Star Publications Archives

A trailblazing artist whose style and art remains highly regarded today, there's a copy of  Crime-Fighting Detective #19 (Star Publications, 1952) CGC FN 6.0 Off-white to white pages up for auction in the 2023 April 30-May 2 Sunday, Monday & Tuesday Comic Books Select Auction #122318. Crime-Fighting Detective #19 (Star Publications, 1952) featuring L.B Cole. Crime-Fighting Detective[...]

Cole might have thought more about what made comic book covers sell on the newsstands than any other artist of his era.  His use of eyeball-searing color and empty space, composition, and cover design makes his covers unique and identifiable among the comics of the period.  For some of his cover work at Star Publications,[...]

Climbing ever higher over the bodies of those she poisoned, she grasped for more until the stern and relentless hand of justice brought extermination and wiped out a snake in human form… The Poisoner!"  A typically lurid cover by Cole playing to an audience that had made crime comics an incredibly successful genre during this[...]

Cole once said, one of the premiere cover artists of the Golden Age and beyond. "If it's a horror cover and you have a big black background, just put in some squibbly line and the reader will see it as a fang, or a claw, or a staring eye, and will read the most horrible aberrations[...]