golden age Archives

Anthology titles combining stories featuring a publisher's best characters was a standard practice of the Golden Age.  DC Comics had World's Finest Comics and All-Star Comics, Fox Feature Syndicate had Big 3, and Marvel/Timely had All-Winners Comics, for example.  In 1942, Ned Pines' Standard/Better/Nedor followed suit by launching America's Best Comics, featuring the Black Terror,[...]

Captain Future, the lead character of the debut of Startling Comics, might be one of the most confusing characters in Golden Age comic book history.  The pulp character of that name (and from the same publisher, Ned Pines' Standard Magazines group) was, according to legend, created by Standard Magazines editors Mort Weisinger and Leo Margulies[...]

Norman Rockwell's nephew Dick Rockwell had an extensive career in comic books that includes Fox Feature Syndicate's Women Outlaws #6.

Hughes and artist Alexander Kostuk.  An interesting part of Golden Age comic book history, there's a Thrilling Comics #1 (Better Publications, 1940) CGC GD- 1.8 Cream to off-white pages up for auction in the 2023 February 23 The Thrillingly Exciting Heroes of Nedor Comics Showcase Auction #40219 at Heritage Auctions. Thrilling Comics #1 (Better Publications, 1940)[...]

Another stand-out issue of an iconic Pre-Code Horror series, The Thing #11 features a Lovecraftian tale of the Necronomicon and the Elder Gods

The iconic airbrushed Schomburg cover for Startling Comics #49 has become one of the most valuable comic books of the Golden Age era due to its likely influence on the creation of the Futurama robot Bender. As for Princess Pantha herself, she's a classic comic book jungle girl character in the Sheena, Queen of the Jungle[...]

The Archie Comics franchise began to expand in earnest with titles that featured some of Riverdale's other most famous characters.

Murray and cover-dated June 1950.  Featuring a cover and story drawn by the legendary Wayne Boring, this strange four-color classic from the late Golden Age of comics is up for auction in the 2023 January 29-30 Sunday & Monday Comic Books Select Auction #122305 at Heritage Auctions. Superman #62 UK Edition (K G Murray, 1950) Of course,[...]

Some of them we know, versions of existing characters, some teased in previous Flashpoint Beyond, Golden Age and Stargirl comic books, some radical revamps of previous characters, some given Who's Who listings and some brand new ones. Because the Lost Children are now Found Children in tomorrow's Stargirl: The Lost Children #3. Beginning with the Newsboy Legion[...]

Compton (presumably).  Something of a rarity in the Golden Age, one eyebrow-raising letter in this issue had a reader taking issue with the focus on what he termed as "England's War" and preferred that Victory Comics hero The Conqueror take on Stalin in Russia.  While this issue hit the newsstands several weeks before the US's[...]

Despite working on and co-creating numerous characters now considered obscure, Lou Fine was considered one of the best artists of the Golden Age.  He was an artist that even other comic book greats admired, and his cover work for publishers Fox Feature Syndicate, Fiction House, and Quality Comics is still highly regarded by collectors to[...]

The series was published by the important Golden Age comic book publisher and printer Eastern Color Printing Company A title too often overlooked that features early covers and stories by the legendary Bill Everett, there's a Heroic Comics #1 (Eastern Color, 1940) CGC VG 4.0 Cream to off-white pages up for auction in the 2023 January 15-16[...]

Super Adventure Comic 55 from publisher K.G. Murray brought the UK the World's Finest 71 story that launched regular Superman/Batman team-ups

Superman's origin was told across comics, newspaper strips, radio, and a book in his early years, with Superman #53 being an important moment

Cole in these auction posts over the years, and for good reason.  He is widely considered one of the most distinctive stylists of the Golden Age, and he may have thought more about what makes a comic book cover leap off the newsstands than any other artist of the period.  Comic books with L.B[...]

Longtime collector Pat Kochanek places Cosmic Aeroplane's acquisition of what was left of the collection in 1979. Apparently, the original owner of this collection purchased most or all of these comics off the newsstand in Salt Lake City from By's Magazine Shop, a popular newsstand outlet in Salt Lake City during the 1940s-1970s run by Byron[...]

Archie Andrews and his Riverdale friends hit the big time a year after his Pep Comics #22 debut, getting his own series with Archie Comics #1

Bill Everett's The Conqueror debuted in Victory Comics from Hillman Periodicals as a superhero transformed by cosmic rays.

A big fan of Hal Foster's Tarzan growing up, young Harvey Kurtzman entered a Tip Top Comics cartooning contest and was published in issue #36.

Newspaper comic strip syndicate United Feature had an extensive presence in the comic book industry since the early days of the Golden Age.  They published their flagship Tip Top Comics for 188 issues from 1936-1954 before licensing the title to St John, featuring a variety of their comic strip characters reprinted in comic book format. [...]

During the boom years of 1939 and the early 1940s of the Golden Age of American comic books, most new entrants in the field naturally had little or no experience in comics publishing.  Such was not the case for Columbia Comics Corporation, which entered the field in April 1940 with Big Shot Comics #1, a[...]

Even without being Wonder Woman's first appearance, Sensation Comics #1 is undeniably a major Golden Age comic book key.  Hitting the newsstands just two weeks after the character's first appearance and origin in All-Star Comics #8, Sensation Comics #1 features iconic and now-famous Wonder Woman artwork by H.G Peter on its cover, and much more. [...]

1" from the cover of that first issue has gone for $7,101.  What's an ordinary collector to do when brittle flakes from the interior pages of this historic first issue have gone for hundreds of dollars? The traditional route to addressing this situation is to go for the so-called "poor man's Action Comics #1", which[...]

Marines taking part in more traditional war stories.  While the title became perhaps best known for its covers which were a combination of war themes and damsels in distress, the interior stories came to encompass a much wider range of stories during the WWII era and beyond.  Features like Werewolf Hunter by Lily Renée, Glory[...]

Demand is also inextricably linked to rarity, in practice.  A desirable comic book that becomes widely known as rare tends to become less rare over time — usually.  With all this said, 20+ years into the era during which we have CGC census and public sales data available, Fox Feature Syndicate as a line is[...]

With the industry exploding in Superman's wake in the second half of 1939, no Golden Age publisher had built up an entire line of ostensibly popular superhero-centric titles until then.  While DC Comics had published New York World's Fair 1939 in conjunction with the debut of that event, it didn't even feature its superhero characters[...]

Like a few other Golden Age publishers, Fox Feature Syndicate titles sometimes verged into horror well before the late-1940s era which is generally considered to mark the beginning of the Pre-Code Horror era.  Such issues, particularly ones with good horror covers, can have crossover appeal among both Pre-Code Horror and superhero collectors.  Mystery Men Comics[...]

Overall, the idea that a then 11-year-old Blatty who lived in a specific neighborhood of East 35th Street and went on to a successful career as an author and screenwriter might be the same William Blatty who was a seemingly avid Mystery Men Comics reader in the same neighborhood in 1939 is convincing.  It's hard[...]

and its accompanying court testimony is a goldmine of historical information about the formative moments of the Golden Age comic book boom.  Filed by the company that would become known as DC Comics and asserting similarities between Superman and Fox's Wonderman, DC v Bruns is perhaps my favorite comic book history historical document, and a[...]

Dick Briefer's Rex Dexter of Mars may draw inspiration from a pair of All-American Comics sagas, which he takes in weird directions.