“From day one you pushed me forward, never once stopped to take a breath. When I look for you, you’re standing in my corner.” From Corner, written by Lincoln Mick, Isaac Horn, and Bailey Warren.
The first comic book corner box I discovered came as a shock. It was a pleasant one to be sure, because I had just turned twelve and a half years old, and American comic books had… dare I say it?… just turned a corner.
Marvel Comics had just published The Amazing Spider-Man #1, and the only thing more amazing than that book was the fact that, somehow, I was able to con my parents into subscribing to it. Even amazinger, the first issue to arrive in my mailbox was The Amazing Spider-Man #2. That, alone, would be enough to excite this twelve-year-old fanboy. I received the book several weeks earlier than its newsstand appearance, and in 1963 being the first one on my block carried weight among my friends.
This was the first time I had ever seen a comic book marketed under the name “Marvel Comics Group.” Since the dawn of Marvel’s Marvel Age of Comics about eighteen months earlier, there had no unique colophon to identify a “Marvel” comic book. Certainly, the covers had an across-the-board look to them, with the great Artie Simek lettering and logos and the heavy balloons outlined in several colors, the Stan Goldberg color work, and all that Stan Lee marketing effervescence. But now we could call ‘em something specific.
The corner symbol, each specific to each title and featuring the major branded character or characters, was a real eye-catcher. Such corner symbols had been used in various different configurations off-and-on by sundry publishers during the previous decades but they were needed for a different reason. Cities still had newsstands and many drug stores clipped comics and magazines onto a wire over the cashier area. The overlapping logos made it harder for casual readers to identify what they were looking at. Many others simply dumped all their comics in a box on the floor next to the newspapers. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: And In This Corner”
