Superhero Comics in 1970s Newsstand Photograph Finally Revealed
Yeah, finally — because it took me nearly a decade to get around to doing this.
The road to hell, as goes the saying, is paved with good intentions. I don’t recall now, though, if it was ever actually my intention to dig up and post to the interwebs all the covers for the comic books shown stuffed into the racks in this old photo taken at a newsstand in the 1970s.
When I first saw the photograph, by the way — posted then in the Robot 6 section of the CBR (Comic Book Resources) website almost ten years ago now — I fell completely in love with the image due to the deep and unexpected sense of the nostalgia it evoked.
It was simply titled “A Newsstand in 1975.”
I was all of six years old back then, but I can still easily recall now the sight of comic books on corner newsstands all across “Chicagoland,” as some of the locals call it. And compelled by this fond and enduring memory, I enlarged the image and printed out a copy on heavy fine art paper to hang in my studio.
Curiosity Killed the Cat
It actually made me curious, though, as to whether the photo was really taken in ’75 or if someone just guessed. Using even what’s partially visible from one of the covers, I thought that I could fairly easily narrow down not only the year, but maybe also the time of year that the photo was taken.
And so, a few nights before the 2011 Phoenix Comic-Con (I lived in Arizona then), I sat down at the computer to satiate my curiosity. I realized that I would probably never know within which American Metropolis “Herman’s Comics” –– the newsstand’s presumed full name –– was located, but I would at least have an idea of when it was there.
Using the Marvel Premiere centered in the front row as a start point, since I actually had the ten issue Iron Fist run in my collection, solving the mystery of when the photograph was taken didn’t take more than a few minutes. But then my brain went ahead and decided to get curious again.
Because I’m not exactly your typical comic book geek, once I’d found success identifying one of the comics recorded there in the photograph, it wasn’t…
