Let's get to the TRUTH (though no one really cares)

   I apologise in advance if this turns into a long ramble.  I know 95% of you will have no interest in this while the other 5% (or in comic figures that's officially 1.5%) will be grinding their teeth and cursing mec again because they DO NOT like this sort of thing being out in the open.

Downthetubes has posted two interesting items on sales figures of British comics:
https://downthetubes.net/?page_id=7110

and:

https://downthetubes.net/?page_id=9082

   The reader will note that it is mentioned that getting sales figures is somewhat difficult as opposed to other areas of entertainment.  The reason for this is quite simple: British comics companies were not built on honesty.

   I had several long conversations with the late Gil Page who had started out in Amalgamated Press and lasted 40+ years until Egmont took over and "pushed" him onto the golf course. I was told how there "were two ledgers -one official one that the accountants used to have a job straightening out and a white one".  I had spent 1975-1994 talking to retired former publishers as well as those still in business and I had heard of "white ledgers" as well as "ghost books" a number of times.

   I need to make a caveat here in that I will not be naming names because some of those involved are still alive and it would be unfair to put them under any deep scrutiny -we all recall the example of the excellent Wasted comic and what happened through non-declaration of sales/taxes. We are also talking about companies that hid the whereabouts of its original art storage warehouse because so much was, 'borrowed' by editors.

   I was having a conversation with Mr. TP in his office and I was asking about financial problems involved in comic publishing as I did not want to make any big "beginner mistakes" (at this time in the late 1970s my intention was to just be a publisher). Mr TP smiled and told me "Always keep a ghost in your drawer!"  Yes, I was confused since that phrase had some dubious connotations so I asked what he meant and he replied: "The ghost that will pay for the holiday or car". This went on some while until I asked if he could explain it to the idiot in plain English. He did so.

   I have written about this before so I'll summarise here. Newsagents and distributors all had little "fiddles" that everyone in the industry knew about but so long as it never had a big financial impact it was overlooked. Added to this was the fact that there could be fiddles within fiddles going on including titles never being distributed -this was still going on in the 1980s and in Bristol alone there were so many weekly comics failing to appear in parts of the city that I corresponded with companies (I still have that correspondence) who had no idea but that was in writing. Face-to-face they admitted this always happened.

   The distributors and printers also had their little fiddle. I spoke to the printers (two different ones) who used to print some of the weekly comics (and for one conversation I had two witnesses with me). I was looking at quotes and talking paper stocks and mentioned how some of the weekly comics varied in size from week-to-week.  It seems that companies wanted the cheapest printing and went for the cheapest available newsprint stock. The printer "always has a reserve of lesser quality -cheaper- paper" and this, it seems, was often substituted so that the printer made "a few pennies more". To be honest I had spoken to a number of printers and there was no hiding any of this and it was, again, taken as standard practice.  As a potential publisher at that time what was I going to do -spill the beans?  Good luck with getting a comic published if you were blacklisted by the printers union.

A snapshot of British comic sales in 1984, published in the comics fanzine Fantasy Advertiser no. 88.

   I was to later learn that the editorial people knew all about this.  It was quite a joke about "the necessity to increase the cover price" because this turned out to also be a fiddle -from the very top people in the company.

   Some people in the distribution trade were also "well known rogues" (criminals -yep, the United States was not alone in that) and there was no big secret.  I was told three times by editors and twice by publishers: "If you are in this business you need to know the lay of the land or you go nowhere".

   This brings us back to Mr. TP and his "ghost" and the "white books".  These could be anything from old account receipt books to note books. These showed the real money coming in and what was skimmed off before going to the legitimate accountant who put the books in order (there were claims that certain accountants knew of all the fiddles and were in on it themselves, however, accountants tend not to blab).

   Things could be arranged so that more than 1% of copies of a title were returned which was where companies saw it as "unprofitable" to continue publishing and so titles merged.  I never questioned this until I realised just how much money publishers were throwing away by cancelling because of such a low return figure. Quite by accident I discovered that the 'loss' involved would also involve a tax refund for the publisher and that the title merger also involved a well known tax dodge. When I confronted ex-editors and one retired publisher about this the publisher stated "absolutely everything was legal" and the editors?  "Not our job -that's  board room business" they all answered.

   As the law changed and artist had to have their artwork returned it was evident just how much of it had been stolen -we all know what 'borrowed' means.  John Cooper and Mike Western both told me that in a way that was probably a good thing as they were both packed out with returned work. Both -and a few other artists- pointed out that it was all work for hire and so returned work had never been envisioned.

   Basically, they got a script, drew the set (strip) and handed it over and then awaited payment. End of story.  Gil Page noted how, as a young man at Amalgamated Press he had handled the contracts and scripts as part of his job.  Everyone, it seems, was talking about "the creator of Superman" having created characters for the company and -he mentions this in my interview with him- there on the scripts and contract was the name Jerry Seigel -The spider, clearly based on American pulps was one character. The other was Gadget Man and Gimmick Kid and "I believe the Phantom Viking was another" -clearly based on Thor I was told.

   Today anyone and everyone claims to have created various characters and that is easy to do. I created Storm Force for the new Eagle comic.  You see, there was an even bigger fiddle going on when it came to creators rights.  Firstly, they did not exist until the 1980s. There were no work contracts; someone was told a new character had been created and they were the person to draw it -Mike Western refers to this in my interview with him in which he references Tom Tully's new Eagle character The Avenger (and, boy, did I have several conversations with the company about that one) and how he was given the script, had to design and then draw the character -that would, today, make him the co-creator of the character.  But back then you did the work and got paid.

   The history of Amalgamated Press -IPC- Fleetway-Odhams IPC-Maxwell Pergamon Publishing and so on is deliberately confusing. A sell off of a certain portion of the comics between Maxwell and IPC and...well, Robert Maxwell once told me "They're all crooks in comics!" (I say no more). It could have gotten quite confusing if things had panned out in the 1990s because Robert Maxwell wanted a comic book empire and his bitter rival, Rupert Murdoch wanted one (let's not get into why).  But there is a very basic problem here that is also a huge one.

   A sold the company to B who published the titles with characters used by A -in some cases there were slight or total character name changes and people often wondered what the point was because it never fooled anyone -same character, reprinted strip just different character/strip name. I shall explain that in a line or two. B then sells what A had sold it to C. Later C sells back to B after it goes out of business and D comes along and buys out B but also sells some of its characters to B -from whom they just purchased the company.

   Here is the problem. In these sell-offs the company might be sold lock, stock and barrel. In other cases titles might be sold off. Odhams, the nearest company to where I was living, had very chatty boardroom types and they told me how they had sold off their humour characters to Fleetway/IPC (behind doors both claimed they owned these characters which was farce in the extreme as until a later sell off they were almost one company) and this is important because it was the humour strips that were wanted and bought "They had no interest in the adventure characters as they said they had enough well established characters and didn't need more".

   In all of this confusion have you noted what is missing?  The insignificant aspect of the deals -the writers and artists. Don Lawrence and later Leo Baxendale blew all of this into the open with their legal cases (go look them up).  You see, the title -if registered/copyrighted and it seems that most companies decided not to bother as that cost money and once printed it was theirs and who, in that day and age was going to challenge them? - was 'theirs'.  However, the characters under the law at the time was work-for-hire so owned by the company but the laws changed long ago. here is an example.

   Billy Bunns works from home (as 95% of comic creators did) and he has this idea for a new humour strip -The Funky Ghost.  He draws up designs, might write a script or draw the first page.  He takes it to his editor, Honest Joe Con.  Con loves it -yes, the Bungo will feature the character in one page every week.  Bunns goes home and puts the strip together and completes the first ten. Eventually, it could take up to a month, he gets paid for strip #1 (you only get paid upon publication so no big advances). After two months Honest Joe decides not to continue with the strip. Three years later the company is sold and The Funky Ghost appears in a new title as The Funky Spook. Bunns gets no money or credit.

   That is how it worked but there are problems.  For one thing, Bunns created the character at home so it does not and never did belong to the comic company -he produced the strips as agreed which could be construed as work-for-hire but he did not create the character on the company premises and he never sold the character to the company.  Artists never argued -they needed the paying work and the mentality of "I created that and I own it!" never existed because "the company is the boss" (some asses still insist that is the case in 2019!!).

   Was Bunns permission sought to re-name and then reprint the The Funky ghost as The Funky Spook in another title under a different owner?  Were any of the creators -artists or writers- ever asked to approve the use of their work under a new owner? The excuse of "Under the mindset of the time" is totally irrelevant when it comes to modern law and creator rights the question is who created the character because who ever created it owns it. It is well and good to say "We purchased the company archive of characters" and announce that you are going to publish collected works or whatever, but you cannot claim ignorance of fact and law unless you are really, really stupid.

   As in most industries, but entertainment in particular, it is always the creative who gets screwed over. They need to eat and earn money so they create a game, a character or music and the company men are the ones who will make absolutely 100 percent sure that the creative has no rights and does not get rich (there are very few exceptions) because as long as the creative is hungry he'll need to come up with another money earner...for the company to profit from.

   I always wondered why Fleetway wanted two copies of a script from me -I always made three carbon copies of a script (two for the company and one for myself) which cost me re. extra paper but it was cheaper than photocopying pages -as with postage to the company that came out of my pocket. Gil Page explained to me that certain editors "got creative" and submitted invoices for scripts and money went into their pockets (another major fiddle the editors were in on). Accountants had noticed "discreprancies" after Egmont purchased Fleetway (by which time certain editors had made a lot of extra money) and it was insisted on that a script signed by the scripter (the extra copy) went to accounts to place on file and nothing was paid out unless that copy was in accounts hands.  It is how a certain editor left Egmont and I was owed £5,580 -all documented- but Egmont response was that I would have to find the editor in question as he no longer worked for them and get the money (I have that in writing, too).

   As for sales figures it was a case of cooking the books.  Before computers the tax office relied on accountants and ledgers so they only saw the figures the company bosses wanted -however high or low they wanted them to be at that time. I once asked Gil Page about 2000 AD sales figures and he told me: "We print 60,000 copies so if asked we have 'sales' of 60,000. Obviously it is nowhere near that and we usually refer to a 'cult following' if we can get away with it".  I asked another publisher (still in business so I will not name him for very obvious reasons) the same question. His reply was in front of two other people who were with me:"You read the title, right?  Your friend here gets to see it and you may let someone borrow it -that's three readers right there.  Now if we only sell, 30,000 copies that does not sound impressive but if we assume people share the issue like you then the total readership is around 90,000 which is far more impressive.  If asked about sales we might given the higher rather than the lower figure". There was a slight deviousness about the answer and the logic given might almost seem to make sense!

   So, a print run of 130,000 copies 'is' your readership.  You print 1 million copies then that is your readership figure.  Yet, as noted, many copies never even reached newsagents or made it outside of warehouses.  Alan Class noted how a thousand copies delivered to W. H. Smith warehouse never left it and when he made enquiries he learnt they had all been incinerated by the warehouse.  That was not uncommon. Also you need to add to this that claims for books lost in transit resulted in insurance money or at best a nice tax refund.  So 130,000 readership becomes a lot less.  The 1 million readers becomes far, far less and let's think about it, comics were disposable entertainment but even so it would mean (we never had mass comic burnings in the UK as in the US) there are millions of Golden Age British comics out there.

   Going by the figures given on downthetubes, 1953 saw some 3,992,397 in circulation and of those comics only a few hundred still exist?  Then if we add the Humour comics of 1953 -The Beano and The Dandy with 1 million each and Knockout, Radio and TV Fun with 1,300,000 then Micky Mouse Weekly with 523,497 and  TV Comic with 268,391 you have 4,091,888. In total, 1953 saw some 8,084,285 comics in circulation.

   I put this to someone who studies statistics and works at a university and he added in "all the variables" and told me that if a million copies of a title were produced each year -that is 52 weeks-all print runs for each title- some 100 million copies ought to be out there. He later told me that he had made an error but if the copies total was correct for each year then for 1950-2000 there would be "Many, many millions of copies still out there". The figures for 1953 and other years does prove that there really ought to be millions of old comics out there.

   The confusion comes with the official figures given because, remembering that up until the early 1960s paper was still subject to rationing, the number of titles and pages within, far exceeded what ought to be available.  He was correct about the fact that there would need to be many millions of copies of comics floating around out there and he has a point regarding paper usage.  I may have also stumbled upon the answer though there is nothing in writing.  Talk to old printers who were in business in the 1940s-1960s and you will hear a lot of stories of the poor quality paper they had to use but also how they managed to 'find some quality stock' for the right customer.  When you see the huge size of the rolls of printing paper you have to be very imaginative about how these were traded on the black market!  There also seemed to be no problem in getting hold of paper "if you knew the right person".

   And this is assuming that the companies really did print that many copies.  If you claimed to print 268,950 copies then you could claim, by your own returns figures, that you had made a loss and in comes the tax dodge. Fact and logic based on the given figures shows that there must be millions of old British comics out there from before the 1970s.  Where are they?

   There was a very good reason why most ledgers had entries written in pencil.

   What it comes down to is this: the comics industry was a very crooked business and could involve double or even triple book keeping from the boardroom right down to the distributor and newsagent. Oh, and I need to be quite clear that a number of creators were and are far from innocent in their own dealings (one in particular who I know will be reading this needs to be VERY honest about his tax returns!).

   I am not even going to cover all those people who attend every convention and 'never'  make a penny and who never declare their sales in their taxes.

   Never be in any doubt that every time you see those old stories about how great everyone was/is in the comics industry that you are hearing/reading bull-shit.  When you read those figures of how many comics were printed/sold each week as yourself where are the many millions of copies that should still be in existence because it makes no logical sense that millions upon millions have vanished leaving us with, perhaps, a few hundred in total of all the titles combined.

   Crooks in the US comic industry were amateurs.