The Tearoom of Despair bemoans the lack of Marvels in the corner-shop…

you can’t just walk into a shop and buy a new Marvel comic book anywhere. So there is no chance of picking up something random, just because the cover looks aces, because there is nothing there. And they really did use to be everywhere…

Yes, I remember that well. Many small shops in the West Midlands of England had a spinner-rack of usually fairly random-but-recent American monthly imports, often visible from the window and priced for the British in pennies rather than U.S. cents. Sometimes they had a big job-lot of ship-ballast comics (cent-priced, U.S. news-stand returns?)… and then there were huge piles of American dynamite to sort through. And they were not sealed in bags for collectors to salt away unread either. Comics were later pre-bagged in the early dedicated comics-shops which emerged across the UK in the 1980s, and the buyer who wanted to peek inside was often treated as a pest. But in your corner-shops a comic was just cheap six-penny trash, and no-one assumed any lasting value. Which meant you could flip through and check out the art. Was that Incredible Hulk #122 one of the Herb Trimpe classics you had only seen in part in the British B&W Marvel reprint weekly? Or a rush-job where they used a fill-in artist? Nope, it was all Trimpe, and in colour…

I even recall encountering a huge ship-ballast hoard, age 10 in the unlikely spot of the newsagents in a tiny village of Banwell near the holiday resort of Weston-super-Mare. I guess the owner had probably got them dirt-cheap at auction in the port of Bristol or suchlike and hauled them back. The problem was, of course, that even if one could sift out a small run of one title, one lacked the pocket-money to buy them all up.

The British weekly B&W Marvel reprints, however (in which you could sometimes actually follow a story arc across multiple issues), were usually laid and layered on a newsagent’s wide horizontal counter. No spinner-racks, due to the difference in size and paper and the need to accommodate a thick stack of 40 or so. Weekly British comics sold well in those days. Often too well, as that week’s issue was often sold out by the time you arrived. Hence the joy of finding a complete story in an American issue. It wasn’t crudely cut up into three or four weekly parts, one of which you’d missed.

As Tearoom points out, it’s ironic that you can often find the cheesy spin-off Marvel merchandise, but not the actual comics. Still, it’s good that all the pre-PC classics are now easily available, albeit as garishly re-coloured and mummified reprints. For instance, £16 will now get you the Kindle ebook In The Hands Of Hydra, 440 pages of the classic 1968 Roy Thomas / Herb Trimpe Incredible Hulk. Whatever you missed and yearned for when younger, can now be had instantly, and perhaps also shared with interested young relatives. Great for getting boys to keep reading outside of school, I’d imagine. And boys do still read comics, even in an age of abundance with videogames, audiobooks, movies and TV shows galore. A robust National Literary Trust 2023 survey showed that 44% of British boys read comics for pleasure at least once a month, with a modest-but-expected 10% tail-off as they move from age 10 to 17. Sadly the huge survey doesn’t seem to have asked where these comics came from. Nor did they ask about any U.S. superhero / Japanese manga divide in reading tastes.

I would query Tearoom‘s statement that…

there is no chance of picking up something random, just because the cover looks aces, because there is nothing there.

Well, not physically. But if one ventures into the pirate websites, that is the very format. Covers, covers, covers, by date of arrival… and thus mixing new superhero comics, indies, kiddy-humour, and vintage reprints. No walled gardens, no locked-down reader apps. Pretty similar to the old spinner-rack at the corner store, I’d suggest. No sixpences required.

Of course, I’m not condoning piracy here, just pointing out it exists and kids can easily access it. If you have an income to spend, you should be supporting the artists and writers.