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The Distribution of US Published Comics in the UK (1959~1982)
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5,838 posts in this topic

3 minutes ago, Albert Tatlock said:

TTT teeters on brink.

Name of publisher is on cover, but who is the DISTRIBUTOR?

Can we get a look at the inside covers?

MV Features did both:

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Same stamp on this T&P western one:

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Just now, Albert Tatlock said:

Here comes towel, catch!

These two are quite early though, 6d versions. Maybe the later 3p and 5p ones were a T&P product. Or maybe these two MV Library books 'fell into' the TP process bucket. That would hardly be a surprise would it. Let's face it, it was flippin chaos back then, wasn't it?

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2 minutes ago, Albert Tatlock said:

Suspense # 11 (Sept. 1960) apparently did not reach Britain, but I have found one advertised in an old sales list of Ron Bennett's, ex of Singapore.

I've written about that one at length in my UKPV thread actually Albert. One of the 'pattern books' as I call them...

 

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3 minutes ago, Albert Tatlock said:

Original full price 1/-. Could T & P have handled the returns? Or could MV, or someone else, have handled T & P's unsold stock?

comicwar.jpg

Mebbe.

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1 minute ago, Get Marwood & I said:

I've written about that one at length in my UKPV thread actually Albert. One of the 'pattern books' as I call them...

But why should the Yanks have sent stuff to colonial Singapore, and not to the glorious motherland?

Was our money not good enough?

Maybe Uncle Sam was not as capitalist as we thought.

More on this later.

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Didn't we establish that the comics with the old money diamond were on comics from well into the post decimilisation era -1974 and 1975. Also the prices in shillings was well over the going rate of comics at the time. Those Kamandis would have been 6 or 7p. Your batch there is a warehouse find!

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But some have T & P stamp and some do not. I have looked through a selection of this batch that I got at the time, and there are stamped and unstamped all jumbled up. The date range covers only a few months, but the stamps are spread seemingly at random across the whole batch.

They would presumably have been stamped very soon after arrival at T & P, so our light fingered suspect would have had to be quick.

And if they went astray before arrival at T & P, why do some of them have a T & P stamp?

They have clearly been offered for sale in retail outlets somewhere before being abandoned, but I have no idea where.

I am stumped.

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It's possible, I suppose, if it was theft, that the thief took both boxes of unstamped and stamped copies, not having the luxury to select just unstamped ones. The fact that there are T&P stamped copies supports the theft from the T&P warehouse theory. The jumbling up could have happened later.

Most 'shrinkage' is an inside job. So it's possible boxes were half inched on several occasions over a period of time, hence a limited selection of particular titles and numbers over a about a year.

But why use old currency stamps? That's the biggest mystery!

 

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I reckon these were just dumped on the market to whoever would buy them by T & P.

The one I have came into my possession around 1980, when they were already well out of date. A lot of them are damaged, heavy scuffs, etc, but that could have happened during the last stages of their voyage through the secondhand channels.

T & P stamped had done the rounds, no joy, maybe the unstamped never went out for distribution and just lay orphaned in T & P's vaults until someone decided to take a chance.

Of course, the 2/- price stamp could not really have been an indication of the retail price at that time, post-decimal.

The problem here is that none of us know the workings of the remaindered book trade at the time, so all we can come up with are informed guesses.

I never saw any of these 2/- stamps 'live' in any shops. possibly market traders were flogging them?

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