Entrepreneur Fred Thorpe started with a newsagent's shop in Leicester, where he recognized the appeal of American pulp magazines and comic books.
After World War II, however, the UK was intent on promoting homegrown publishers, and thus banned the direct importation of American periodicals.
Inside the front cover, with the indicia, a sentence mentioned Thorpe & Porter as sole distributor in the UK market.
[7] The company was purchased by Independent News Distributors (IND), the distribution arm of National Periodical Publications (DC Comics).
[2] (Traditionally, IND distributed all DC publications, as well as those of a few rival publishers, such as Marvel Comics from 1957 to 1969, in addition to pulp and popular magazines.)
(Thanks to Gilberton World-Wide Publications,[5] Williams had European-language divisions in Denmark,[11] Finland,[12] France,[13] Germany,[14] Italy,[15] the Netherlands,[16] and Sweden;[17] most of these publishers were sold off around 1979.)
Warner sold its publishing division, including Thorpe & Porter, to W. H. Allen & Co. in 1977, which in 1978 decided to close it down[18] (with Skinn almost immediately moving on to the top position at Marvel UK).
For their part, the Babani brothers of Brown Watson retained the various licenses for their hardback annuals, and in 1979 formed a new company, Grandreams, to continue publishing them.
[21] After his stint at Marvel UK, in 1982 Skinn started Quality Communications and revived House of Hammer (as Halls of Horror); he continued the magazine until 1984.
Thorpe & Porter started out as a publisher of lurid and sensationalist paperback books, originally in digest size and later in the more traditional format.
Thorpe & Porter was one of the first British publishers to print its own clean versions of the comics, "using blocks made from imported American matrices.
UK issues of Classics Illustrated that were never published in the United States include Aeneid, The Argonauts, The Gorilla Hunters and Sail with the Devil.
Mick Anglo adapted three stories — by Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Wilkie Collins — for the T & P Classics Illustrated.
Classics Illustrated line (making it a collector's item in the States),[2] but instead was sold to DC Comics, which published it as part of their superhero anthology series, Showcase.
The T & P imprint Strato (originally created for its paperback line) published thirteen issues of a Mystery in Space reprint, a 68-page A4-size magazine, between 1954 and 1956.
[34] Other reprint titles with which T & P had some success included Blackhawk, Gene Autry Comics, Forbidden Worlds, Kid Colt, Outlaw, Tomahawk, and Young Romance.
Conflicts over content occasionally arose between the parent magazine and its international franchisee; when a comic strip satirizing the English royal family was reprinted in a Mad paperback, it was deemed necessary to rip out the page from 25,000 copies by hand before the book could be distributed in Great Britain.
The Brown Watson[b] imprint,[10] launched in the early 1950s, originally published genre paperbacks like Sinister Forces by Alvin Westwood (1953) and The Horror from the Hills by Frank Belknap Long (1965).
[10] (The hardcover annuals tradition was a staple of the UK comics scene; the company most known for this type of publication was World Distributors, which started producing them in the 1950s.)
"[19][40] Starting in the 1950s, Thorpe & Porter published a number of men's magazines of questionable taste, an early title being Clubman, and another being Comic Cuties.