The blog TV Tropes, in an undated entry, gives a short history of Charlton, a low budget printer/publisher. Charlton’s printing presses had been used originally to print cereal boxes. Charlton cut corners by using plastic printing plates rather than standard metal plates. It operated on the cheap for its whole existence from 1935 to 1986, when it finally shut its doors (and retired its overworked printing presses.) Wikipedia describes the origin of the business by telling that John Santangelo Jr and Ed Levy met while in prison. Santangelo had been publishing song-lyric magazines, violating copyrights, and was sentenced to a year in prison. Levy was a lawyer, whose crime is not listed. They both had sons named Charles, which created their first company name, T.W.O. Charles Company, later changed to Charlton.
Charlton went into comic books in the '40s, and published
Yellowjacket Comics, which featured an unusual hero, Yellowjacket, who could get bees to help him. Note: Yellowjacket was beaten to comic books by Red Bee, from Quality Comics. Also, as has been pointed out, a yellowjacket is not a bee, but a yellowjacket costume was bright yellow, and looked better in comic books printed using plastic printing plates.
From
Yellowjacket Comics #5 (1945). Artwork, pencils only, attributed by the Grand Comics Database to Ken Battefield.
3 comments:
Recurringly, and not just in the stories of low-end publishers, superheroes and costumed crime-fighters fail to change costume when temporarily wanted by police. The Yellowjacket might at least have ditched the striped cape, if he did want to spend time changing his shirt and trousers.
I didn't know that Charlton had used plastic plates. I once read that they abandoned publication when that second-hand printing press failed.
I remember Charlton trying to market itself in the '70s by writing as if some large share of fans regarded Charlton and Marvel as producing similar product, and esteemed both. I think that almost anyone who regarded Charlton as comparable to Marvel must have had a low opinion of Marvel.
But, of course, Charlton provided a start — or sometimes a refuge — for artists and for writers who would do or had done work of notable virtue, and occasionally produced such work for Charlton itself.
Daniel, I remember a fan base for Charlton, if only because they would publish new artists, and some of the artists who submitted stories went on to work at other publishers. There were even a couple of fanzines devoted to Charlton.
I found most of Charlton just fair, and some of their comics just awful. Every once in a while they would grab my attention, like they did with Captain Atom by Ditko. Mostly, though, I remember a time or two in the fan press reading that the sealed boxes of Charlton comics going to distributors would sometimes just get returned without the box being opened. I'm surprised they went as long as they did.
Charlton also gave us the character Blue Beetle, who I think endures to this day as part of the DC universe. I encountered the character through a comic book I "liberated" from my dentist's office (he didn't believe in using novocain, so I figured he at least owed me a comic book). I thought it was a cool story - mild mannered archaeologist uses a magic scarab to turn into a superhero and fight giant mummies with laser beam eyes while dodging the affections of a hot Egyptian dancing girl. Ten year old me thought that was pretty exciting stuff.
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