy

Edited July 3, 2020 by 01TheDude

[Steven Coates]

Hi Marwood,

Great information and insight, thanks!

I ran into this oddball Journey into Mystery #76, through the GCD and thought I'd investigate further. Reviewing the on-line images reveals many examples of the corrected Black Circle 12c copy  and the regular 12c copy with a thin font. But the only images of the 12c copy with a bold font are all from the same source. Which is not surprising when considering data/image mining and the 12c copy with a bold font image's position as base or primary in the GCD.  I do not think the image of the 12c copy with a bold font is from an actual comic cover, but rather a manipulation.  I will attempt to remove it from the GCD.

On a related note, would you grant me permission to use your posted pence price image of Journey into Mystery #76 to the GCD?

[Get Marwood & I]

4 minutes ago, Steven Coates said:

Hi Marwood,

Great information and insight, thanks!

I ran into this oddball Journey into Mystery #76, through the GCD and thought I'd investigate further. Reviewing the on-line images reveals many examples of the corrected Black Circle 12c copy  and the regular 12c copy with a thin font. But the only images of the 12c copy with a bold font are all from the same source. Which is not surprising when considering data/image mining and the 12c copy with a bold font image's position as base or primary in the GCD.  I do not think the image of the 12c copy with a bold font is from an actual comic cover, but rather a manipulation.  I will attempt to remove it from the GCD.

Great, that was my suspicion Steven - that it wasn't an actual comic. Probably used in an internal advert or something. Removing it is the right move I think if it can't be validated. 

4 minutes ago, Steven Coates said:

On a related note, would you grant me permission to use your posted pence price image of Journey into Mystery #76 to the GCD?

That's not my copy as it goes - just taken from eBay probably for illustrative purposes. That said, you can feel free to use any image that I post here that I state as being mine (I usually do). I would prefer the GCD use "UK Price Variant" instead of "British" as the description category, but I'll leave that to you to take forward as a suggestion if you feel it worth considering  

[Steven Coates]

My preference is also different than the current naming. I think it should be more formal and consistent, which would require additional database structure.

I currently add notes to better describe the variants, such as "A price variant intended for Canadian distribution."

And thank you!

"Once you can convince them, it was their idea, it will become a good idea." (John Smith)

[Steven Coates]

It took awhile, but the 12c copy with a bold font has been removed from the GCD. Changes to the base index are waiting approval. I did additional searches for parent images and could not locate a single one. Any I found appeared to be the same as the GCD or derived from it.

[Get Marwood & I]

Morning 

The three repriced Marvels have been on my Get Carter list since I started this thread but rarely come up in the UK. So I was initially excited to see this one pop up on eBay YooKay the other week, but then a bit deflated when I saw the 'orrible corner chunk missing:

"Typical", I thought and decided to pass, even though I have been known to buy less structurally appealing comics elsewhere (or as they are sometimes otherwise known, Charlton UK Price Variants).

Would you Adam and Eve it though, five minutes later this second one turns up like the proverbial London Routemaster:

 

OK, it still wouldn't win any 9.8 beauty contests, but it's complete and I'm taken with it. And nice to see the Kid managing to doge those bullets again, on the cover. Not that he needs to of course - dodge them, I mean - as it's clear that no one else on Earth at the time could hit the proverbial barn door from three feet. So there's nothing to be a'feared of there.

I've used the word proverbial twice in this post so far, and I kind of like it.

A nice bonus date stamp too:

At least it would be if you could decipher it.

10c inside, still:

That's just lazy, isn't it.

One down, two to go 

[Get Marwood & I]

Just for fun, and accepting all the obvious data limitations, I plotted all the copies I could find with arrival dates on them to see if they gave an indication of the printing order and, therefore, how a new pricing 'cut off' point could have occurred midway through the printing of the twelve January 1962 cover dated issues, to indicate how the repriced versions might have come about.

That was a long sentence. 

Anyway, here's what it shows....

 

Spoiler

 

[Get Marwood & I]

Morning 

I thought I'd mention this recent example that popped up in the Romance thread the other day.

@BuscemasAvengers posted this lovely copy of Love Romances #97, noting that the variant status was missing from the CGC label:

He noted that the previous existing highest recorded copy - image courtesy of Heritage - did have the variant label:

I pointed out that the Verification tool entry for BuscemasAvengers' 9.2 copy did not have the variant field completed so it would likely be recorded as the regular edition on the census and sure enough that is what happened. So back off to CGC it went in the hope that they would amend the census record and replace the slab label to show the variant status.

BuscemasAvengers then received this message:

• CGC identifies the other version as the variant, so the label is correct.
• The initial print run was the version with 10 cents covered with a black circle.
• Marvel changed it to the regular 12-cent circle.
• As the black circle came first, we consider the regular 12-cent cover to be the variant.

I had to laugh when I saw that CGC advised that the 'regular' cover was the 'variant', an oxymoronic statement if ever there was one. 

Although it is likely that the 10c price covers were printed first, they would then have been run through a correcting printer afterwards to add the correct 12c price once the pricing error was spotted. That may have been done before or after the 'regular' 12c priced copies were run. No one knows that order so it's odd for CGC to use order of printing as a reason to support their decision. The correcting overprint is still part of the original production process, after all.

Putting that aspect to one side, a variant is always the copy with the lowest number within a first printing run and which deviates from the 'main event'. The main event in this case is the correct priced US 12c version. That is what was intended to be the 'regular' edition. The corrected versions are a mistake and the additional production details (the overprinted price / black circle) therefore make them the non-standard book. The 12c regulars appear comparatively ample. The 12c corrected copies appear scarce. I doubt there is a nuanced collector alive who would refer to the uncorrected copies as a variant. As @Dr. Love succinctly put it in the romance thread, "collectors know what's what".

If CGC hold firm on this, they will have to confirm that the Heritage 8.5 book label posted above was an error. If they change their mind, and agree that 'Black Circle' corrected versions are indeed the variant, they will need to start correcting books like this 7.5 below, if asked:

It will be interesting to see which way they go. In the meantime, we can safely assume that the census records cannot be relied upon as any indicator of slabbed volumes for each book type.

 

[BuscemasAvengers]

Thanks for posting this, Steve. Indeed, their reply was in fact the 8.5 that sold in June was also labeled incorrectly.

[Get Marwood & I]

On 9/9/2023 at 11:27 AM, BuscemasAvengers said:

Thanks for posting this, Steve. Indeed, their reply was in fact the 8.5 that sold in June was also labeled incorrectly.

You're welcome Tim - sorry for getting you embroiled in it all 

Here are two more slabbed 6.5 copies - both the corrected version, one labelled variant the other not:

 

[BuscemasAvengers]

On 9/9/2023 at 7:06 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

You're welcome Tim - sorry for getting you embroiled in it all 

Here are two more slabbed 6.5 copies - both the corrected version, one labelled variant the other not:

 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 9/9/2023 at 12:10 PM, BuscemasAvengers said:

It's clear that they're a little confused with these books. All three of these are incorrectly labelled based on their current position with your book:

[Get Marwood & I]

...

[namisgr]

I would say on CGC's behalf in deciding what constitutes the 'regular' version and the 'variant' one: Those with a circle blackout and a reprinted or stamped higher price next to it have a 'variant' feel to me, given that for the entire Marvel SA, this was a scarce and unusual feature.  So I kind of see where some of the graders there would decide to refer to blackout circle copies as 'variants'.

Whatever your take on what constitutes a regular printing and a variant one, I agree with you that it would certainly be helpful for collectors if CGC used a single, unified standard for them all.