date=1675654920]
were there ever issues 1-9
Unfortunately these were the only two issues. Ziff, like other Golden Age publishers, often started new comics with high numbers, had a new comic carry on numbering from a cancelled title, and that sort of nonsense. Some of it seems to be related to mailing privileges and some of it just seems like contrariness.
Many small publishers, when starting new lines, wanted them to be picked up for distribution by their distributors. Most distributors didn't take on distribution of every series published by smaller publishers. They only took on new series they thought would sell well. They didn't want to fill up their warehouses with material that wouldn't move. They didn't want to spend a lot of time marketing series that they'd have a hard time getting their retail customers to accept. So, when small publishers started new series, they started their numbering at higher than 5 or 10, so that the distributor would think that those titles already had proven to sell successfully enough to last for several months, or even over a year, in the case of a bi-monthly or quarterly-issued book already having lasted for 9 issues. Bad selling new series rarely lasted past 3-4 issues. The Publisher would drop them, not being able to afford paying artists and writers to produce them, and paying expensive colour printing costs, when sales income for those books is significantly lower than their production costs.
I learned that in the record producing business. Many small, independent record labels started their record numbering series with odd numbers, enough higher than 100, 200, 300, or 1,000 to give the appearance that many different records had been issued, to give the appearance that their new company was stable, and already bringing in enough sales to have been in operation for many months, or a few years.
Unfortunately, Ziff-Davis had many series that started with #10, and only printed #s 10 and 11.
They pulled the plug on many series earlier than many other publishers. Surely that was because their comic book publishing arm wasn't very well funded, and had the tiniest margin of cost vs. revenue requirements to continue operating. That is interesting to me, because their parent company was very successful in other businesses.
