Gold Key Comics

Star Trek #10 (May, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I’ve mentioned in passing a time or two before on this blog, I didn’t get to see Star Trek when it originally aired on the NBC television network from 1966 to 1969.  Until 1970, we only had two TV stations in the Jackson, MS metro area; and although one of them was an NBC affiliate, it sometimes pre-empted that network’s programming to carry something else (usually a program from ABC, the odd-network-out in our market).  My maiden voyage upon the starship Enterprise would thus have to wait until reruns of the by-then-cancelled show started airing locally in syndication, probably sometime in 1970.

Once first contact was finally made, however, I immediately (and unsurprisingly, considering the other stuff I was into) became a big Trek fan.  And I was keen to extend my enjoyment of the show through what we would now call ancillary media.  The thing was, in 1970 and 1971, there wasn’t a whole lot of licensed Trek story-product available.  Read More

It was April, 1970…

Posted on by Alan Stewart

On July 21, 2015, this blog made its debut with a post entitled “It was the summer of ’65…”.  In that first installment, I described my earliest experiences with comic books, leading up to to my very first comics purchase in the, well, summer of ’65.  Since then, I’ve been writing about some of the most interesting individual issues I bought in my first few years as an avid comics reader (and nascent collector), while also attempting to chronicle, more generally, the evolution of my own comics tastes and interests, and setting that personal narrative in the broader context of what was going on in the funnybook industry (and, more broadly, in American culture), during those years.

But now, almost half a decade after starting this project, I’ve reached the point in the narrative of my comic book buying and reading where that story almost came to an end, fifty years ago.  I’ve arrived at the time in my life when, at least for a while, I stopped buying comics.  Read More

Dark Shadows #5 (May, 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Once upon a time, in the mid-to-late Sixties through the early Seventies, there was a television show called Dark Shadows…

It was a thirty-minute show that came on five days a week, late enough in the afternoon that most kids could catch it if they came straight home after school.  It was a daytime serial — a “soap opera”, in common parlance — but one that built its stories not around adulterers, secret children, and long-lost evil twins, but rather vampires, witches, ghosts, Frankensteinian monsters, warlocks, werewolves, zombies, and even more things that go bump in the night.  Read More

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. #10 (January, 1967)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

“Batmania” may have dominated the pop culture landscape in 1966, but it was by no means the only thing going on at the time — not even within the smaller sphere of pop-cultural activity that was of special interest to nine-year-old boys such as myself.  For one thing, there was also The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (that’s the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, for those of you who don’t already know, and yet might actually care for some reason), in addition to being something of a mini-phenomenon of its own, was of course also part of the larger wave of popularity of the “super-spy” genre in the early-to-mid-Sixties.  The wellspring of this popularity was author Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the hero of a series of espionage thrillers who’d debuted in 1953, but who’d really taken off (especially in the United States), when it was revealed that President John F. Kennedy was a fan.  By 1966, the enormous success of Agent 007 had yielded a crop of imitators as well as variations on the “spy-fi” concept, including TV’s spoof Get Smart and Western-spy-fi genre hybrid The Wild Wild West, not to mention comics’ Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents series.     Read More

The Wild Wild West #1 (June, 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The very first comic books I bought for myself, in the summer of 1965, were DC comics, and for the most part I stuck with that publisher for the next couple of years.  I wasn’t completely an exclusive DC customer, however; I also bought comics from Gold Key, the comic book imprint of Western Publishing.  Gold Key produced superhero series like Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. and Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom; they also had the licenses for Tarzan, and for the Disney and Warner Bros.cartoon characters.  However, I wasn’t very interested in any of those.  No, I bought Gold Key comics because they published comic books based on my favorite television shows — and in March, 1966, one of my very favorite shows was The Wild Wild West.  Read More