Gold Key Comics

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Gold Key Comics was an imprint of Western Publishing created for comic books distributed to newsstands.

Contents

[edit] History

Gold Key Comics was created in 1962, when Western switched to in-house publishing rather than packaging content for branding and distribution by its business partner, Dell Comics.

[edit] Properties

Gold Key featured a number of licensed properties and several original titles (including a number of publications that spun-off from Dell's Four Color series). It maintained decent sales numbers throughout the 1960s, thanks to its offering many titles based upon popular TV series of the day, as well as numerous titles based upon both Walt Disney Studios and Warner Bros. animated properties. It was also the first company to publish comic books based upon Star Trek.

Over the years it did lose several properties, including the King Features Syndicate characters (Popeye, Flash Gordon, The Phantom, etc) in 1966, the Hanna Barbera characters (to Charlton Comics) in 1970, and Star Trek (to Marvel Comics) in 1979.

[edit] Key creators

The stable of writers and artists built up by Western Publishing during the Dell Comics era mostly continued into the Gold Key era. In the mid-60s a number of artists left to work for the newly formed Disney Studio Program. Among the few new creators at Gold Key were writers Don Glut, Len Wein and Mark Evanier and artist Mike Royer. Also in the 70s writer Bob Gregory started drawing stories, mostly for Daisy and Donald.

A striking difference between Gold Key and other publishers (which had been done by Dell as well) was to publish most of their mystery, jungle, science-fiction, adventure and the like series with full color painted covers rather than the standard line-artwork.[citation needed]

[edit] Hard times

In the 1970s, when the comics industry experienced a downswing, Gold Key was among the hardest hit. Its editorial policies had not kept pace with changing times and suffered erosion of its base of sales among children who could now instead watch cartoons and other entertainment on free television.[1] By 1977, all of the company's original series had been cancelled (most had been dropped circa 1973-1974), and its licensed series were virtually all reprint-only, although Gold Key was still able to obtain the rights to publish a comic book series based upon Buck Rogers in the 25th Century between 1979 and 1981.

In this period Gold Key experimented with digests, to some success, and distributing comic books simultaneously both on racks at drug stores, super markets and such under the Gold Key label and — usually in plastic bags of three — in toy and department stores, along with newsstands at airports and bus/train stations "as well as other outlets that weren't conducive to conventional comic racks"[2] under the Whitman logo which it also used for such products as coloring books. Western at one point also distributed bagged comics from its rivals DC Comics and Marvel Comics under the Whitman logo. President of DC Comics Paul Levitz has stated "The Western program was enormous — even well into the '70s they were taking very large numbers of DC titles for distribution (I recall 50,000+ copies offhand)."[3] Continued declining sales forced Western in 1981 to cease newsstand distribution and thereafter release all its comics solely in bags as "Whitman Comics". The "Gold Key" logo was discontinued. Eventually arrangements were made to distribute these releases to the nascent national network of comic book stores as part of the Whitman alternate methods of distribution. All these efforts proved ultimately unsuccessful, and by 1984 Western was out of the comic book business.

[edit] Relaunches and reprints

Three of Gold Key's original characters — Magnus, Robot Fighter, Doctor Solar and Turok, Son of Stone — were used in the 1990s to launch Valiant Comics' "Valiant Universe".

Dark Horse Comics has published reprints, including several in hardcover collections, of such original Gold Key titles as Magnus, Robot Fighter, Doctor Solar, M.A.R.S. Patrol, and the Russ Manning-produced Tarzan series. The Checker Book Publishing Group, in conjunction with Paramount Pictures, began reprinting the Gold Key Star Trek series in 2004.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ It is also alleged by Carmine Infantino that in the mid-to-late 1960s, DC Comics attempted to pressure Gold Key from the stands by sheer weight of output. Quoted in: Ro, Ronin. Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American Comic Book Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2004)
  2. ^ News from Me (column): "More on Comicpacs" (May 2, 2007), by Mark Evanier
  3. ^ ibid

[edit] Trivia

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The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

[edit] Selected titles

[edit] Original Series

[edit] Licensed Series

[edit] External links

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