Mark Anderson writes…
Hi Mark, love your web work (especially the occasional references to Broadway — another passion of mine). Your article about Phil Seuling and comics distribution brought back a memory to me that I could never find more info on. When I was young, I started getting into comics around 1974 or 75, buying at the local Ohio pony keg store. When I would visit my grandmother in Toledo, I remember being able to buy "discount" comics with the covers taken off. These were sold in packs of 4 or 5 and would usually include a "Giant" issue for maybe 50 cents for the pack. My guess is that these would be a secondary market for magazines that never sold in their initial run, but I never ran into them anywhere else. Was this the work of one corner store, or a common practice throughout. Thanks again!
There's a long answer to this and a short one and I'm going to give you the short one…which as you'll see, is not all that short. This was back in the days when almost all comic books in this country were distributed on a returnable basis. The national distributor would ship bundles and crates (usually, bundles) to regional distributors. The regional distributors would ship comics to neighborhood newsstands which would offer them for sale.
The neighborhood newsstand had the option of sending their unsold comics back for credit and sometimes, if they got in 25 copies of the new Action Comics and didn't have room on their racks or didn't think they could sell that many, they'd return some or even all of them immediately. Or they'd send back unsold issues after a week or two. In theory, they were supposed to send back all the unsold copies of a given comic when the next issue came out but most got away with returns whenever they felt like it. At the main rack I patronized, the employees would return comics when they started to look a little shabby from kids pawing through them.
Simple math would then be done. Your newsstand got in 1000 comics last month. You returned 400. You pay for 600. The regional distributor would then take its cut of what you paid and pass the rest on to the national distributor. The national distributor would take its cut and pass what was left on to the publisher.
Ah, but what about those returned comic books? What happened to them?
In certain areas, deals were brokered to redistribute them, usually overseas. In some warehouse somewhere, kids being paid minimum wage or less would sort through them, pull out the ones in good condition and package them to be sent to other countries, often to be sold at U.S. military installations. It has been alleged that often, a publisher or distributor would get back 50,000 copies of an unsold-in-this-country comic, ship 20,000 of them overseas to be sold and then claim for tax purposes that all 50,000 were pulped.
Pulping — turning the comic back into raw materials for possible reuse — was what they were supposed to do to all the unsold comics. That often didn't happen.
Let us say you're a regional distributor in the mid-west. At the end of the month, you have around 100,000 unsold copies of comics published by my company. You want to get credit for them but it really isn't cost-efficient for anyone if you ship them back to my plant in New York and I pulp them there. It's easier if you send them to a pulping company in your area or even have your own machines. Okay: Then how do we handle the accounting on these? There were basically three methods…
- The Affidavit Method. You just tally the unsold comics, pulp them and send me an affidavit saying you pulped 98,573 of my comics so you owe me no money for them. I trust you. The potential for abuse of this system is pretty obvious…and indeed, it was abused. Lying abounded. There are scholars who've studied this practice and concluded that some comics that were canceled for reported bad sales actually sold very well. They were just victims of affidavit fraud.
- The Partial-Cover Method. You have kids in your warehouse tear off the top third-or-so of the cover of each comic. There were machines that could do this but more often, it was done by hand. Tearing off that strip rendered the comic void and unsellable so you could ship me just those strips of cover and I could count them if I didn't trust you…though more often, it was done by weight. And then you send me an affidavit that you pulped the rest of each comic.
- The Full-Cover Method. This is like the Partial-Cover Method except that you tear off the entire cover of each comic and ship it to me.
The Partial-Cover Method was the main one used but it had its loopholes. In some areas, the comics weren't pulped after the title strips were removed. In some areas, they were sold for reduced prices, usually in bundles. In most cases, the publisher never received a cut on these.
There were many ways this deal worked. Some regional distributors were in on it, some weren't. In some cases, a guy would bring a truck around to the regional distributors' warehouse after hours or on the weekend and some employee there would fill the truck with stripped, to-be-pulped comics for quick cash. In some cases, an outside pulping plant fenced the goods. I once heard a long "confession" from a then-retired employee of a regional distributor in Southern California. The owners of the distributor were like Sgt. Schultz on Hogan's Heroes, officially knowing nothing. But they did get a cut when their warehouse crew sold tons of allegedly-pulped unpulped comics out the back door.
The stripped comics were sold in various venues, usually in bundles and always for much less than the comics would have cost intact. There was an old bookstore in downtown L.A. I visited often in the early sixties when I was amassing much of my comic book collection. A comic bought at a newsstand then was 12 cents. In this and most stores, used copies went for a nickel each. In this store — it was called Everybody's Books — you could also buy a bundle of twenty stripped comics, tied in twine, for fifty cents. I didn't buy many of them. I bought comics mainly for reading, not collecting, and the stripped comics were quite readable. Still, I felt uneasy about coverless and partial-cover comics. They were like injured pets.
But the big problem with the bundles was you could only see the top comic and you didn't know what else you were getting until you went home and cut the twine. If you bought two bundles, they might contain the exact same books but with a different one on top. All the bundles at Everybody's contained somewhere in them, a partial-cover copy of The Brave and the Bold #28 featuring the first appearance of the Justice League of America.
On a grander scale, there was a little shop in San Diego — my parents took me there once when we were on vacation — that sold nothing but coverless and partial-cover comics. They had thousands, unbundled, for a nickel each, six for a quarter. I went there shortly after I'd discovered and fallen for Batman. I left there with 96 damaged but readable issues of Batman and Detective Comics which I voraciously consumed for the remainder of that trip.
The sale of comics that were supposed to have been destroyed was not a secret. It was done openly in Southern California until around 1968 and I never heard of any publisher or distributor objecting. I'm sure the practice continued elsewhere after that but around '68 was when the shops I went to stopped carrying them. There is evidence into the seventies of what I mentioned earlier: Comics selling decently but being viewed as failures because someone exaggerated the number of returns.
I have a hunch why the sale of comics that lacked full covers disappeared. It was in the mid-sixties that a lot of magazine articles appeared heralding how much old comic books sold for…in good condition. I suspect those articles just made disfigured comics seem less desirable. But maybe that's a silly theory and the real reason had something to do with publishers and/or distributors quietly, as opposed to openly, cracking down on the racket.
Well, that's the short version and I apologize that it went on this long. The full version would include a lot more about dishonest dealings by distributors — it was not the cleanest of businesses — and questions of where the money went. There are a few folks I know researching this kind of thing and I'm eager to learn more about it. I'll try to follow-up when I do.