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Send all letters to Richard Boucher at PR-Publications@webtv.net Richard Boucher The Secret Origin of Richard Boucher On a dark night in 1955,a baby is born at 11:45 p.m. on the 14th of December. Who would guess that this brat would some day be chronicling the history of an age that he was never around to see? In my youth in southern California, I had the good fortune to always accompany my mother to various grocery stores on her shopping expeditions. To keep this unruly kid quiet, Mom would often let me peruse the local spinner racks with her spare change in my sweaty hands. One fateful day, I can across Justice League of America # 38 with the cover depicting a very different JLA battling what seemed like an even different version of the JLA itself. Of course we all know that it was the legendary Justice Society of America itself. And I was "hooked" on these characters. It was my first introduction into what I later learned was the Golden Age of Comics and the beginnings of a lifelong fascination for that bygone era. I never missed a single issue of the JLA after that, in hopes of getting more of the JSA! Imagine my delight to see them pop up in titles like Flash, The Atom and Green Lantern, not to mention The Brave and the Bold, and Showcase issues that featured such great characters as Starman, Dr. Fate, the Black Canary and Hourman, then the Spectre! Oh heaven, it must be heaven! I always eagerly awaited the start of what I figured should have been a natural, the JSA in a series of their own. But alas, this never came to pass. If it seems like I was a DC zombie, this is not true! Over at Marvel, the 25 cent giant reprint books like Fantasy Masterpieces presented me with my first glimpse of the Timely Age of Comics. Why were these characters no longer around, I thought to myself? And this question started my search for all things old. And it wasn't long before another company came along and offered me even more things Golden Age to search for...The Mighty Crusaders # 4, in "Too Many Super Heroes." And, well, now I just had to find the MLJ guys! But youth and time were not on my side. Soon hormones kicked in, and by 1970 I was no longer interested in comics old or new! But by 1977 I would return to the "fold" when a band mate of mine bought a "comic book store." You can imagine my surprise at the possibilities that presented to me. Not only could I now buy any current comic book I wanted (from a friend no less!), but I could now buy those long lost treasures of my "youth." It wasn't long before I had reassembled my childhood collection and whatever I missed the first time around, and, of course, providing my friend with a much needed boost in income. One day this guy came in wanting to sell some old books. Now this man was about 50 or so, and, of course, his books were all from the 1940's and 1950's! Imagine my delight and my friend’s when we saw these "Golden Age" books that this guy was willing to sell very cheaply. My friend, being the great businessman that he was, bought up all 200 or so books for about $300.00! I in turn, I bought about 50 or so books from him at a slight profit to my friend, and thus I now owned "real" Golden Age books such as Marvel Mystery, Daring Mystery, and a bunch of Human Torch and Sub-Mariner books too. In addition to this were 5 MLJ books, a Blue Ribbon, a Top-Notch, a Pep, a Zip comic, and a Shield-Wizard book. Wow, now I was cool! But the joy of that day was not over yet! In that "buy" were books from other publishers, like Better/Standard Pub. with characters like Doc Strange, the Fighting Yank, Captain Future, Wonderman, and other great characters. Also there were books from Fox, Harvey, and a few other publishers that I never heard of. Now my horizons were expanded even further. And this was the beginning of my Golden Age collection. I n the early 1980's,my dear friend wanted to sell his store, and the new guy who didn't have enough money to buy the whole shebang, was in a dilemma. My friend offered me the opportunity to buy any GA book I wanted to help lower the buying price for the new owner. I agreed and got almost 300 more GA books for a little over $1500.00, a steal even then! Now I was cooking with gas, but fate would deal me a cruel blow just a few years later. In the interim, I had frequented other bookstores and that new thing called the San Diego Con and expanded my ever-growing GA collection to over 500 books. Could life get any better? But in 1986 a divorce would soon separate my books and me, as I had to sell off my books to satisfy my "legal" agreement in the settlement. What this did for me was to spur me on to somehow save some of the knowledge and information (plus the joy they brought me) for a time when I might re-enter this wonderful hobby. So I set about crudely drawing all the characters that I thought were "neat" or important to have. Plus I wrote down many of the "facts" of these characters so I wouldn't forget where they came from, or who they were. All in all, I must have made three- or four- hundred drawings in that six month period off of a model drawing that I photocopied so I could easily and quickly fill in the costume details for each character. Likewise I developed a "biography" system where I could just fill in the "facts" of each character for relating them to their respective drawings. And this is how I started my drawing and writing habit. It would be several years later before I got back into comics, but never that heavily into the GA, as I had taken quite a beating in selling them, and prices had become too prohibitive to buy large qualities of books. Instead I concentrated on the "obscure" publishers of the 1940's and 1950's when I eventually returned to buying comic books. And I still had all those drawings that I made, and over time, I would slowly start to make new ones off of the originals that I had made. Of course, today, you now see a lot of these reworked drawings and those notes that I did, on this site. Little did I know back then that this is what it would lead to. I have tried to improve my skills in drawing and writing over the years and hopefully what you see is the culmination of a childhood wish, to collect every character that every was from that long gone era. Along with that, came reference books and articles from other people who shared my passion for this subject and, along the way, I discovered even more characters, and some of these were not of American origins! Yes, the English-speaking countries, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, had their "Golden Age," too, and now my scope expanded once again. So one day in 1998, after wandering the World Wide Web, I received an e-mail from this guy, who shared a similar passion for the Golden Age, and he was a hobbyist of action figures and wanted to trade info so we could both further our hobbies. This person was Darrin Witshire, but we never connected as he moved and then I moved, and we lost contact. While visiting Bill Nolan's great Pure Excitement Comics web site, I wrote a letter to Bill who also is a nut for this subject and as luck would have it, Bill had received a letter from Darrin too! By sheer chance, Bill suggested to both of us that we should contact each other, and we did, and as they say the rest is history. What this site now presents to you is due in large part to the amazing skills of Darrin, and that great guy Bill Nolan for reuniting the two of us. We have to date, done over 200 Golden Age characters and close to 100 other types of characters that are associated or are related in some fashion to the Golden Age. In our first 12 issues, plus one annual, we have had the pleasure of making lots of new and exciting friends who have shared their thoughts, views and information on the Golden Age of Comics. And it is for these people, that Darrin and I, along with our two new team members Jeff and Anthony, will continue to bring you even more good guys and gals from around the world, until we've managed to track down every last one of them. And with your help, we can make a permanent home for these great characters of yesteryear. I would like to thank my wife Pamela (who I married in 1997), whose patience and understanding, along with her support and never-ending encouragement has enabled me to pursue this hobby that we all love so much. Peace to all of you, and God bless. Richard Boucher Darrin Wiltshire Hi folks. Richard has asked us, the creative team behind GG&G, to write short bios on ourselves. Not being a gifted person with words, I was reluctant but thought it could be fun. I was born in Ontario, Canada in 1967 to two great parents, George and Winnifred Wiltshire. It would be seven years later when my Dad bought me my first comic--don't remember the number, but it was a 100 page Giant, and it was Detective Comics. That would begin my journey into the four-color realm of comics. I don't know what drew me to those wonderful costumed characters, but I found them irresistible. The strangest part may be that I never took to just one character. I would choose my purchases based on the introduction of a new character, than if it had, say, Spider-Man. And that may explain why there is a GGGA site today. It was also around this time that I starting collecting action figures. What kid wouldn't enjoy having real-world adventures with their favorite heroes? I know I had some of my best times flying Superman around the living room. Jump ahead 23 years to 1996. Much had changed, but much had stayed the same. I was now married to my beautiful wife, Debbie, but I was still reading comics, and I began to recollect those old Mego toys I remembered fondly. Then I also found myself a new passion--my computer. I soon was online and enjoying all the new found info at my fingertips. It wasn't long before I was searching out the comic sites and came across a message on the Golden Age (now Old Comics) message board. It was from a guy named Richard Boucher. The message told how he was going to draw every single character that existed during the Golden Age of Comics. He went on to mention that there were over 1000 characters to be chronicled, and I found that fascinating. I contacted Richard by e-mail and asked him if he was interested in putting his archive on the web. He wrote back and said that he was an amateur artist, and, if I would like to see some samples, he would be more than happy to send some. Well, it never came to fruition at that time, but I always remembered that message on the GA board. A year and a half later, I was again reading messages on the Golden Age board and came across one from Richard Boucher. This time Richard was putting together an alphabetical list of Golden Age characters and had posted the "A" section. Remembering him from earlier, I again contacted Richard about doing a website. Richard said he would send some samples, and I was excited. Within a few weeks I received those first few pictures in the mail. I was so ecstatic with what I saw, that I put together a webpage with some of the drawings Richard sent. Richard had a look at what I did and was interested in doing something further. He sent his ideas to me both by e-mail and regular snail mail. I began to create pages and scan drawings. We refined what had begun as a simple archive into what is now The Good Guys & Gals of the Golden Age. Today we have a small, but growing number of viewers; that’s you reading this. With your help we may realize that dream of archiving all the Good Guys and Gals of the Golden Age. Thanks for reading. Anthony Bernardo Kid Eternity, Blackhawk, and Me. Who was it who said the Golden Age is always 12 years old? Well, it was for me. That was when I first discovered the Golden Age of Comics. I’d been reading comics for several years, but when I was twelve I learned of the great surge in superheroes in the 1940s. My "schoolbooks" were Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes (a Christmas present from my aunt), DC’s Super-Spectaculars and reprint titles like Wanted and Secret Origins, as well as Shazam, and Marvel’s Doc Savage and DC’s The Shadow (with the superb Mike Kaluta illustrations). And on a dull Labor Day weekend I saw a paperback called All in Color for a Dime. This book and the original essays written in the Sixties established much of what we think about the Golden Age. For the first time, I knew that comics had a real history. That those strange old characters like Blackhawk, Plastic Man, and Kid Eternity were merely the tip of the iceberg, the foam on the wave of heroes created during the 1940s. Over the next few years, I collected any books I could find with Golden Age reprints, as well as reading books on the Golden Age like Steranko’s History of Comics or The Comic Book Book (a sequel to All in Color for a Dime). These fed my appetite for new information on the heroes. But my interest in the Golden Age comics waxed and waned as high school, college, a doctorate in English literature, family responsibilities, an intermittent attempt at doing a comic book, and now a fledgling career as a writer (in short, life) came down the pike. Through this time, my attitudes towards the Golden Age changed. When I read the Golden Age stories in the early Seventies, they appealed to me because they were, strangely enough, darker than more modern comics were. But then publishers in 1940 did not have the Comics Code Authority to worry about, and comics borrowed more heavily than they have since from the pulp magazines, radio shows, comic strips, and movie serials. Golden Age stories dealt with issues like organized crime and political corruption that comics were just beginning to touch on in the early Seventies. Nowadays, when every grim and gritty "hero" seems to exist solely to "kick butt," I find the Golden Age heroes more idealistic, more patriotic, but at the same time more comical and screwball. Golden Age comics took America seriously, but, thank heaven, they didn’t take themselves seriously. Over the years my interest in the Golden Age and comics in general waned, but as my doctoral work drew to its close, and I was looking for something to fiddle with on my computer, I returned to my old interest in comics. I can remember the first time I went on the Web. I think my first search was for Doc Savage sites. But eventually I found some of the online Golden Age sites. Good Guys and Gals of the Golden Age was one of my discoveries and one of the best. Month after month, it featured a new line-up of heroes from the past, many I’d only heard of and some I didn’t know existed. The links page was a treasure trove of other great sites. GGGA, as well as sites like Bill Nolan’s wonderful Pure Excitement Comics, helped me to realize something about the Web, the outpouring of generosity that went on daily on this electronic landscape. I dropped the site a few fan letters and struck up a correspondence. Then Richard mentioned a database project, which would grow out of the site listing every hero of the Golden Age. Wow! What more could a scholar and a fanboy want? I volunteered my help. Later, when I learned that Richard and Darrin were producing a CD based on the first twelve issues, I ended up proofreading their material along with Jeff. Now here I am writing my bio for the site and wondering what I’ll do for a conclusion. Well, I’ll just say what I feel. I’d like to show my appreciation to the men and women who have kept the Golden Age of Comics alive: Richard Lupoff, Don Thompson, Roy Thomas, Jim Steranko, and many others. I’m grateful to Richard and Darrin for the opportunity to give back some of what I’ve received. And, finally, I thank my family for their support and encouragement over the years, even putting up with a comic book habit that lasted three decades. Jeff Beyrent As an infant I was rocketed to Earth just before my home world exploded. Nine years later, I watched as my parents were murdered by a hold-up as we were walking home from a movie. Distraught, I ran blindly away from the terrible scene and into an abandoned subway station. On the platform I met an old man. He wore a long robe that might have been gray. And he had long white hair and long white beard. He told me that I was the re-incarnation of a long dead Egyptian prince and presented me with a ring and a lantern made of a strange green colored metal. Hmm? What’s that? They’ve been done before? All of them? Awww… RATS! Okay… I was born in 1954. I discovered The Lone Ranger, Zorro, The Adventures of Superman, Popeye, Mighty Mouse and Tarzan on TV; and The Phantom, Dick Tracy, Peanuts and Henry in newspaper comic strips early in my life. Comic Books came later for me, when I was about nine. Superman, Batman, The JLA and JSA, The Legion of Super-Heroes, The Challengers of the Unknown, Green Lantern, Aquaman, The Flash … Well, let’s just say I was hooked! And I have been ever since. I’ve spent most of my life in the "corridor" between Washington, DC and Baltimore. The major exception is the five plus years I spent living in Northern England. I hope to go back again someday. I’ve always felt at home there. I met my wonderful wife, Lenah, in 1972 when we were both still in high school. We were married in 1977 and she still loves me, even though I’ve never completely grown up. Or perhaps because of it? We’re the parents of four sons; ages 22, 13, 11 and 4. Yeah … we don’t seem to know when to stop. My formal education was at the University of Maryland. I majored in Education and had strong minors in American History and American Literature. What am I doing with my education? I’m working for the U.S. Government. I have had the opportunity, over the years, to use my literary skills (Such as they are) in the amateur "fanzine" publishing community as a proofreader and editor, where I have also written reviews on various Sci Fi television programs. I’ve been corresponding with both Richard and Darrin fairly extensively over the past year, ever since I discovered GG&G in a hyperlink on the SA/GA list. It became one of my favorite sites quite quickly. Both Richard and Darrin have been very receptive to certain of my suggestions for GG&G and I feel quite honored that they’ve asked me to join the GG&G team.
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