Marvel UK Price Variants: My Part in Their Downfall

Spidey Goes to Tobago

By Stephen Cranch, September 2023

“A rare book with a nice acquisition story. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

Hello 😊

Many years ago when the world was a much simpler place, and I still had hair, I was, for a time, a Spider-Man Completist. If you’re not familiar with the term ‘Spider-Man Completist’ it basically refers to someone who one day, for reasons inexplicable, decides that they must gather every appearance of Spider-Man in a US comic and then duly sets about achieving it.

Unfortunately, having everything means just that – everything. Not just a copy of every issue of every title, every mini-series, every one-shot and every guest appearance, but also a copy of every variation of every issue of every title, every mini-series, every one-shot and every guest appearance. Yes, that’s right. It’s clearly a form of madness. A nice one though, and one that kept me entertained for a good many years in the early 2000s.

For the main Spidey title, The Amazing Spider-Man, four of the many variant collecting opportunities available to the budding completist came in the form of our old friends the price variants. Specifically, the US, UK, Canadian and Australians:

If you’re here reading this you probably already know what price variants are. You likely don’t need me to tell you that the four countries above are the only ones in the known cosmos to have had first printing price variants of original US comic books made for their citizens. You see, if a non-standard comic didn’t come off the same printing presses, in the same location and at the same time as the original standard US book then it’s a repackaged reprint of some sort. Or an ‘International Edition,’ if you’re CGC.

In the end, I managed to complete a full run of Amazing Spider-Man price variants before finally knocking completism on the head about ten years ago. I had all the Canadians, all the US Price Variants (the famous 30c/35c ones and the later, not so famous $2.29 / $2.49 ones), all the Australians and all the UK pence priced ones. Looking back, I think I was the first and only person on planet Earth to have all of them at the same time. That would look pretty good on your gravestone, wouldn’t it. Here lays Stephen Cranch: He had full runs of all the Amazing Spider-Man price variants.

In respect of the pence ones I found that there were one hundred and one Amazing Spider-Man UK Price Variants printed, excluding annuals. Here are the confirmed issue numbers:

Amazing Spider-Man UKPV Issue Range: 1-17, 28-41, 44-54, 71-120, 215-223

And here are pictures of the first and last:

One thing that surprised me when I started out was how hard it was to determine exactly which Spideys were produced as UKPVs (that’s ‘UK Price Variants’ from here on in, to save me having to keep typing it all out). For such a high-profile title, and with comic collectors being a generally inquisitive bunch, you’d have thought that the issue range would’ve been locked down many years hence but it turned out that even some of the most knowledgeable sources had the wrong information to hand, often citing the existence of pence issues that, as it turned out, did not actually exist. As my tracking spreadsheet below hopefully shows, the gaps in the Amazing Spidey UKPV run likely didn’t help matters (NOPE means ‘no pence edition’ by the way. Quite clever, I thought, at the time):

To further illustrate, for many years I battled to establish that the Amazing Spidey #42 and 43 that you can see as NOPEs on the spreadsheet did not get the UKPV treatment. Ditto Spidey #18. Ditto, I said, not Ditko. Pretty much every collector and dealer who earnestly told me that they had seen a pence copy of one of these gap issues on their travels was challenged to produce one. No one ever did. Possibly they were misremembering Thorpe & Porter price stamped cents copies or perhaps had convinced themselves that UK stamped distribution copies were UKPVs (which of course they are not).

Over time, my Amazing Spider-Man UKPV issue list started to get cemented in as the definitive one and even the God of UK comic history, Duncan McAlpine added some data I provided to his UK Comic Book Price Guide site website as follows:

“UK Variant Issues (with thanks to Stephen Cranch for some useful corrections): #1-17 have a printed 9d (ninepence) cover price, #18 had a 9d cover stamp. #19-27 have an ink 10d cover stamp which is quite large and can sometimes be quite heavy unfortunately. #28-55 have a printed 10d cover price. #56-70 have a 1/- cover stamp. #71 is the start of a printed 1/- cover price up until #101. #102 (double size) has a printed 8p cover price and from #103 it’s a printed 6p cover price up until #120.”

— https://www.comicpriceguide.co.uk/us_comic.php?tc=amazspid

Looking at it now though I can see that some of the info is wrong. Doh!

Expanding on that theme – the theme of trying to get things right – I’ve always liked to pin things down properly in my comic explorations, and to satisfy myself that the information that I post online is as near as likely correct as it is possible to be in the absence of official records. One of my long-held comic collecting mantras has been the fairly self-evident ‘it doesn’t exist until it exists’ and that phrase has served me well down the years. In my experience, you can’t just spend a few weeks looking for things and then claim the end results to be robust. You have to look for some things for weeks, and months and years before you can start to say with any level of certainty whether, say, a book does or does not exist as a price variant.

To satisfy myself that the UKPV issue gaps in the Amazing Spider-Man run were gaps by design, and not just books in stubborn hiding, I started to look to see whether the same gaps were mirrored in other Marvel titles. I devised a tracking spreadsheet and set about populating it to see whether any Marvel titles with the same cover month as the missing Spideys had pence copies circulating. My thinking at the time was fairly obvious  – if no Marvel title had a UKPV for a given month, then that is why the Spidey book couldn’t be found. If other titles did have a UKPV however, then there was still a chance that the equivalent Spidey cover dated copy was out there waiting to be found.

It was that exercise – populating the UKPV gaps for all Marvel titles – that ultimately led to my attempt to seek out and document every known Marvel UKPV and then, in later years, do the same for the other six UKPV bearing publishers of DC, Archie, Dell, Gold Key, King and Charlton. Fast forward ten years or so and I find that discerning people in the hobby now refer to me as “that bloke who knows a lot about UK Price Variants.” Which is nice.

So that’s how all the UKPV tracking came about. It took me countless hours over countable years to be able to post what no one had ever posted before at that point – an accurate summary of UK Price Variant issue ranges for the seven publishers known to have solicited them.

A lot of time went into documenting these numbers and some of the issues in the figures below (accurate as at August 2023) took many years to appear:

1. Archie UK Price Variants – 26 confirmed UKPV issues 
2. Charlton UK Price Variants – 617 confirmed UKPV issues
3. DC UK Price Variants – 840 confirmed UKPV issues 
4. Dell UK Price Variants – 223 confirmed UKPV issues
5. Gold Key UK Price Variants – 122 confirmed UKPV issues
6. King UK Price Variants – 24 confirmed UKPV issues
7. Marvel UK Price Variants – 3,023 confirmed UKPV issues 

That’s a grand total of 4,875 UK Price Variants currently existing between 1960 and 1981. And there are still a few hundred more Charltons, one Gold Key and maybe a couple more Archie’s waiting to be found. At just over 5,000 UKPVs, you’ll only need to buy 25 short boxes to house them all! Or maybe a few more than that, if you’re into backing boards (I customise mine):

So, that’s the introduction done. If you’re wondering what Tobago has got to do with anything, and why Spidey went there, you’ll just have to Google it. And if you’re happy to read on, I’m now going to give a potted history of what are, let’s face it, the hobby’s favourite UKPV books (except mine – mine’s Charlton) – the Marvel ones. Hooray! Here we go.

A Brief History of Marvel UK Price Variants

In the beginning….

“And lo it was said that 3,023 Marvel UK Price Variants existed between the cover dates of May 1960 and December 1981. And there was a great gnashing of teeth!”

I know this, because I spent years grinding mine while hunting them down. And counting them. And saving pictures. And adding them to a spreadsheet. And buying loads of them.

I didn’t buy all of them though, as there were far too many pricey ones that would require a remortgage. I did, however, gather the first twenty that rolled off the presses – here they are in cover date and then alphabetical order:

Some of those took a while to find, I can tell you.

You can find the full 3,023 issue range here: https://boards.cgccomics.com/blogs/entry/4904-marvel-comics-uk-price-variants/

As well as putting together the issue list, I spent quite a bit of time looking into the UK distribution of US comics in general and found little to no evidence of any original Marvel comics being distributed prior to the arrival of the first UK printed price copies in May 1960. And talking of May 1960…

May 1960: Len Miller vs Fred Thorpe

It all starts quite modestly with just two titles – Gunsmoke Western #58 and Journey into Mystery #58:

Oddly, compared to other publishers’ output, these two May 1960 cover dated books were shared by two of the leading UK distributors of the time – Thorpe & Porter and L Miller & Co. We know this because they added great big lines of distribution wording in place of the regular US indicias to prove it. Here is Miller’s Gunsmoke Western #58:

And here is what the first Thorpe & Porter indicia looked like (that first Journey Into Mystery #58 didn’t have it for some reason – this below is the next one):

Both Len Miller and Fred Thorpe had a history in the reprinting and repackaging of original Marvel content for the UK market so it’s not too difficult to guess how they got their feet into the ‘proper American comic’ door once the ban on US imports to the UK had been lifted in late 1959.

The constraints of physical time tell us that the full Marvel title range for any given cover month wasn’t printed on the same day but graduated throughout the production month. Some titles were printed at the beginning of the month, some in the middle, some at the end. It may be that our first two pence books were printed late in the month and just caught the tail end of the instruction for pence copies to be printed. There would’ve been an instruction – it didn’t happen by magic – and it had to start somewhere. I doubt – but can’t prove – that Fred Thorpe and Len Miller would have asked Marvel for one paltry May cover dated book each to start their distribution journeys and it may be that these two comics arrived in the UK alongside the first books to be printed with the next month’s cover date. There’s no one alive who remembers any this though, alas, and no records to refer to. So that bit is just guesswork on my part. Other theories are of course available.

For the next 15 months, Len and Fred would continue to share the distribution of American Marvels in the UK. The table below shows which of the titles Miller distributed – mostly westerns as you can see (he did a lot of western reprints, prior):

Thorpe distributed Kid Colt (he got himself one western) and everything else. I like to think that there was some sort of gunfight between Fred and Len as to who got Kid Colt. Fred, incensed that Len had all the bloody westerns, must’ve trained really hard and just hit more empty beer cans than Len did.

There’s no truth that any of that actually happened mind, but it does allow me to post this random pence Kid by way of illustration:

Yes, it’s a double cover. I’m just showing off.

During the early period of sharing, Thorpe & Porter would continue with 9d printed cover prices but Miller, for reasons unknown, would revert to 10c prices on their titles from September 1960’s cover date. You can see in the table above, for example, Gunsmoke Western #58 and 59 have 9d printed cover prices, making them UKPVs, but issue 60 to 65 revert to 10c cover prices. These issues still carried the additional Miller indicia data line, so were still variants, but those books aren’t counted as UKPVs in my figures because they carry a US printed price. When Thorpe & Porter take the title over with issue #66, the 9d printed cover price is reinstated.

It’s all a bit confusing really. My thinking is that Miller reverted to 10c cover prices so that he could then stamp his books at 6d and, in doing so, undercut Thorpe & Porter. All of Miller’s UK produced comics were 6d at the time though, so maybe he was just looking for consistency.

You could argue that Miller could have just left the 9d printed price in place and added a 6d stamp, but I could see how the UK newsagent could easily end up selling the books at the 9d printed price in error and miss the sometimes hard to spot 6d stamp. If you see a 10c price however, you are then forced to scour the cover for the UK stamped equivalent. And they might have annoyed Marvel by asking for a 6d price which may have got confusing given the Thorpe & Porter 9d pricing. Again, that’s all just speculation on my part.

This is what one of those 10c priced / 6d Miller stamped indicia variants looked like, incidentally:

As you can see, our Rawhide Kid #19 retains its UK variant status by way of the UK specific indicia, but it cannot be included in the UKPV figures as it has no printed UK cover price. It’s a distribution variant, I suppose.

The final Miller Marvel book – Amazing Adventures #4 – was cover dated September 1961. From October’s cover month, Thorpe & Porter took over all Marvel titles and in doing so finally became the ‘sole distributor of first printing US Marvel comics in the UK’ that most online reference sites still incorrectly label them as being. Indeed, Miller gets very little credit or recognition for his contribution where original US comics are concerned. He solicited UKPVs for Marvel and Charlton but also distributed UK stamped cents copies for many other publishers in the 1960s. I’m happy to have set the record straight a little in that respect by posting online about his I.W., Harvey, Charlton and Archie distribution, as well as the Marvel books detailed in this article.

Anyway, I’m supposed to be talking about Marvel UK Price Variants, aren’t I. We’ve established how many UKPVs there are, when they started and who distributed them. Let’s now have a look at all the differences between the pence and cents copies.

Cover Differences

One of the things I did during my research was to establish all the physical differences between the UK Price Variants and their US cents priced cousins. There are quite a few of them as it goes, and they did not always remain constant, Here’s a table showing the main differences:

So those are the main cover differences throughout the UKPV era. Still on the theme of differences between the US and UK copies though, I did some more detailed work to establish all the different types of UK specific indicia in our Marvel UKPVs. I found seven specific date phases between May 1960 and November 1964 with five unique indicia types within them. I won’t go into detail about those now but this is what the five different indicia look like, along with the cover dates in which they appeared:

I could go on for a few more pages about indicias if I’m honest, as there are a lot more interesting elements to them, including a period where the Thorpe & Porter indicias appeared in the cents priced US copies too. An article for another day, maybe.

Next up, gaps and hiatuses. Contain your excitement!

Issue Gaps & Hiatuses

Hiatus is a pompous word isn’t it. Gap is a bit basic though, so I tend to use both to describe the periods during the UKPV era where no UKPV was produced for a given month or longer. There are gaps all over the place in the pence era. Very few titles get to run their full course without one or more issues being missed for one reason or another. For me, a hiatus refers to a period where there are no UKPVs for any title. A gap is just a missing issue, here or there.

Now we’ve got that settled, there are five hiatuses in the UKPV 20-year window. ‘Hiatuses’ ups the pompous ante a notch or two from the singular ‘hiatus,’ doesn’t it, but I’m going to use it anyway.

Hiatus #1

There were no UKPVs for any Marvel titles from cover dates December 1964 to July 1965 inclusive, an eight-month period. Most titles are missing 10 issues, dependent on the cut off points in the production process. As the extract from my tracking spreadsheet below shows, the missing issues are staggered between October 1964 and August 1965:

Interestingly, we see Thorpe & Porter stamped cents issues fill the UKPV distribution void during this period. I’ve tracked all the missing UKPV issues in the first hiatus and have found stamped cents copies in circulation for almost all of them, indicating a formal arrangement was in place to ensure that distribution continued while the UKPVs were on hold. Here’s an extract of the tracking spreadsheet for that exercise:

As you can see, the missing UKPV issues all have 9d or 10d stamped cents copies in circulation. Each entry on the sheet corresponds to one or more stamped examples that I have filed away in, appropriately enough, the files. Here are some examples:

The only issues in this UKPV hiatus period that I have been unable to find a stamped copy for are Rawhide Kid #43 and Tales To Astonish #62, both cover dated December 1964. TTA #62 seems to have mythical status in this respect, with many collectors of a certain age remembering their inability to find a copy back in the day. It’s nice when later research supports the memories of those who were there at the time.

There are still no official records indicating why the UKPVs stopped during this period. An online friend of mine by the name of Richard Collier (Malacoda on the CGC Forum) – I say online friend, as I’ve never met or spoken to him – attributes this hiatus to uncertainty around the UK Government of the time’s tax plans. Richard has done the most research of anyone I know in this area and I think he’s right on this, as there is no real evidence of the ‘dock strikes’ that have been mentioned as the possible cause down the years. You can read more of his research into the various Marvel hiatuses here.

Hiatus #2

The second UKPV hiatus affecting all titles straddles the three months of October to December 1966 during which one or two UKPV issues are missing:

Once again, UK stamped cents copies can be found for all the missing UKPV months and once again I’ve put tracking table together to show what can be found out there – extract below:

Briefly, the majority of these UKPV hiatus issues can be found with 10d oblong price stamps and / or one shilling circular stamps. My research has concluded that the likely owner of these stamps is a company called Goldstar. You can read up a little more on this in my threads over at CGC but that’s it in a nutshell. Here are some more examples, including my own old copy of the Amazing Spider-Man #43 that you may recall from earlier in this article (yes, it probably seems a long time ago now, doesn’t. A ‘short article’, Ben said….):

Hiatus #3

The third hiatus was the biggest and longest, with no UKPVs appearing for any of the 16 months cover dated December 1967 to March 1969. The gaps were again staggered with some titles missing up to 17 consecutive UKPV issues:

During this period, Thorpe & Porter stamped cents copies appear again for the missing UKPVs with sequential stamp numbering in line with the UK shipment dates that I plotted for DC comics which continued to arrive in the UK. As the example below illustrates, both comics are dated May 1968, in the middle of the UKPV hiatus, and both shilling stamps are numbered ‘4’ (indicating that they likely arrived in the UK in the same monthly shipment):

This again supports the theory that this particular Marvel UKPV hiatus was also unlikely to be the result of shipping strikes as previously believed – Marvel and DC shipments clearly continued throughout it.

Hiatus #4 & 5

The fourth hiatus has no UKPVs for any of the 4 months cover dated April  to July 1974. The gaps were again staggered with some titles missing 5 consecutive UKPV issues:

Spidey was probably a bad example to use there as its UKPVs stopped with May 1973’s issue 120 so as not to clash with the newly released Spider-Man Comics Weekly in the UK:

The fifth and final hiatus is a nice, date consistent two-month break with no UKPVs for any of the ongoing titles cover dated February and March 1981:

There’s not too much more to say about the last two hiatuses other than the fact that they exist. The main reason for that is that I haven’t gotten around to delving any deeper. Maybe Richard will, at some point.

OK, what shall we look at next? How about the links between UKPVs and other types of variants? That sounds promising.

Marvel UKPVs and Their Links to Other Types of Variants

During the early days of my Marvel UKPV research I kept discovering links to other types of variants many of which were pretty much under the radar. I’ve mentioned the L Miller indicia copies already – a separate subset of variants in their own right – but the Marvel UKPV research also led me to the discover what I ended up calling the Marvel US Price Font Variations. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it.

When I was building the pence copy master list, and adding new examples, I had to pay very close attention to the price box when scouring online images for each issue that I thought could exist in pence. On eBay especially, I would be able to quickly scour the listings of any given issue and know whether it was a pence copy without opening it (which saved a lot of time). To illustrate, in the early 1960s, many Marvel UKPVs would have pricing set in a white box whereas the US copies would be a white cents price set into the background colour. Strange Tales #75 is a good example:

It became quite easy to spot those types of pence copies – you’d just look out for a white box copy among all the other US copies with their white cents price set into the cover’s background colour. No wonder I’m now cross-eyed. One day I saw the ‘UKPV indicating’ white box on a Strange Tales #75 and thought “Aha! Pence copy” but, on opening the listing, I found it to be cents priced:

Lots of feverish digging around ensued and that is basically how I ‘discovered’ that some early Marvels existed with different ten cent price fonts. I subsequently found that others had noticed them too but, as I’ve often found, no one had taken the trouble to document exactly what existed and perhaps explain why. I did though, and went on to publish the first and I think only issue list available online coupled with a fairly decent explanation as to why they likely exist in the first place.

This illustration below sort of sums up my theory on why the US Price Font Variations exist:

What we see is nine consecutive cents priced issues of Wyatt Earp with identical ‘bold’ 10c price fonts. Then, out of the blue, the tenth issue appears with an odd looking ‘slim’ 10c font, cover dated June 1960. And what also happened with the June issue? The first pence copy was introduced, yes:

If a pence copy for Wyatt Earp #29 had never been printed, the chances are that the font on the cents copy would have been this usual bold one that had been used for many years prior:

My theory on this is that the instruction to produce pence copies hit the printers for the first time around the beginning of 1960, as they were printing the May/June 1960 cover date books. Being the first time they would have done this, they made up a 9d price slug and, perhaps acting on an instruction that the pence copies had to be printed first (to get them across the pond quickly), they scratched out the usual bold 10c price from the printing plate, added in the 9d one and printed off the UK destined pence covers. Then they stopped the presses, removed the 9d price, put back a 10c one but, because the original plate now had a square hole in it, they used the same font as the previous 9d slug.

Did that make sense? It’s hard to put into words sometimes.

Look at these three Strange Tale #75s below:

On the assumption that they all came from the same first print run – I’ve found no evidence to the contrary on that – what do we think the order of printing was here?

Logically, the bold font cents copy was printed first as it exists as a white font set into the blue of the back plate, i.e. the way it was always done. To make the pence copy, the printer scratches out the 10c price from the plate, creating the ‘white box’ hole, and adds a 9d price slug. But on this occasion, perhaps, the message hits that he didn’t print enough cents covers. So he scratches out the 9d slug from the cover plate and adds a second 10c slug to make up the required numbers. The end result? Three different versions of the same issue, all first printings – one pence and two cents. You could see how this sort of error could creep in in those early days which are littered with printing issues, errors and quirks. And remember that the covers were printed separately to the guts so maybe they miscalculated and had more guts than covers.

If you look at this printing plate for the UK Alan Class comic Uncanny Tales #10, you can see that the shilling price is etched into the printing plate to create the white price on the finished cover:

If you wanted to reuse that plate, but with a different price, you’d have to first cut that shilling area out of the plate before you could add in your new price slug. These copies of Astonishing Tales below seem to show that production progression in action (Alan Class reused his covers many times, by the way):

The first plate use is the shilling priced #75, but when Alan decides to reuse the cover for its next outing (number 124), rather than create a brand-new plate he just cuts a square hole where the shilling was and adds in – rather crudely – his new 6p price. Not him personally of course, but his printer. It works though, and perhaps that is how they did it on those early Marvels?

I’m not a printer though to be fair, so I may be talking complete noncents here (heh heh). Whatever the reason(s) may be for the US Price Font Variations existing however, there is one inescapable fact – they started appearing as soon as the pence copies were introduced.

Now, take a look at this lovely Battle #70 pence copy from June 1960, priced 9d:

Isn’t she lovely. Isn’t she wonderful.

This book is special to me for three reasons.

Firstly, it’s one of only two pence copies that I’ve seen of this issue in ten years of looking. The copy above is mine, happily, and the other one is owned by an online chum of mine called Kevin who has got so many comics that he didn’t even know he had it until he opened up a box one day for the first time in 50 years and found it lurking. So with only two known copies, it’s an exceptionally scarce UK Price Variant.

Secondly, by using my US Price Font Variation research – yes, that again – I was able to predict that it would exist in pence long before it was ever confirmed. As the table extract below shows, Battle #70 had two cents priced copies in circulation – a bold font one and a slim font one – so I knew that a 9d slim font copy would one day turn up:

It’s great when one research strand compliments another. I love it when that happens.

The third and final reason I love that Battle #70 pence copy is the story of how I came to own it. I first spotted it in this online auction lot, a good few years ago now, some time before COVID:

Nice looking lot, isn’t it. I could just about make out that it was a pence copy and, of course, was chomping at the bit to have it and to finally prove my theory correct to the world that it would exist (I say the world, no one actually cared that much when I posted about it in triumph. Maybe Triumph was the wrong place to post it). The trouble was, the auction was hundreds of miles away and I didn’t want to risk losing out in the online bidding. So off I went and made a day of it.

When I got there, one of the leading (and nicest) UK dealers was there who of course was after everything he could get his hands on. I could go on – it was an extremely enjoyable day – but we agreed on a plan in which I would bid on my lot and he would bid on everything else.

In the end, I had to bid half of planet Earth to win the lot. But win it I did. All the lots that day went for eye watering prices and there were many oohs and ahhhs as some of them came in at several multiples over what you’d expect. I got it though and although I technically overpaid by a mile, it was worth it. A rare book with a nice acquisition story. It doesn’t get much better than that.

So, that’s the link between Marvel UKPVs and Marvel US Price Fonts covered.

What else is there to tell? Quite a lot actually, and I could probably fill another 20 pages with anecdotes and observations about this, that and the other. So I will! Maybe not 20 pages though.

Anecdotes and observations about this, that and the other (but not 20 pages worth)

One such snippet, which always makes me smile, is this extract from my UKPV tracking spreadsheet which, when viewed in the right light, gives us a potential explanation as to why Marvel Super Heroes #80 exists as a stand-alone 12p priced UKPV and Marvel Team-Up #81 is absent from an otherwise long run of pence copies:

I wonder what could have happened there!

And then there is the Two-Gun Kid #60 pence copy that certain online sources insist on claiming as having a ‘UK-unique’ handwritten issue number even though the cents copy conspicuously has it too:

And no, Stan never wrote it. Or did he…..?

And then there are the host of cover examples that I’ve gathered over the years which give us an insight into the ‘what came first’ printing order debate:

In the example above, you can see the red ink starts to disappear in the ‘F’ of Fantastic only to completely break away as, presumably, that piece of the printing plate snaps off mid print run. Could that pence copy have been printed first, therefore, if all pence copies have the missing red bit? Probably nay.

And with this copy of Spidey #5, you can still see the remnants of the 12c price on the pence copy:

 

That can only mean that the cents cover was printed first. Can’t it? And yet there are also clear examples which imply the opposite – pence covers printed first – as some of the Marvel US Price Font Variation copies I mentioned earlier indicate. Some might have been second though:

I don’t give a hoot which version came first myself. They are all first printings, all part of the same end to end production job. Some may have been first in the queue, some last. Or in the middle somewhere:

It doesn’t matter.

Talking of Amazing Spider-Man #5, earlier, this copy below is one of my collection favourites owing to the cool printing error:

How cool is that? And when does ink tend to run low, incidentally? Towards the end of the run.

 

Look at these five sequential Tales of Suspense pence copies (issues 30-34, images in order):

Four different 9d font types over five consecutive issues. This shows us that consistency may not have been a significant preoccupation of the 1960s printers, including the chap who made up the further cents price slugs on the US Price Font Variants. Something to think about, isn’t it.

And talking of printing finesse, or the lack thereof, it wasn’t getting any better ten years later. Some poor sod had to stamp these by hand, if the wildly different placements are anything to go by:

And this masthead work is just sloppy, I’m sorry:

One last observation – I was once asked which Marvel title had the most UKPVs. My response was this:

Ms Marvel has the longest UKPV run where all issues in the title exist as pence copies (1-23) closely followed by The Fly with all 19 issues in the title existing in pence. Captain America has the longest unbroken pence run of 78 issues (176-253).

I better wrap this up now or we’ll be here all day.

Epilogue

I always liked the epilogue in those old TV shows. They don’t do that anymore, do they. I suppose the final thing I’ll cover before I go (please, go!) is my assessment of which UKPVs would be the hardest to get, if anyone ever felt like taking on the task of collecting all 3,023 this late in the day.

There are a lot of very expensive UKPVs in that run now. Amazing Fantasy #15, Spidey #1, Hulk #1, X-Men #1, Skull The Slayer #4. The list is endless. And there are so many issues that used to go for lower, manageable amounts which have now skyrocketed. So you would have to be very, very rich now to gather a full Marvel UKPV compliment.

If you were rich though, and money was no object, you’d likely find that the significant majority of UKPVs are obtainable with a bit of hunting and perseverance. You wouldn’t have to spend long looking for an AF#15 in pence or any of the other costly ones, although Hulk #1 seems a little scarcer than his peers in my experience. There are two groups of books that you would struggle with, though. The early non-super hero ones, and some of the final ones.

To illustrate, I could count the number of pence copies that I’ve seen in all my years of research on one hand for these two:

And that hand only has three fingers. More of a claw, really.

Many of the early romance, western and war titles are extremely uncommon and you could spend quite a bit of time waiting for one to come onto the market. That probably makes sense of course, as they weren’t as well collected or – clearly – preserved as the super hero books and they also likely had much lower UK print runs.

At the other end of the spectrum I’ve seen precisely two copies of that Marvel Super Heroes #104 pictured above, the very last UKPV in that run, in all my years of looking. It was a very late addition to the 3,023, found in a box at the London Comic Fair (I can still remember it).

Indeed, I’ve yet to find a single copy of Sgt. Fury #167 for myself, since a single copy came to someone else’s attention some years back. It also makes a bit of sense that some of these books are hard to find as they likely had very low print runs as the UKPV era was coming to an end.

Anyway, I’m going to end this article by posing one last comic – Two Gun Kid #60. I like this one because, well, it’s Two-Gun Kid #60, but also because it has been jumped all over by Thorpe & Porter:

Even though Fred obliterated the printed price we know it’s a UKPV as it has no cover month (remember?). And it has a UK indicia. And you can see the 9d price through the stamp anyway. Lovely new 10d price stamp though. What’s not to like.

I’ll go now, finally. I hope you enjoyed reading a bit about Marvel UK Price Variants and my part in their downfall. Be seeing you!

Steve

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