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I've decided to put together a collection of my favourite golden age comic covers. For those of you who don't know, the golden age of comics started around the late thirties with the early superhero comics (Superman, Batman and many more). After World War II, superheroes lost a lot of their popularity and comic publishers seemed to be willing to try any genre that might sell. There were crime, romance, sci-fi and horror comics to name a few. In the late 50s and early 60s, the superheros became popular again and the golden age was over. Comics were crazy in the 40s and 50s. For some reason, we tend to have a highly idealized image of the 40s and 50s, but there was as much crazy stuff going on then as there is now. Even though these decades somehow projected an outer veneer of cleanliness and sanity, the craziness crept out at the edges. I had always read that some comics at this time were very violent and inappropriate for children, but I was still a little shocked after seeing some of these covers. Their over-the-top gore and violence caused the introduction of the Comics Code Authority, which effectively sterilized comics for the next forty years. I have found that I went through two stages in my appreciation of golden age comic book cover art. The covers I loved the most while in the first stage were the weird, wild and over-the-top ones. I believe that I'm currently in the second stage, where I have started to appreciate the composition and power of the covers. The covers collected here we're chosen when I was in the first stage, and are some of my personal favourites. These aren't the most important covers of the time, but rather they are the ones I liked the best at the time. I tend to gravitate towards all things obscure. You may notice that certain companies are not represented well here. For example, I have only chosen three covers from DC comics, one of the largest publishers at the time, yet I have numerous examples from Aragon/Stanmor/Key/Gilmor comics, an obscure, cruddy little comic company that made crazy covers just so their comics would be noticed. I've divided the covers into a few genres to make then easier to navigate. My original intent was to have a clever, snarky comment to go with each cover, but so many of these covers put me at a total loss of words. Thus I will only add a comment when I have something interesting to say. If you have any interesting comment on any of these covers, email them to me and I might add them to the site. Now that my selection here has been put together to share with others, I plan on creating a gallery of my favourite covers from my second stage of appreciation. It will likely be organised by artist, and will feature my favourite covers by my favourite artists. I owe a great debt to many other cover sites, such as the Grand Comic Book Database, Ben Samuels' Classic Golden Age Comic Book Cover Gallery, Crimeboss Crime Comic Books and, of course, eBay. Please note that clicking on a cover will display the jpeg alone in your browser window, which, depending on the image quality, may allow additional detail to be seen. |