Recently I’ve been thinking back to the days of when I started collecting comics. I wasn’t just collecting them, I was reading just about everything that I could afford to get my hands on. This would be roughly around 1984 or so.
I would go out to my local bookstore to get my comics off the rack. Even though this store carried just about all the issues published by Marvel and DC at the time, they were all jammed together in a makeshift rack at the front of the store. This rack had several different levels but they were close together, which made pulling out a comic, without bending the spine in multiple places, a very tricky affair.
That didn’t matter, because not only did this store carry a lot of titles, they also carried Marvel Trade paperbacks and Graphic Novels. All along the front of the store.