Parent company | Tower Publications |
---|---|
Founded | 1965 |
Founder | Harry Shorten |
Defunct | 1969 |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | 185 Madison Avenue [1] New York City |
Key people | Harry Shorten Wallace Wood Samm Schwartz |
Publication types | Comic books |
Tower Comics was an American comic book publishing company that operated from 1965 to 1969, best known for Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents , a strange combination of secret agents and superheroes; and Samm Schwartz's Tippy Teen, an Archie Andrews clone. The comics were published by Harry Shorten and edited by Schwartz and Wood. Tower Comics was part of Tower Publications, a paperback publisher at that point best known for their Midwood Books line of soft-core erotic fiction aimed at male readers.
Tower Comics set themselves apart by publishing 25-cent, 64-page comics, during a time of 12-cent, 32-page comics. The comics were something of a throw-back to the Golden Age, in that they had more pages than most of their contemporaries and usually featured five or six independent stories, with all the main characters coming together for the final story of the issue, a common Golden Age plotting device used in team books such as DC Comics's All-Star Comics .
Tower publisher Harry Shorten "cut a dream deal with Wally Wood" in which Shorten would be the managing editor and "Wood would be granted a wide latitude of creative and business freedom devoid of a 9-to-5 office job or hefty administrative duties, and be allowed to concentrate on creating characters and concepts for an expanding line of superhero comics".
When it became obvious Wood could not handle the volume of material Shorten wanted to publish, he hired Samm Schwartz, who Shorten knew from both men's many years at Archie Comics. [1] Schwartz handled the scheduling of all the material and assignments of scripts and art other than Wood's own. [2] Schwartz's Tippy Teen, an Archie -style comic about the adventures of a spunky teenaged girl, ran 27 issues. Tippy Teen and its spin-off, Go-Go and Animal, featured many stories drawn by Schwartz, as well as contributions from moonlighting Archie artists like Harry Lucey and Dan DeCarlo.
Other notable creators associated with Tower included Dan Adkins, Gil Kane, Reed Crandall, Steve Ditko, Richard Bassford, Len Brown, Steve Skeates, Larry Ivie, Bill Pearson, Russ Jones, Roger Brand, and Tim Battersby-Brent. [1]
At some point in the early 1980s John Carbonaro purchased the rights to the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and associated characters and published them in his JC Comics line. [3] In 1984, Deluxe Comics launched their own line of new T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents stories, claiming the characters had fallen into the public domain. Carbonaro sued, [4] and was eventually awarded full legal rights to the property. [3] [5]
In the early 2000s DC began to reprint the original Tower stories as part of their DC Archive Editions , and in 2010 DC began publishing a new T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents series, having announced the year before that they had secured the lawful right to do so.
T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents is a fictional team of superheroes that appeared in comic books originally published by Tower Comics in the 1960s. They were an arm of the United Nations and were notable for their depiction of the heroes as everyday people whose heroic careers were merely their day jobs. The series was also notable for featuring some of the better artists of the day, such as Wallace Wood and Gil Kane. The team first appeared in T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1. The name is an acronym for "The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves". The team has appeared in several versions via several publishers since the early 1980s.
Wallace Allan Wood was an American comic book writer, artist and independent publisher, widely known for his work on EC Comics's titles such as Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, and MAD Magazine from its inception in 1952 until 1964, as well as for T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and work for Warren Publishing's Creepy. He drew a few early issues of Marvel's Daredevil and established the title character's distinctive red costume. Wood created and owned the long-running characters Sally Forth and Cannon.
Irving Novick was an American comics artist who worked almost continuously from 1939 until the 1990s.
Alfonso Williamson was an American cartoonist, comic book artist and illustrator specializing in adventure, Western, science fiction and fantasy.
Dark Circle Comics is an imprint of Archie Comics Publications, Inc. Under its previous name, Red Circle Comics, it published non-humor characters, particularly superheroes in the 1970s and 1980s, and was a digital imprint from 2012 to 2014. In 2015, it was converted back to a print imprint and was completely revamped as Dark Circle Comics, featuring darker and more mature content than previous incarnations of Archie's superhero line.
JC Comics was a comic book company primarily involved with the post-Silver Age iteration of the characters the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. JC Comics was owned by John Carbonaro.
William Pearson, known professionally as Bill Pearson, is an American novelist, publisher, editor, artist, comic book scripter and letterer, notable as the editor-publisher of his own graphic story publication, witzend.
Richard Bassford is an American illustrator who has worked in both advertising and comic books.
This is a list of various alternate universes featuring characters from Archie Comics. Most Archie stories take place within a setting that is gradually updated over the years, and events in one stories are not commonly referenced in others, but those stories remain largely in continuity with each other. However, there have been several series of stories that take place outside of this continuity, featuring alternate versions of the characters in different settings.
Charles Eber "Chic" Stone was an American comic book artist best known as one of Jack Kirby's Silver Age inkers, including his landmark run of Fantastic Four.
Franklin Robbins was an American comic book and comic strip artist and writer, as well as a prominent painter whose work appeared in museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, where one of his paintings was featured in the 1955 Whitney Annual Exhibition of American Painting.
The Alley Award was an American annual series of comic book fan awards, first presented in 1962 for comics published in 1961. Officially organized under the aegis of the Academy of Comic Book Arts and Sciences, the award shared close ties with the fanzine Alter Ego magazine. The Alley is the first known comic book fan award.
Tower of Shadows is a horror/fantasy anthology comic book published by the American company Marvel Comics under this and a subsequent name from 1969 to 1975. It featured work by writer-artists Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, Johnny Craig, and Wally Wood, writer-editor Stan Lee, and artists John Buscema, Gene Colan, Tom Sutton, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Bernie Wrightson.
Blue Ribbon Comics is the name of two American comic book anthology series, the first published by the Archie Comics predecessor MLJ Magazines Inc., commonly known as MLJ Comics, from 1939 to 1942, during the Golden Age of Comic Books. The revival was the second comic published in the 1980s by Archie Comics under the Red Circle and Archie Adventure Series banners.
Samm Schwartz was an American comic artist best known for his work in MLJ and Archie Comics, specifically on the character Jughead Jones.
Notable events of 1966 in comics. See also List of years in comics.
Deluxe Comics was a short-lived comic book publishing company which published one title, Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents.
Notable events of 1969 in comics. See also List of years in comics. This is a list of comics-related events in 1969.
Harry Shorten (1914–1991) was an American writer, editor, and book publisher best known for the syndicated gag cartoon There Oughta Be a Law!, as well as his work with Archie Comics, and his long association with Archie's publishers Louis Silberkleit and John L. Goldwater. From the late 1950s until his 1982 retirement, Shorten was a book publisher, overseeing such companies as Leisure Books, Midwood Books, Midwood-Tower Publications, Belmont Tower, and Roband Publications.
Tower Publications was an American publisher based in New York City that operated from 1958 to c. 1981. Originally known for their Midwood Books line of erotic men's fiction, it also published science fiction and fantasy under its Tower Books line and published comic books in the late 1960s under its Tower Comics imprint. In the early 1970s, Tower acquired paperback publisher Belmont Books, forming the Belmont Tower line. Archie Comics' cofounder Louis Silberkleit was a silent partner in Tower's ownership; longtime Archie editor Harry Shorten was a major figure with Tower in all its iterations.