Spinner Rack Blues, by Mike Gold
“Ah, you kids today, you’ve got it easy.”
I’m sure over the past several million years that line started more lectures than all the speed freak professors at all the Ivy League schools combined. It also inspired more than a few comedy routines, too, including a classic from Monty Python. But when it comes to comics, you kids today, you’ve got it easy – if you’re lucky enough to live within travelling distance of a friendly neighborhood comic book store.
For the first 40 years of this medium’s history (much longer for Archie Comics), comic book sales were dependent upon spinner racks like the one pictured above. They appeared at local candy stores, drug stores, toy stores, newsstands, train and bus stations, and even some grocery stores. They were low-profit, high-labor efforts that gave parents some place to park the kiddies while they were buying cigarettes and Sal Hepatica.
As comics fans, we rarely had any idea when new issues would appear and we hardly ever knew when brand-new titles would pop up. A handful would be advertised within the comics themselves, but the on sale date wasn’t necessarily accurate. Distributors received the books two to three weeks prior to release date, and sometimes would pass some of them along early if there was space on the truck. Or if there wasn’t, sometimes not at all. Some stores never received books from certain publishers: Harvey and Charlton were particularly difficult to find in my neighborhood.
But for the dedicated comic book collector, it was a way of life. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I’d be at the drug store across from my grammar school with my lunch money in hand. Every weekend, my friends and I would walk one mile down Chicago’s Devon Avenue from Kedzie to Western, stopping at seven different stores that carried comics. Oh we did a lot of other, more annoying stuff as well, but we never passed a spinner rack up.