Tag Archives: Archie

Throwback Thursday: the fabled rotating comic stand!

Yep.  When I was in kid on Long Island, it would be either war comics (especially Sgt. Rock), Conan the Barbarian (or his himbo spiritual cousin, Ka-Zar the Savage) any of the various Archie titles, or a horror comic.  (I thought superhero comics were stupid when I was a kid.  In order for a comic to entertain me, it had to include war, swords, Archie or monsters).

When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, my dad would occasionally  pick me up titles that only seemed available in Manhattan, where he worked as a bus driver — books like the 1980’s iteration of the Blackhawk Allied commandoes or (joy and rapture) The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones.  (Maybe Indy’s title adhered more loosely to the rule of thumb I cited above, but that was forgivable, because it was the greatest comic book ever created.)

The last time I saw a rotating rack like this was … 1993?  1994?   For a while, it was neat little fixture of the 7-11 along Route 1 just outside Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  You could make a run for coffee or nachos at any hour and snag a comic while you were at it.  By then, I was thoroughly entrenched in the DC and Marvel superhero pantheons.  (A really cool goth kid in my freshman dorm had shown me Frank Miller’s work, and I was hooked.)



Throwback Thursday: January 1, 1980 magazine covers

I hope that you are all looking forward to a rockin’ New Year’s Eve.  It’s hard to believe that we are not only ringing in a new year, but also a new decade — “2020” still sounds like science fiction to me.

Where does the time go?  Somewhere irretrievable.

Anyway, here’s a couple of Pinterest finds for my fellow 1980’s nostalgia nerds.  (We’ve got a nice little subculture goin’ on Facebook.)  These are a few covers from January 1, 1980 (or in the case of the weekly TV Guide, the decade’s first full week).  Try to wrap your head around the fact that, in a few days, the decade will have begun a full forty years ago.

Oh … I couldn’t resist throwing in a couple of comic book covers dated January 1980, too.  I actually had that issue of “Battlestar Galactica.”  I still remember it sitting in a stack at the bottom of my closet, with one or two others — vastly outnumbered by “Sgt. Rock” and various “Archie” titles.

 

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