I recently came across this 1962 ad announcing DC's "Comicpac," a collection of four comics sold together in a plastic bag designed to be hung from a peg. I'm not much of a comics historian, but I'm guessing the idea was to market this format to stores that wouldn't have had a magazine stand or spindle rack to sell them the usual way.

Apparently the format caught on, as I distinctly remember these sorts of packages showing up in grocery stores, five-and-dimes and even hardware stores well into the 70s, and maybe later. By then, the strategy was usually to position the most popular books to face the outside of the bag (meaning one of them would have to be turned "backwards" to the other three), with the two in the middle (and thus unseen) often being the "booby prizes," titles you otherwise might never have messed with.

In real life, the original 60s-era Comicpacs looked like this:

Here's another early ad giving a glimpse at a display rack designed specifically for the Comicpacs:

Here's an enlarged view of the rack for a (slightly) better peek at the "banner" on top:

Normally four comics of this period would have cost you 48 cents, so at a "discount" of 47 cents it's not like the Comicpac represented a huge savings (especially if you didn't intend to buy all four titles anyway), but hey, there was such a thing as penny candy back then, so if your folks gave you two quarters you were in business.

By the 70s I seem to recall the Comicpac was a bigger bargain than buying four comics individually at newsstand price, but the drawback was that they usually were at least a couple months out of date. By then, the labels were printed directly on the bag itself, but with these early specimens, it seems the labels were cards or stickers stapled or glued to the top of the bag.

The labels are time capsules of comics history in themselves; for instance the first design, in 1962, features the ubiquitous Wayne Boring "arms akimbo" Superman pose seen so often in merchandising of the era and, in the example below, hints at the variety in the DC line of the day, with Sea Devils and Dobie Gillis on equal footing with the superheroes.

Jump ahead three years to 1965 and the Boring image remains, but now surrounded by DC's infamous Silver Age "Go-Go Chex." Superman's supremacy is still secure: In the bag itself, Batman and Flash comics are included, but only Superman rates a spot on the label, despite his appearing in only one of the comics included, and even then only as a supporting player to Jimmy Olsen.

Alas, what a difference a year makes; come 1966, Superman's undisputed reign as DC's number 1 icon is suddenly over, as he's forced not only to share the spotlight with Batman, but to actually stand behind the Caped Crusader in this, the seminal year of TV Batmania. Also, Wayne Boring's "Superman Artist Supreme" status has been usurped by Curt Swan.

By the end of the same year, Superman's reversal of fortune is complete, as he's crowded off the label completely in favor of Batman. In fact, by this point, the Caped Crimefighter is such a hot commodity that the name of the product itself has changed from "Comicpac" to "Batpac." Holy Hostile Takeover!

The really cool thing about all of these labels is that they tell you what's in the bag. That wasn't the case with the generically labeled comic packs of the 70s. I can still remember scrutinizing a bag of Marvels, tugging at the (quite loose) packaging in an effort to pull forward a copy of Avengers #145 and see what kind of lemon Marvel was trying to sneak in behind it. The groupings always seemed so arbitrary, I invisioned the bags being stuffed by half-sleeping slave laborers in a sweatshop somewhere based on whatever titles the publisher had the most leftovers of, and I fully expected to one day find two copies of the same book in a bag.

Along with the oversized tabloids, the tiny digests and the 100-page Super-Spectaculars, the Comicpacs always intrigued me as experiments in the comic book packaging format. Of course they'd never sell today, as collectors are too obsessed with condition to pay money for four comics when two of them can't even be seen. No, now we'd rather have the books out in the open, where we can inspect the spine and corners and flip through the pages to make sure none stick together or have creases. We want our comics pristine.

You know, so we can go home and put them in a bag.

Update: Here's more on the history of Comicpacs at the cool "Thought Baloon" website.