Considered "one of the finest romance illustrators in the business" by a contemporary, Alice Kirkpatrick is an underappricated Golden Age artist.
Ace Periodicals Archives
In an important moment for Pre-Code Horror, American Comics Group and Ace Magazines waged a war involving the usage of "Unknown."
Instead, he chooses to devote his life to fighting evil of all kinds."
The entire Ace superhero line is incredibly underrated, and Magno in Super-Mystery Comics was among the best of the bunch, and a lot of the run is tough to get. An important superhero debut from the early WWII era, there are several issues[...]
According to a lawsuit over the creation of Ace Periodicals comic books during this era, Magno the Magnetic Man and the rest of the material in Super-Mystery Comics #1 was the creation of a comic production studio run by Patrick Lamar. At least two stories in this issue were based on plots from past Ace[...]
According to a lawsuit over the creation of Ace Periodicals comic books during this era, the material in the publisher's earliest comics, including Sure-Fire Comics #1, was the creation of a comic production studio run by Patrick Lamar. And it has also emerged that several of the stories in this issue were based on plots[...]
The rare Ace Periodicals series Our Flag Comics started off with a character called the Unknown Soldier. While he was certainly patriotic in concept and action, his plain blue costume and mask might have seemed rather ordinary to readers who had recently been introduced to the likes of Captain America and The Shield While not[...]
When Ace Periodicals entered comics in 1940 with the title Sure Fire Comics, the field was already booming. The publisher wasted no time in catching up with the field and developing a superhero comic book line with a wide range of characters. For example, less than six months after the debut of Wonder Woman in[...]
Ace Periodicals entered the comics field in early 1940 with the title Sure-Fire Comics, which featured the character Flash Lightning by Robert Turner and Harry Lucey. A superhero with a broad range of lightning-powered abilities, Flash Lightning's origin takes some fairly obvious inspiration from Fawcett's Captain Marvel. But it is arguably even more similar to[...]
Appropriately enough, the being called "The Unknown" is the most mysterious figure in the Ace Periodicals line-up. The character debuted in Four Favorites #21, directly after the last Four Favorites appearance of masked superhero character The Unknown Soldier in the previous issue, giving rise to fan speculation over the decades that the two characters are[...]
Ace Periodicals' Four Favorites title was a similar concept to Fox's Big 3, DC Comics' All-Star Comics and All-Winners Comics. It was an anthology series that featured some of the publisher's most popular characters that ran for 32 issues from 1941 to 1947. This started out as including the superheroics of Magno and Davey, Vulcan,[...]
The rise of patriotic comic book superheroes such as The Shield and Captain America during World War II quickly had publishers trying to outdo each other in terms of just how well these heroes could embody America. While not one of the best-remembered patriotic heroes of the era, The Flag, who first appeared in Our[...]
Ace Periodicals' Banner Comics title starts off with a little bit of a mystery: the series begins with issue #3. Typically, this would mean that the series changed titles after the first two issues, sometimes even from a non-comics title, but there's no apparent match for that scenario on the Ace Periodicals timeline. The debut[...]
Ace Periodicals entered the comics field in early 1940 with the title Sure Fire Comics, which featured the character Flash Lightning by Robert Turner and Harry Lucey. A superhero with a broad range of lightning-powered abilities, Flash Lightning's origin takes some fairly obvious inspiration from Fawcett's Captain Marvel. But it is arguably even more similar[...]