As I’ve mentioned previously, DC in 1965 looked very different from when the era started in 1956. Marvel isn’t the same company either. Western comics are fading away, though they’d see a resurgence in the Bronze Age; superheroes have largely taken over horror/SF anthologies (though of course they’d see a resurgence too); war comics have gone from anthologies to series dealing with Sgt. Fury, Sgt. Rock or the War That Time Forgot.
However there was more to the comics industry than Marvel and DC. A look at January, 1966 shows that while the Big Two have become increasingly focused on superheroes, there’s still a lot of variety on the newsstand (I’m not considering underground comics for this post).
Outside of its long-running Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope books, DC doesn’t have the string of media tie-ins — Gang Busters, Mr. D.A., Sgt. Bilko — that it used to. Outside the Big Two however, TV spinoffs remain common.
(
(Space Family Robinson, as Jeff notes in the comments, is not an adaptation of Lost In Space. Which I knew, but forgot while I was writing this post).
Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff Presents fill the gap left by DC and Marvel ditching horror anthologies.
Like Twilight Zone the Karloff book is a TV tie-in that started as Boris Karloff Thriller (Karloff hosted the Thriller TV series) — plus, of course, it draws on Karloff’s own status as a horror legend.
Gold Key also gave us adventure series such as Turok, Son of Stone.
And Magnus, the distant descendant of Doc Magnus devoted to smashing robots instead of making them.
There’s also the Archie-verse, which I’m guessing at least one or two of you have heard of.
Plus Walt Disney comics. You might have heard of them too, or caught one of their movies at some point.
Other comics companies are trying superheroes with mixed results. While MLJ’s line would have a long, if erratic publishing life—
— plenty of forgettable heroes came and went, like minor league players who never reached the big time.
Then there are books targeting markets such as horse lovers—
— hot-rodders —
— and um, giant duck lovers?
I’ll be back to focusing on DC and/or Marvel in the next post but I wanted to at least touch on the broader picture.
#SFWApro.
Space Family Robinson was not a tv tie-in comic; it predated the Irwin Allen tv series and Allen made a deal with Western, to prevent a lawsuit, allowing Western to use the Lost in Space tag with their series. Both got the same idea of using Swiss Family Robinson and putting them in space; Western just got there first.
You are also giving short-shift to some of the other companies. baby Huey was a popular cartoon series and did well, in comics, for Harvey; but, theri bread and butter was largely Richie Rich and Casper, though they dabbled in superheroes and related, again, under Joe Simon, with the Harvey Thriller line (such as Spyman, Thrill-O-Rama, and Unearthly Spectaculars).
Charlton had a successful line of Action Heroes, with Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, The Question, Peter Cannon and Judomaster. not as big as DC or Marvel, but good material. They also had a thriving line of romance comics that did well with girls and a strong line of westerns, that continued into the 1970s, as well as their war comics, with features like The Lonely War of Capt Willy Schultz (Fightin’ Army) , Shotgun Harker & Chicken (Fightin’ Marines), and The Iron Corporal (Army War Heroes). They picked up the Hanna-Barber licenses, in the 70s, but had some cartoon books of their own. Also, some of those hot rod comics did quite well, thanks to work by Jack Keller.
The MLJ heroes were just a sideline, for Archie, as the Riverdale Gang ruled their roost and had a big share of the comic market. They were still a very major player in the industry.
I knew that about Space Family Robinson but annoyingly forgot it while drafting this post. Edited to correct that.
When I was a kid in the early 80’s I occasionally be with my grandmother when she would stop by the grocery store near her house. They did not carry any Marvel or DC comics but they did have Disney and, sometimes Casper, comics she would buy me. In retrospect they were clearly reprints of decades old stories. I recall not thinking much of the Casper comics, but the Disney Duck stories certainly held up.
The one thing I remember of the Harvey Comics is a sequence where one of Wendy’s witchy aunts is taking an oral test in school to prove how easy it is:
“Who was George Washington?”
“That’s a trick question — George Washington’s a bridge!”
That still makes me laugh.
Harvey was in bad shape, by the 80s. They stopped publishing in 1982, then the company was sold and resumed publishing in 1986. Casper was pretty much all but dead, by the late 70s.
1950s and 60s Richie Rich holds up pretty well (the Warren Kremer stuff). Same with Archie in those periods.
I was never into Harvey Comics as a kid but I am impressed by the map showing all their characters existed in a shared universe: https://www.seducedbythenew.com/2020/06/harvey-comics-universe-map.html#.Y7q21uLMIbk