As we've spoken about before in the past, the opening up of the Direct Sales marketplace in the 1980s inspired a whole lot of different companies to enter the field with their own wares, competing for a piece of this lucrative non-returnable sales market. One of these was Archie Comics, who were persuaded to take … Continue reading Brand Echh: Mighty Crusaders #1
Comic books attracted the attention of some pretty colorful people, especially when it came to the ranks of would-be publishers. One of the most colorful was David Singer, who for a short period of time in the mid-1980s presided over both Deluxe Comics and Lodestone Comics, and operated as a publisher looking to carve out … Continue reading Brand Echh: Codename: Danger #1
It strikes me that it's been a while since we checked in on the doings of my favorite of the Archie/Mighty Comics campy super heroes of the mid-1960s, the Web! As you already know if you've read our earlier features on this line of comics, at teh height of Batmania in America and the huge … Continue reading Brand Echh: Mighty Comics #40 Part 2
As the potential audience for comic books opened up in the early 1980s with the rise and advent of the direct sales market, it wasn't just young new would-be publishers who noticed. Some of the most established firms were just as aware of this new venue, and they geared up to enter it. One of … Continue reading Brand Echh: The Fly #1
By 1966, the super Hero fad of the 1960s was in full swing, propelled to the forefront of popular culture by the debut of the BATMAN television show, which became a short-lived national obsession. BATMAN's mix of straightforward heroics with broad self-deprecating humor made it the poster child for middle America in terms of defining … Continue reading Brand Echh: Mighty Comics #40
As we've spoken about a few times in this feature, the early 1960s saw a bit of a renaissance in the fortunes of the costumed super hero in comic books. With the relatively newly-instituted Comics Code Authority putting an end to the crime and horror comics that had flourished in the early half of the … Continue reading Brand Echh: Adventures of the Jaguar #1
For most of the Golden Age of Comics, the partnership of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had been a sales juggernaut. While they had their occasional flops, more often than not the combo was responsible for hit after hit--enough so that their names would sometimes be called on in the advertising, something that typically was … Continue reading Brand Echh: The Double Life of Private Strong #1
The 1970s saw a rise in representation for African-Americans in popular culture--although that representation wasn't always sensitively done. But with Blaxploitation films bringing in big box office returns (especially as compared to the cost to produce) people suddenly became aware of a large black audience that wasn't being tapped--and a variety of players moved to … Continue reading Brand Echh: Fast Willie Jackson #1
The combination of the super hero fad and a bit of an overlapping nostalgia boom led to the creation of this issue of Archie/Mighty Comics' MIGHTY CRUSADERS #4, one of the best-remembered bad comic books of its era. For in its pages, having brought back a couple of its golden age heroes in prior adventures, … Continue reading Brand Echh: Mighty Crusaders #4
As the super hero boom of the 1960s began to reach its fever pitch, even those publishers who eschewed costumed crime-fighters as a rule began to dip their toe into the masked avenger pond. So it was that even Archie Comics attempted to produce a sub-line of stories featuring the red-headed kid next door as … Continue reading Brand Echh – Life With Archie #42
The Tom Brevoort Experience 