American Update: Adventure, Horror, Romance and Danger on Other Worlds! A Golden Age Gallery
*IW/Super: IW/Super is a strange side street on the highway of comics history, Launched by Israel Waldman in the late 1950s, he acquired content for his comics line by buying out a defunct printer’s stock of printing plates, which included the interiors, but not the covers, of a few hundred 1940s comic books, from dozens of publishers. With a fine disregard for copyright – since most of the publishers had gone under anyway – he simply reprinted the comics under new covers, with a bizarre non-sequential numbering scheme that no-one’s quite figured out to this day. Since these were distributed, three to a bag, as ‘novelties’ to toy and drug stores, they weren’t treated as periodicals, and weren’t subject to the Comics Code, so the 1940s horror titles, unabridged, might have caused an extra frisson to kids raised on the Code-Approved era. This is a selection of the great, the good and the grotesque of the Golden Age, with new listings this update for Black Knight, Danger, Fantastic Adventures, Fantastic Tales, Firehair, Frontier Romances, Jungle Adventures, Robin Hood, Space Detective, and Strange Planets.