Quality Comics put out a wide variety of strong, solid material back during the Golden Age of Comics, much of which is largely forgotten today. But they maintained a strong house art style and a commitment to story that made their offerings among the most readable comics of the period. Today, we're going to look … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: SMASH COMICS #36 and the Death of Midnight
Flo Steinberg came to the notice of comic book fandom during the early 1960s, during the initial flowering of what became the Marvel Age of Comics. As Marvel's corresponding secretary, she was, among other things, charged with answering the volumes of fan mail that came in for editor Stan Lee, and so the various active … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: BIG APPLE COMIX #1
Fiction House was one of the more successful comic book publishers of the Golden Age of Comics. They came into the field from pulp magazines, where they had an active line of titles every month. For the most part, Fiction House's comic book output mirrored their pulp magazines--often using the same title and even on … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: WINGS COMICS #94
One of the most remarkable storytellers in the history of comics was Bernard Krigstein. His work first came to prominence in the 1950s, when he worked for the illustrious EC Comics. Krigstein produced many notable stories for EC, but probably the best remembered was "Master Race", published in IMPACT #1. This story, in which a … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #46
Quality Comics was one of the best publishers during the Golden Age of Comics, and true to their name, the quality level of all of their titles was high. In part, this was due to the fact that Will Eisner did editorial work for the early Quality line and helped to innovate a number of … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: MILITARY COMICS #1 and the Death Patrol
The basics are a familiar story to anybody who studies the history of comics. Young creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sell the rights to their creation Superman to what would become DC/National Comics. As their ten-year contract to produce the strip was reaching its end and fearing that National wouldn't re-up it, the pair … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: FUNNYMAN #1
When the strip was first introduced (in the pages of DETECTIVE COMICS of all places), Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Boy Commandos was an immediate sensation. Graduating into its own title several months later, the earliest issues of the series were among the best-selling that DC put out during that period--on a par with SUPERMAN … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: When Brooklyn Was Superman
Sheldon Mayer is one of the most important figures in the Golden Age of Comics, though he's one that relatively few people have heard about. An obsessive cartoonist, Mayer broke into the business at a young age, in the era in which comic books were just starting out. For a time, he worked at the … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: Scribbly Returns!
I only became aware of this story recently, and it has an aspect to it that may have been overlooked to some. So I'm going to feature it here. In the postwar era, the public's taste in comic books shifted away from super heroes towards other genres. Notably, humor comics became quite popular, and like … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: ALL FUNNY COMICS #16
When we left things off on this sequence revising the two-year marriage between Clark Kent and Lois Lane in the SUPERMAN newspaper strip between 1949 and 1952, and its eventual disillusionment, Lois had penned an article revealing to the world that her husband was really the Man of Steel. Making his way to the Daily … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: The Buried Newspaper Marriage of Superman and Lois Lane, Part 3
The Tom Brevoort Experience 