Gold Key Comics Pin-Ups Extra: Up and At Them!

No survey of Gold Key back cover pin-ups is complete without a look at one of the great modern homages to those painted mini-masterpieces, 2002's Radioactive Man v.2 #6 from Bongo Comics:


Back cover pin-up from Radioactive Man v.2 #6, November 2002 ("#106, November 1963"), cover art by Batton Lash and Bill Morrison


(And here's the cover:)



Pretty cool salute, huh? All that's missing from the Radioactive Man pin-up are the words...um, "Radioactive Man Pin-Up."

But the homage to the gold age of Classic Key...I mean the classic age of Gold Key..doesn't end at the covers. From stem to stern this ish of Radioactive Man mimics its inspiration and milks it for fun, from the inside cover "educational" comic...






...to the "Club News"...








...and even Gold Key's infamous cartoon contests!






Even the comic itself is a salute: like most issues of Radioactive Man, the interior art style mimics the comic it's inspired by, in this case Gold Key's sixties borderless panels and rectangular speech balloons:





Gold Key Comics! From a time where every cartoon character and every nightly TV show had its own comic book. No elaborate crossovers, they only cost 12 or 15 cents, and they actually went far out of their way to avoid restarting a series with a new #1!