I was recently looking at an image from 1945 of the comic section of a general store, and it really is amazing to see how much was available. Yes, folks back then didn't have all the entertainment options that we have today, but I'm still impressed. It's a shame that comic companies and shops have fallen on such hard times these days, especially given the popularity of the characters and stories from comics in the movies and TV. Hopefully the shops and industry will find a way to survive through the ongoing pandemic and shut down.
Plastic Man and Cap shared a more modern age adventure in STF #2542...
17 comments:
Wow! That general store even kept the books in good shape. Very few stores I had near me bothered to do that.
Plas and Cap were fine but Skull looked a bit off.
Happy Mothers day! Where are all the comic reading females? Very few seemed to have found this site.
That's one crazy picture of Red Skull -- not only is his head a lot creepier than I've ever seen it, but the symbol on his chest looks like a representation of the Japanese flag (at the time). Hopefully someone can enlighten me about the situation on the original work.
I personally am going to seriously look at some comics subscriptions once the current shutdown has relaxed. (No grocery store in my youth had more comics than could be held on two rotating wire racks!)
See Plas here makes me yearn for a return of the Expansion Team.
Nice cover as always and awesome pic of the comic books. If only I had a time machine and currency from that time period... And a suggestion for Mother's Day next year... Invisible Woman and Lois Lane vs Granny Goodness. For Father's Day, a sequel... Mr. Fantastic and Superman vs Darkseid.
In the village I grew up in, two places sold comics, the bus depot (wire rack) and the drug store next door, which had a layout like this one, but smaller. I got into comics because the city's Sunday paper was dropped off at the bus deport, and when I went with my dad to pick it up I sometimes was able to get a comic (Caspar and Disney to start with, then Superboy and Detective (Robin). When the bus station closed down the wire rack moved next door to the drug store. The kids books stayed on the rack, while the super-heroes and what little crime/horror books(the CCA having destroyed that market) and regular lower class magazines were on the shelves. In high school I got a job as an evening clerk at the drug store, where I read 10 comics for each one I bought. But for some distribution reason, we only had DC / Harvey / etc., but no Marvel. It took until I left for college (early 70's) to find the Avengers and X-Men.
As for Red Skull and the Japanese flag, it was fairly common to try and demonize both Axis powers on the covers, even though Cap was always fighting on the Nazi front. Red Skull hadn't become Cap's Arch-Nemesis yet.
Special Mom's Day:
Invisible Woman, Wonder Woman (Hippolyta), Scarlet Witch, Mera
vs. Talia al Ghul, Mystique & Cheshire.
Wow! That truly was the Golden Age of comics. It's funny how times change. I still have no use for digital copies, I need to feel them in my hands and smell them (better back when it was newsprint) as I read them.
Its not just comic books, print media (books, magazines, and newspapers) have been dying off for a while as new media like movies, radio, TV, video games, dvds, internet, etc become popular.
Happy Mother's Day to all the lady-folk in your extended family, Ross.
:-)
I seriously half-expected the Forever People to be standing together, holding up a sign that read: "Happy Mother Box Day!"
;-)
If there's a special Father's Day cover this year, I think that there's no better pairing than to revisit Odin and Jor-El.
@Bob Greenwade: Guest-starring Jim Harper II as "The Asguardian?"
Say hi to Brainiac and a box of shrunken super heroines. All kinds in that mother box.
The Silver Age verdant version? Or the Gigerized robot version?
Alas, the only thing that might save comics would be the invention of a cheap process for making high-quality paper.
The prices of comics never go down because the price of paper never goes down.
The cost is why I finally had to quit comics in 2007.
Great story Jay Johnson.
I grew up in Brooklyn, NYC in the late '70s/early '80s. It was a notoriously bad neighborhood but I didn't know it at the time. Near my apartment was the candy store that had a small spinning rack. The comics were awfully STUFFED in without care, sometimes 3 titles in one basket so you had to thumb three everything to see what was there. The lady who ran that shop really didn't care! Haha. Option 2 was the large newsstand under the subway overpass. They had a huge shelf behind a glass similar to Ross' photo. Large selection but issues were inconsistent. You never knew if the following issue would pop up. Honestly, buy comics was like going on an Easter egg hunt. You could not rely on just one store to get your titles.In the subway, near your school, with your parents out shopping in the city, if you found an issue on sale you grabbed it because it might not be sold near you. When we moved to the Long Island suburbs in '84 I discovered shops kept consistent distribution and I also discovered specialty shops for the first time!?!. The nightmare was over!
For me, the nightmare restarted when DC and Marvel went back to $0.25. Then, rose to $0.30 (etc. etc. etc.)!
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