I popped into the local convenience store the other day and was surprised to see something that hasn’t been on sale there in many, many years; a display selling comic books.
It wasn’t a spinner rack, mind you. Those disappeared from corner stores and grocery markets a long time ago. Collectors now search antique stores and flea markets for the tall wire metal racks to display not the current month’s selection of titles, but favorite samples from personal collections, not in corner store but in man caves.
This thing was a temporary cardboard display, the kind delivered flat and then folded into shape by a worker, little tabs inserted into corresponding slots to hold it together. I put together my share of them, working at a big box retailer, but never assembled one to display comic books.
The disposable nature of the cardboard display likely means it is a temporary feature. The old metal spinner racks were semi-permanent fixtures, stocked and sorted once a month by the store owner or a person from the periodicals service, returning older, unsold titles for credit and putting newer issues in its place, normally according to cover date or a color code at the top of the interior pages. Back then, it was a system, because buying comics was a regular thing for kids, teenagers and adults alike.
My guess is this new display is a brief anomaly, a marketing tie-in riding on the coattails of the most recent Superman movie. The comics all prominently featured Superman, Batman or characters from DC Comics’ constellation of trademarks.
Word is the new movie generated enough positive buzz from viewers that sales of Superman comics are seeing a bump in numbers. These displays are trying to cash in on that.
The comics cost more now than they did when I was a kid, but what doesn’t these days? The art is just as good, if not better. Or at least the art is more technically accomplished, though I don’t know how appealing it actually is to kids.
When I prowled the spinner rack as a boy, the covers weren’t just heroes crouching or leaping at you, trying to look cool. They were actually doing cool stuff: tossing tanks around, zapping UFOs, rescuing gorgeous women from monsters and the like.
There were deathtraps, runaway vehicles, pools of acid and bombs about to explode. Most of all there were word bubbles and other captions known as cover copy, enticing the curious reader with phrases like “If we don’t stop them, the city is doomed!” or “They’re dead—and you killed them!”
The trick was making you want to know what happened inside the cover. At the very least, if you liked dinosaurs, this one had a dinosaur on the cover. If you liked spaceships, that one had a space battle going on. Modern comic covers all have a creeping, homogenized sameness to them.
If you want to buy a comic, for a kid or for the kid in you, my advice is to seek out the nearest comic shop. We live in a comics desert, so that means a trip to Valdosta, Savannah or Jacksonville. The dollar bins will be full of fun stuff at a fraction of the price.
But if you’re only up for a drive to the corner store, one of these will do.
