Quote:
What I do know for a fact though is that when I was ten years old, back in the summer of '65, (way before such things as "comic book shops";) when my friends and I went to the local drug stores looking for the next month's comics, we didn't give a solitary hang about the covers. All we looked for was our favorite characters.


Problem with that argument is that by the time the Atlas revival began, all the kids who were familiar with those characters (at least as far as publishers' then-prevalent theories are concerned) had cycled out of comics' customer pool. Cap, Subby, and the Torch were nobody's favorite characters by then, so bold, simple, striking graphic design on the covers would have been a good way to catch the attention of all those new readers Stan was trying to cultivate. Kinda like Avengers #4.
Who am us, anyway?
--The Firesign Theater