Ok, how about this for an idea. We take it in turns to post a favourite (British spelling) comic cover every day. This went really well on the comic fan website that I used to frequent. What we tried to do was find a theme or subject and follow that, until we all got bored with that theme. I'd like to propose a theme of letters of the alphabet. So, for the remainder of October (only 5 days) and all of November, we post comic cover pictures associated with the letter "A". Then in December, we post covers pertaining to the letter "B". The association to the letter can be as tenuous as you want it to be. For example I could post a cover from "Adventure Comics" or "Amazing Spider Man". However Spider Man covers can also be posted when we're on the letter "S". Adventure Comic covers could also be posted when we're on the letter "L" if they depict the Legion of Super Heroes. So, no real hard, fast rules - in fact the cleverer the interpretation of the letter, the better, as far as I'm concerned.
And it's not written in stone that we have to post a cover every day. There may be some days when no cover gets posted. There's nothing wrong with this, it just demonstrates that we all have lives to lead.
If everyone's in agreement I'd like to kick this off with one of my favourite Action Comic covers, from January 1967. Curt Swan really excelled himself here.
Discussion and voting on future monthly themes takes place on the "Nominations, Themes and Statistics for A Cover A Day" thread. Click here to view the thread.
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Johnny Quick appeared in Adventure Comics until #207, December 1954. There's not much of a gap between him and another speedster in 1956.
Fawcett kept the Marvels going through 1953 with the last Marvel Family cover dated January 1954. Plastic Man made in to the end of Quality with the last issue cover dated November 1956. Hillman's Airboy's last issue was 1953. St. John published Zip-Jet in 1953. Black Cat lasted as a feature until 1951 and she returned in Black Cat Western in 1955. Also The Phantom started in Harvey Hits in 1957. Black Cobra, The Flame, Samson, and Wonder Boy from Farrell appeared 1954-1955. Sterling's Captain Flash is from 1954-1955 as well. Of course Lev Gleason's Crimebuster made it well into the 1950s, although Daredevil really didn't. I think at mid-decade the Adventures of Superman ignited a small revival in superheroes although they didn't catch on. But publishers did at least test the waters.
Does the Phantom Stranger in the 1950s count? And at the end of the decade Archie started The Fly (and briefly Pvt. Strong).
The trope that superheroes died off in the late Forties has been repeated so often it has been accepted as fact. Superheroes had dominated the comic book racks for more than a decade then following WWll you had horror, science fiction, crime, war, westerns, humor et al grabbing a chunk of the market. It seems more that superheroes were, for a brief period, simply overshadowed by all the other genres.
According to my own Grand Unified Theory, the Golden Age runs through 1954. The years 1955-1959 are designated as "The Recovery Stage" before the Silver Age begins in 1960 (for DC)/1961 (for Marvel).
I believe these are Scooby and Shaggy's second and third appearances this month:
A true classic #12 (for 12¢)
I never noticed before, but Hulk only has three fingers and a thumb, and three toes on the foot we can see, on this cover. That wasn't true in his own recently-canceled book. Did Kirby just forget?
I don't know, but Hulk (in)famously had only three toes in this splash page as well.
Evidently Hulk's form has never been static!
He had three toes in common with all of the bi-pedal dinosaurs and today's birds. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse also had three fingers and a thumb.
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