It's been a while since I've done one of these galleries, but once I get started, it becomes a week-long research rabbit hole that is so fun I don't wanna do anything else. Taking an old picture of a newsstand / drug store, I've put together montages of the comic book covers on display. In previous installments (which can be seen here), I mostly presented a small sampling of the covers, but this time, with most of these, I endeavored to show every cover I could discern. I was not 100% successful, but I got most of 'em.
A few notes: The first photo is a 1939 catalogue page from Atlas Wire Products depicting comic books from numerous months in that year. All of the newsstand et al photos are labeled with the cover date of the books on display, which was a few months after they went on sale (the norm for comic books to prolong shelf life). The Autumn 1951 photo is a screencap from the Season 1 episode of ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, "Crime Wave," in which a newsstand vendor has a giant story right behind him: Superman's secret identity, on display in a handful of comic books (also of note, all of the books are DC Comics with the one exception of Harvey Comics' JOE PALOOKA for reasons unknown). The shot from 1953 is actually a repeat image, but this time I've shown every comic instead of the sampling I did in Hey!! Kids!!! Comics!!!! Part I. The kid on the sidewalk is looking at a bunch of comic books in Australia, so most of those are variants from down under. The July 1959 shot (with the greaser) is a different angle on a shot from a previous installment of this series. The two images from 1979 (jumping two decades, as I've said before, good newsstand pics from the 1960s and 70s are hard to find) are from unknown comic book shops, so there's a mixture of new and old books on display.
I've got more of these to come, but they're so labor intensive (and I do have a life, sort of) that it may be a while until Part VII is posted, but when it does come, I'm going to go back to some of the earlier photos and put together more comprehensive montages of the covers on display (as I did with the 1953 entry here). Because, OBSESSIVE.
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| 1939 catalogue listing for comic book racks |
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| June 1940 |
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| March 1942 |
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| June 1942 |
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| May 1948 |
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| June 1948 |
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| July 1948 |
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| November 1948 |
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| July 1949 |
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| Adventures of Superman screencap, covers from Autumn 1951 |
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| February 1951 |
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| Australia 1952 |
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| November 1953 |
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| Spinner rack, left side |
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| Spinner rack, right side |
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| books on the shelf to the left |
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| October 1954 |
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| July 1959 |
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| January 1979 |
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| Comic book store, December 1979 |
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| New comics on display |
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| Old comics on display |
