Digifiend wrote:Kashgar wrote:We've covered this ground on this forum before. All of AP's tabloid titles, if they survived the war at all, Chips, Comic Cuts, Wonder, Tip-Top and Jingles were fortnightly until 1952 when an end to paper rationing allowed them to become weeklies again. (Similarly Thomsons weren't able to launch Topper until the beginning of 1953).
I can also confirm that Tip-Top and Jingles were produced by the same production team on alternate weeks in the same way that the editors of the Thomson boys' papers Rover (John Low) and Adventure (Stuart Gilchrist) had edited the fortnightly issues of Dandy and Beano respectively along with their own fortnightly produced papers during the war years.
Yeah, I suppose if the war hadn't happened, Topper might've launched in 1940, or at least early that decade, since they seemed to be releasing them once a year (Dandy 1937, Beano eight months later in 1938, and Magic a year after that, 1939) with the intention of making a comics big five to go with the story paper big five. How is is that Beano and Dandy were able to resume weekly publication in 1949, but AP had to wait another three years?
Resumption of weekly publication was, like its cessation during the war, a more complicated business than it might appear.
For a start the AP kept a number of its titles on a weekly publishing schedule throughout the war and beyond eg Film Fun, Knockout, Radio Fun, Champion but they did this by cancelling quite a considerable number of titles in the 1939-1941 period and by allowing their remaining tabloid comic titles to be published fortnightly.
Thomsons on the other hand chose to go down the all fortnightly route in 1941 and even so they still lost Magic and Skipper.
Thomsons boys' papers resumed a three week in four publishing schedule in Nov/Dec 1946 and full weekly publication in Mar 1949 with the Dandy and Beano, who never adopted the three in four week publishing scedule of their boys' paper stablemates, resuming weekly publication in July 1949.
It should be pointed out that, like a fair number of rationed items, paper wasn't a commodity that was on the ration one week and then off it the next. It was derationed in stages and what the AP or Thomsons chose to do with their slowly increasing allocation of paper was a matter of choice. The AP may well have kept their tabloid titles on fortnightly publishing schedules till Nov 1952 so that they could have paper with which to launch new titles eg School Friend in May 1950 and Lion in Feb 1952. Thomsons chose not to do this.
There is also the matter of idiosyncratic in-house politics to consider. The AP was very much governed by old men in the immediate post war years who fought the corner of long established titles like Comic Cuts and Chips and probably extended their lives on nothing more than adequate fortnightly sales. And its certainly no surprise that when the old guard were no longer in control three of the AP's most venerable tabloid titles Chips, Comic Cuts and Wonder were sacrificed overnight to make way for the 'trendy' new television based comic TV Fun.
Seriously though, this sort of trading is scandalous. British comics and ephemera in general are way too expensive IMHO. I know some folks pick up bargains now and again but for the majority of us , prices for yellowed copies of old comics are prohibitive. You'd have to take out a small mortgage just to complete a collection. Still a long way behind our American cousins I'm afraid.
Just kidding.