I have to admit that I was disgusted beyond belief when I read this. Claypool Comics has been around for years now - well over a decade - and have been a staple to a lot of people. You don't produce 166 issues of a title if no-one's reading it. So what happened?

Diamond Distributors. I can understand that a company runs to make a profit. But what I cannot understand is how a company can establish itself as a monopoly, eliminate the competition via coercion, threats and buy-outs and then dictate the market. Even Microsoft was pulled up when they started that, however it seems that no-one is able to challenge Diamond. Perhaps I am thick, but I can't work that out. Diamond can close down a company, which they've done with Claypool, and deprive people of their livelihood because that company isn't making enough of a profit to suit them. And Claypool ran at a profit - just that Diamond's cut clearly wasn't enough.

Claypool wasn't a company without any establis…

The big one. For years I'd only ever seen the cover for this book in ads in various Newton comics, never had I clapped eyes upon an original. In fact I started to have serious doubts as to if it actually existed, and those doubts were increased when none other than John Corneille told me that he'd never seen one either. That changed somewhat when another Newton collector, Robert Thomas, informed me that he had an original Swap Card album. Armed with that knowledge I set about tracking down one of the most elusive Newtons of all.

Luck finally came my way a couple of weeks ago when my good friend Kevin Patrick emailed me with some general comments and chat and mentioned that he'd just picked the album up the previous week. I mentioned that if he ever wanted to sell or trade it then to keep me in mind, but knowing Kevin's love for Australian comics I doubted that'd be happening soon. I also asked if he'd be willing to scan it. Kevin then went one better - he'd …

Before we start Scott Rowland has made an interesting observation about the X-Men titles. Scott says, "The Newton X-Men 5 reprinting issues 9 and 11, but omitting 10 may mean that they were working with the materials prepared for Marvel X-Men Annual 1, which did the same. (X-Men 10, the first appearance of Ka-Zar, was reprinted in Ka-Zar volume 1, number 1)." It's an interesting theory and certainly a sound one. It could also be that working on the same principal Marvel never sent the stats/material over to Newton for X-Men 10, however we may never know the definitive answer. It's great to theorize though, so by all means throw those ideas up.

Now to today's entry: The Incredible Hulk.

The Hulk was one of the first wave of Newtons, along with The Amazing Spider-Man, Planet Of The Apes, The Avengers and Dracula. Titles such as The Fantastic Four followed very soon after and can still be considered to be part of that first wave, but the Hulk was there from the start …

One of the main questions I get asked, especially since I started documenting the Newton range, is where can they be bought from and how much do back issues sell for. First up, where can they be bought from? Clearly the answer is dealers, but it's not that simple. A lot of dealers, especially in Australia, don't take the Newton line all that seriously and as such they'll throw the titles into dollar boxes or worse. One dealer I spoke to here in Adelaide told me how he just throws out any Newtons that come into the store. And that was after I told him that I'd happily buy any Newtons he came across, and that he could name his own price. His reply, "Yeah, but you'd be the only one buying them." Again I reiterated that he could name his own price, only to be told that it'd be a waste of time keeping comics for one person only - no competition I guess, thus no-one to play me off against. His loss, not mine, as I go elsewhere.

Most comic shops in Australia …