Whitman(!) Sampler

A Whitman-branded issue of Batman I had when I was a kid. I thought that I was pretty much out of ideas for Reference posts, but when someone asked me a question on Bluesky I realized that I had at least one more. As I’ve noted many times, when I was a kid, you could find comics in all kinds of different places. For me, it was mostly grocery stores and gas stations. That covered both new comics and the damaged and unsold comics that I got in mystery packs. However, there were a lot of other places that sold periodicals but did not typically sell comic books. Most notably, in my case, department stores like K-Mart or the smaller regional chain that had a presence in my neck of the woods called Pamida. K-Mart did sell Savage Sword of Conan and Epic Illustrated and illustrated humor magazines like MAD, Cracked, and Crazy, and sometimes they would sell mass-market paperback reprints of comics, but there were no regular comic books to be found on the shelves mixed in with Good Housekeeping…