| Posted: 30 May 2012 at 5:02am | IP Logged | 9
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The most important thing to keep in mind about that photograph -- and the reason I post it myself from time to time -- is that there was nothing extraordinary about that comic rack. It was not located in a specialty shop -- probably it was on the back wall of some drugstore, alongside the other magazines. It might have been a larger newsstand. It could even have been in the magazine department of a department store.In other words, that kid could have walked in off the street -- basically, Anystreet, USA -- and found that wall of comics waiting for him. That's precisely what happened to me, in fact, the first time I walked into Eatons department store, on Jasper Avenue, in Edmonton, Canada, when I was eight years old. And a couple of blocks down the street from Eatons was the Mike's magazine and book, which had a similarly huge rack of comics. Across the street from the apartment complex where my parents and I lived was a big shopping center, where I could buy comics from a rack on the end of one of the aisles in Woodward's grocery store, or walk to the other end of the mall and find a big display of comics in the United Cigar Store. Or any drugstore, where there would be, at the very least, a spinner rack. As there was at the bus depot, the airport, the train station. It's a point that really cannot be belabored: kids-- the target audience -- did not have to search out a "comic book shop" to find the product. They were everywhere. Even the local barber shop had a big stack of comics for kid customers to read.
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