{"id":5367,"date":"2026-11-02T09:07:03","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T14:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/?p=5367"},"modified":"2026-11-02T09:07:06","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T14:07:06","slug":"whitman-sampler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/2026\/11\/02\/whitman-sampler\/","title":{"rendered":"Whitman(!) Sampler"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A Whitman-branded issue of Batman I had when I was a kid.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. That covered both new comics and the damaged and unsold comics that I got in mystery packs<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

K-Mart did <\/em>sell Savage Sword of Conan<\/em> and Epic Illustrated<\/em> and illustrated humor magazines like MAD<\/em>, Cracked<\/em>, and Crazy<\/em>, 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<\/em> and Redbook<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pamida sold even less than that. I think maybe<\/em>, at best, though I can’t say with certainty, they sold Archie digests on the checkout shelves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But on occasion, I did pick up some comics from Pamida in the form of mystery three-packs, but not the type of mystery packs in which I most often got comics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mentioned them in passing in my post (linked above) about mystery packs, but only to note that they were something different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what were they?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whitman – which for some reason I always imagine with an exclamation point even though there isn’t one – was an imprint of a company called Western Publishing, and was also known as Gold Key Comics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gold Key, which was created in the 1960s when Western decided to start publishing comics in-house rather than making them for their partner Dell Comics, had been a reasonably successful comics publisher, mostly printing licensed comics such as Star Trek<\/em> and The Twilight Zone<\/em> and a number of animated properties from Walt Disney and Warner Brothers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After losing several licenses and finding themselves unable to compete with the sheer volume of comics put out by DC and Marvel, by the late 1970s, alongside comic that were sold to traditional markets under the Gold Key label, they introduced the Whitman imprint for comics that were sold in packs of three and distributed to retailers – like department stores and toy stores – that did not typically sell traditional comics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As noted in my post about mystery packs, unsold or damaged newsstand editions of comics could be returned for a refund, and the refund policy required only that the retailer return part of the cover of the unsold\/damaged comics, with the expectation that the comics would then be destroyed. That didn’t happen, as retailers got their refunds then sold the comics to a third-party who packaged them up in the mystery packs that were so vital to my comic-reading life as a kid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pre-packaged Whitman comics, however, were not <\/em>returnable, and that was the reason for the Whitman logo on the cover: retailers could not open up the packages, tear off part of the cover, return it for a refund, and then resell the damaged comics the way the could with newsstand comics that bore the Gold Key logo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to doing this with their own comics, Western also entered into deals to distribute comics from DC and Marvel in three-packs under the Whitman(!) imprint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that’s how I sometimes ended up getting comics from Pamida, a place that didn’t usually sell comics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t know that I ever got any at K-Mart, though I did get them from some places – most notably gas stations – that also sold the other, unscrupulous mystery packs, and sometimes regular comics, too. I also got some Whitman(!) comics outside of the packs, too, mixed in with regular comics I got at used bookstores and the like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other than the different branding on the cover the comics were identical to the newsstand editions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the DC comics distributed by Whitman(!) had the Whitman branding as seen at the top of this post, the Marvel comics had a diamond on the cover (not to be confused with the now-bankrupt Diamond Comics Distributors, which came later).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The birth of the direct market – dominated for decades by that other Diamond – proved to be the death of Gold Key and Whitman(!) and it went out of business in 1984.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I was a kid and didn’t really understand the difference between the different mystery packs. I just knew that the ones that said Whitman(!) were always completely intact, unlike the comics in the other mystery packs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recall that someone once wrote in to Ask the Answer Man “What’s the deal with some comics saying ‘Whitman(!)’ on the cover?” and receiving a terse response along the lines of “Those are comics distributed by Whitman(!)” that didn’t really explain anything as far as I was concerned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post was my attempt to give a more satisfactory answer than Bob Rozakis did all of those years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Born and raised in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jon Maki developed an enduring love for comics at an early age.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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I thought that I was pretty much out of ideas for Reference posts, but when…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Whitman(!) Sampler\n\n#Reference #comics #ComicsHistory #nostalgia","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[46],"tags":[28,26],"class_list":["post-5367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reference","tag-history","tag-nostalgia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peoZaI-1oz","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5367"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5373,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5367\/revisions\/5373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opendoor-comics.com\/unbagged\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}