Editorial

--COVER HEROES & HEROINES--

    Hello, gang! It’s good to be back with another issue of the Good Guys and Gals of the Golden Age. I hope you all realize that this is our third consecutive issue in as many months. We are very proud to be back on a schedule. I would like to thank my two dear and great friends, DARRIN WILTSHIRE and ANTHONY BERNARDO for their valiant efforts in making this happen. Take a bow, guys!

    I'm going to keep this month’s editorial short (HA!) since I am getting ready to take a vacation to that glittering city, LAS VEGAS! Wish me luck! LOL! So without further delay, let’s get down to business.

COVER HEROES & HEROINES

    As the header at the top of the page suggests my main topic this month is those wonderful characters, the cover heroes (and heroines), who for one brief moment had their place in the Golden Age of comics. Pictures are indeed worth a thousand words, especially in a visual medium like comics. So it’s no small feat for an artist to create a feeling or mood on a cover that would grab a potential reader’s attention and hopefully their hard-earned dime as well. Cover characters are anomalies, for they appear nowhere else but the cover of the book. But just imagine what it was (and is) like to see these creations who could the reader wonder "what if"! I know many times I have spied a cover from the Golden Age (as well as the Silver Age as we’ll see later) and wondered what that story might have turned into. And that wondering is what comics is all about. In previous issues, we have featured almost a dozen cover heroes in our Mystery Guest sections, because we believe that these characters deserve a place among the more famous Good Guys and Gals of the Golden Age. For this month and the next, our Companions sections are solely devoted to cover heroes. Though Silver Age (1960-1976) cover heroes are found in our Obscure Silver Age section, for what could be more obscure than a character who appeared only once on the cover of a comic book! We hope you enjoy this little experiment in which each profile is a brief "cover blurb" with my finished drawings of the characters and, as a special added bonus, the actual comic that it came from.

MYSTERY GUEST

    As mentioned above, we have mainly used cover heroes (and soon heroines) for this section of our site. To date, Darrin and I have identified well over 30 cover heroes and heroines from around the world, and no doubt there are a few more waiting to be discovered. Out of our list, we have visual information on all but two characters, the WHITE FLASH and TORNADO TIM, both of whom appeared on the cover of DOUBLE COMICS by the Elliot Publishing Company. If you can produce an image of these last two characters, I will send you a free reprint CD-ROM of your choice! So consider yourself challenged! Our Mystery Guest from last issue was LIBERTY MAN!, so named because he appeared on the cover of Liberty Comics # 10. If you identify this issue’s Guest as well as the "other" Mystery Guest from last issue, you could win original drawings. So get out your Gerber's and Overstreet's and start looking. Good hunting!

GREATS OF THE GOLDEN AGE

    This is our site’s newest section, which features THREE Golden Age stories hand-picked by DARRIN in every issue. We hope you enjoy this addition to our site and send us your comments on it. Also worth mentioning, our new CD ROMS, GREATS FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF COMICS Volumes 4, 5, and 6 will be ready first week of October. Each CD has 22 full stories and over 150 pages of art. You can see a list of the contents HERE! DARRIN made these CDs a joy to behold (and he picked the stories)! So if you love the Golden Age of comics, then you owe it to yourselves to BUY these CDs and marvel at the great stories and art or appreciate a restored piece of lost Americana. We are also DROPPING the price of all SIX of our CDs down to $12.50 each make them more affordable. So get those dollars out and ORDER TODAY! Meanwhile, I have just sent Darrin the next disk of scans for him to edit. These scans will comprise volumes 7 and 8, and I am hard at work scanning the contents for volumes 9 and 10. With any luck we should have at least two ready by the end of November, and two more ready after the first of the year. Wouldn't these make great Christmas presents? LOL! Also, we have spent the summer months buying over 40 additional Golden Age comics, all containing some great stuff, to ensure that we will have future CDs. Stay tuned for future updates on our REPRINT series.

    Well, that's it for this issue. Join us again at the end of September for issue 19, OK? God bless. You all take care now. Go and enjoy.

Richard Boucher 08/30/01