Erika M Anderson

Wrong adverts

I’m not sure why this comic destined to be distributed in the UK has Australian adverts? Was it an error or are there more instances? I possess a dozen other (admittedly earlier) UK copies of this title and the ones with adverts have UK addresses, often for Charles Atlas courses or similar.

Would a child in the UK sending the coupon to Dubbo, New South Wales Australia get anything back? If they did at least the envelope would have another interesting stamp on it!

Superman in Australia began a couple of years earlier than the UK reprints, so had different numbering and mostly different pricing. Our May 1959 Superman 109 had the same number of pages/contents as Australia’s April 1959 number 141 which cost twice the price down under.

PS: The fact that the final UK Superman issue was published in January 1960 might mean that although DC reprint comics continued in Australia for many years K G Murray were no longer able to distribute their variants in the UK as Thorpe and Porter were now sole-importer of the real things??

More wrong adverts

Unusually for UK reprint comics there are two slightly different covers available for this issue. One has “COMICS” top left in white. The other has “COMICS” in yellow. They must have felt the need to remove the “NOW MONTHLY” that featured on the original cover. Was the change in colour the result of a second printing run due to the first batch quickly selling out? Who knows. Who cares. etc etc

This 68 page Arnold/Jenson/Thorpe and Porter (?) UK black and white comic reprints strips from two pre-code Prize comics. Undated, it must have been published between 1952 and 1955. Was it laziness that saw the american ads appearing? Later comics published by Thorpe and Porter would see them use the half page gaps to advertise other comics in their line up. They never seemed to try too hard to solicit adverts for the interior pages of their comics. But ads often appeared on the inside covers.

I think readers in the UK would have little joy responding to ads for businesses on the other side of the Atlantic ocean.
It always puzzled me that so many adverts in old horror comics seem to target a younger audience than the books were aimed at.

How bonkers is this. They even reprint the Statement of Ownership details which don’t even apply to this reprint.

Here is the original Prize cover from March 1952.

Back cover

Tenderness Versus Watering the Lawn Backwards

I’m mystified that such a great song doesn’t get more recognition.