Any one remember Gold key comics?/
Yep,
Pretty sure they used to publish a lot of the Disney comics back in the 60’s and 70’s.
Were they the ones who did a line of Star Trek comics? I know they did Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants.
I had a few of these when I was a lad, but they didn’t survive. Alas, got thrown out lang and lang ago.
Yeah, I remember them. They always seemed 3rd tier to me. DC and Marvel were first tier. Charlton Comics was a big drop down to 2nd tier. Gold Key, Classic Comics, and everything else aimed at kids was 3rd tier. Their stuff just didn’t appeal to me. The only times I read them was while waiting at the barber shop. My barber had piles of them to keep his juvenile customers occupied.
They kind of pioneered painted covers for comics. Russ Manning’s Magnus Robot Hunter was a big highlight! I liked Dr. Spektor, mainly for the Jesse Santos artwork.
Carl Barks, who invented Scrooge McDuck, is considered one of the titans of the comics medium. His entire run of Disney comics, including the Gold Key stuff, was reprinted between 1983 and 1990, in a ten volume hardcover set.
So, yeah, they’re remembered. Some of them, pretty well.
The Star Trek comics were trash. They were written and drawn by people who had never seen one episode of the show.
I remember Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories fondly. Although Gold Key is defunct, they’re still in publication. I thought the Duck Tales animated series was well done and quite faithful to the comics it was adapted from.
When I was a kid, we had some Gold Key comics collected as Dynabrite Comics collections, including classics like Mickey Mouse in “Island in the Sky”, Donald Duck in “The Golden Helmet” and Scrooge McDuck in “The Golden Fleecing”. I remember them very fondly; they were great stories!
No. Dell comics was doing it long before. Of course, both Dell and Gold Key were Western Publishing, just with different people running the presses. Most of Dell’s titles went over to Gold Key after GK was founded, including the movie adaptations, the Walt Disney comics, Tarzan, and Turok Son of Stone.
I still have quite a stack of Gold Key comics. Their 1960s science fiction lines – Magnus, Dr. Solar – were pretty good, and their continuing Turok was great. After Tarzan moved to Gold Key they started doing adaptations of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books.
If you’re interested, the Dell and Gold Key Tarzan comics are available free online, here:
The whole Disney Afternoon line-up was great! Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers was super, and Tailspin was great, and Duck Tales was the best of the bunch. Brilliant.
Later, Goof Troop was pretty good. Not super great, but very good.
Quack Pack was a horrid failure, just a ghastly monstrous flub of a blunder.
As Don Karnage might have said, “Zat is zee way the cookie, he crumbles.”
I remember Gold Key comics. They were a staple of my childhood–all kinds of stories involving Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters, Warner Brothers cartoon characters, Walt Disney characters, and whatever live-action shows they could adapt (for example, “Captain Nice” and “My Favorite Martian”). I never really got into their more “older” material though, such as Turok, or Magnus.
I wasn’t limited to Gold Key as a child, and also read Batman and Superman and so on. But what always struck me about Gold Key was that there was no advertising–not like in DC or Marvel comics, where we heard about Daisy BB guns and Raleigh bicycles, or we could win prizes for selling greeting cards or Grit. Rather, Gold Key filled in single pages with jokes, or brief articles on things kids might find interesting. I also noticed, that unlike DC, Marvel, and even Archie, Gold Key never carried the Comics Code Authority stamp.
Gold Key comics were good entertainment when I was a kid. I probably still have a few kicking around somewhere.
I think they also did a “Twilight Zone” comic, as well. Anybody remember Carlton comics? Characters like the Fly, Blue Beetle, and a Captain America knockoff called The Shield.
No, those were MLJ/Archie/Red Circle. Charlton did the Action Heroes (Blue Beetle, The Question, Peacemaker), a bunch of crappy horror comics, E-Man and the Phantom.
AKA Nite Owl, Rorschach, and The Comedian.
Yes, Watchmen was originally going to be a resurrection of the Charlton Action Heroes. DC balked at a resurrection which would lead off with one of their recently-purchased characters being killed off and the situation deteriorating from there.
“Charlton Comics Give You More!”
Charlton gave us comics based on the movie Reptilicus (changed after the first couple of issues to Reptisaurus) and Gorgo. Some of these were actually drawn by the great comic boo=k artist Steve Ditko, who was better known for his work at Marvel (where he had been the original Spiderman artist)
For obscure comics, how about American Comics Group, which had a lot of supernatural titles (where ghosts were always depicted as having dashed outlines, and colored green) and the wonderfully offbeat Herbie:
As mentioned, only Blue Beetle was Charlton (actually, the original was Fox, but the more popular Ted Kord version was created for Charlton). And The Shield predated Captain America by about a year, which is why Cap has had a round shield for most of his existence (his original was too evocative of The Shield’s look, so they changed it to avoid MLJ suing them).
Here is a thorough, and fairly easy to follow explanation of Gold Key, Dell, Western Printing, and how they all fit together.
I’ve seen some fanzines from the 60s that actually referred to Gold Key as one of “The Big Three.” Historically, there’s always been a bit of a drop-off after the “big two.”
When I was growing up in the 60s, Charlton was definitely third tier behind DC. (Marvel was unavailable in my area until I was well into my teens.)
Dell/Gold Key was second tier, though it didn’t try to hard to compete with Superhero comics. They did do Little Lulu, one of the great comic books of all time.