Recently I excavated a lot of my old comics from the Bully Longbox Storage Vault, including a lot of comics I wanna regale you good people with my stories of how they're my favorite comics. (Is What If? #11 the greatest comic about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, ever? You make the call!) But among the superhero stuff I found my old treasure of Gold Key and Dell comics...dozens and dozens of battered and worn funny animal and cartoon tie-in books that I just loved so much I read 'em to shreds. Among these, however, were what I have always thought of as the weird backwoods country cousins of the Gold Keys: Top Comics.
What the heck are these? Top Comics baffled me when I was just a wee tiny stuffed calf and they still are bit of a mystery to me now. There was only one place I was able to get them at: the long defunct-chain of Savarin Restaurants and Rest Stops dotted along the New York State Thruway, during those never-ending car trips from Syracuse to Oneonta or Schenectady to visit relatives. There was always a spinner rack with plenty of Top Comics, and I was allowed to get two or three. But I never saw 'em anywhere else in my life. For that matter, minor mystery B: what the heck ever happened to the Savarin chain? I wasn't sad to see 'em go...their brand of unenthusiastic diner food was kind of dismaying even to me at that age, and I was excited to eat out anyway. Good riddance to bad rubbish and I was pleased when they were eventually replaced by Burger Kings and McDonald's. But why'd they go out of business? Whoa, whoops, I think I just answered my own question. Well, that solves the Mystery of the Disappearing Crappy Roadside Restaurant Chain!
Top Comics were, it's very clear, reprints of Gold Key Comics, and the indicia in each lists the publisher as K. K. Publications on North Road in Poughkeepsie, New York, which is another imprint of the octopus-like Western Publishing in Poughkeepsie, which published and distributed Dell and later Gold Key Comics. I'm simplifying that explanation tremendously for my purposes here. It's unpacked in a little more detail in Wikipedia's Western Publishing entry, but for my shiny dime nobody does a better job of clarifying the clear-as-mud Western story as Mister Mark Evanier, whose explanation here should be required reading for anybody interested in Dell and Gold Key. Come to think of it, maybe only Mark knows the true story behind Top Comics, but he don't mention 'em in his article. (Fill us in if'n you know, Mark!)
Anyway, these are clearly Gold Key comics under a different name. All the ones I have featured Disney and Warner cartoon properties, but from what very little I've been able to find on the web on Top Comics, they also produced issues of other Gold Key comics: The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Lassie, The Three Stooges, Tarzan, Flipper, and probably many more. (Those additional titles are courtesy of a sales page on the Mile High Comics site.) In addition, every comic has extra "Gold Key Club Comics" activity, cartoon, and text pages clearly branding them as Gold Key comics. (More about some of these feature pages a little further down.)
That sales page, however, is just about all I can find about Top Comics on the web...there doesn't seem to be anything else major that I can find and certainly no real explanation for what the heck these things are in the first place. Googling "Top Comics" returns a bajillion results, almost all of them referring to either the series Tip-Top Comics (home of Nancy and Peanuts) or various "top comics" lists. Last time I checked Overstreet, which was admittedly a few years back, there was no listing for the Top Comics either.
So what do I know about these? Well, all of mine seem to carry a 1967 copyright date. They are all unpriced on the comics themselves: several of them have a somewhat generic sticker that says "15¢" affixed to the cover, but they don't all have 'em...and none of the covers shown on that Mile High page show these stickers, so I'm guessing the stickers might have been placed on there by the Savarin gift shop operator rather than the publishing company. That leads me to make this wild, unfounded guess: were these comics that were published for overseas, or maybe for military bases?
About half of the comics in my possession have no ads. The inside front and back covers are filled with black and white one-page gag strip reprints, and the back cover is a repeat of the front cover art minus the logo but marked "Pin-Up":
On the other hand, the other half of 'em do have ads, mostly of the "send away for this cool cheap crap" variety (click on the photo to expand to a much larger and legible size):
...which doesn't seem likely for overseas comics to feature American send-in ads, so I'm stiff baffled. So, comics blogosphere and four-color scholars, help me out here: what were Top Comics? Why were they labeled and branded as such? Why could I only find them in a roadside gift shop? Why weren't they simply selling the usual Gold Key comics in those venues? Huh? Huh? Huh?
All that said, the baffling mystery that even at the time vaguely nagged at the back of my stuffed brains never kept me from enjoying the rich comicy goodness of Top Comics. This is classic and primal 1950s and '60s cartoon comics material here, folks, and it was through these as well as my beloved Golden and Disney Comics Digests that I mostly developed my sheer love of the consecutive art medium. Plus, rabbits dropping anvils on top of ducks! You can't go wrong with that.
Among these sixteen or so Top Comics is absolutely one of my favorite comics of all time. My love for the story inside probably is reflected by its well-worn condition: Top Comics: Uncle Scrooge #3...
...which features in its loose and curling pages (one even had a huge chunk accidentally torn out of the corner), quite possibly...no, make that absolutely positively, my favorite Uncle Scrooge comic story, ever: "The Great Steamboat Race":
I love this story: Scrooge finds out about an ancestor's never-finished steamboat race against a rival pig, and the pig's descendant and Scrooge decide to finish the race. There's one catch: both steamboats are sunk at the bottom of the muddy Mississippi. Well, there's another catch: the pig's got a professional salvage company to raise his boat. Scrooge has Donald and the nephews. There's a brilliant science gag in here where Scrooge's boat is raised using inflated inner tubes (not as clever as ping pong balls, but I wasn't aware of the genius of that story at the time). I've read this story hundreds of times and even when I eventually "traded up" for a cleaner and sharper copy in that big-ass Gladstone reprinting of the complete Uncle Scrooge, I still cherish and hold dear to my heart this tattered and battered issue.
Why? Because it is, as far as I can remember, my first introduction to the fantabulous work of Carl Barks. Take a gander (tee hee) at the splash page up above. Do you see any writer or artist credits? Nope, you do not. But like millions of other fans of Unca Carl, I instantly recognized quality and brilliance in his work, and I recognized that not all comics, or even all Uncle Scrooge comics, were created equal. The other shoe dropped in my head at that very young age: that people actually created comic books, and some of them were better than others. It was like a lightbulb flash going on over my head, but it started an entire lifetime of collecting, reading, and loving comics, and my search for the Good Ones, like those done by "The Good Duck Artist." Even before I knew his name I could tell that that Scrooge saga reprinted in tiny size in Walt Disney's Comics Digest where Scrooge unrolled his ball of string across Africa against Flintheart Glomgold was the work of that same guy who did the steamboat story. And the one where the Beagle Boys had a robotic submarine that fired diamond-sharpened bluejay missiles. And the one where Magica da Spell turned herself into a duplicate of Scrooge to steal his Number One Dime and was foiled by the nephews when she was rude to them. The best comics in the world...then or now.
So in the end, the mystery of Top Comics still makes me scratch my little stuffed head. But the magic will never stop.
Special bonus interior peeks!: all the Top Comics featured the usual-for-the-time Gold Key text, puzzle, and comics filler pages that were often a bit of a disappointment (they weren't truly comics, they were jus' takin' up space.) Mighty Mike Sterling over at Progressive Ruin recently posted a Gold Key quirky feature page of reader-submitted monster drawings, which reminded me just how much that particular page used to freak my little brains out as a kid:
Another regular feature was the aptly named "Can You Complete The Comic?," or, as I like to call it, "Western Publications Refuses to Pay Its Gag Men and Makes Kids Pay for the Privilege":
This feature mighta been more appealing to me if another Top Comic I remember buying at the same time hadn't featured the exact same gags, completed. I guess that Gold Key gag man finally overcame his writer's block with the help of some Savarin pancakes and a shot of rotgut whiskey, huh?:
Too young to vote? To heck with the establishment, man! While your 'rents are busy campaigning and ringing doorbells for Richard "Mister Clean Government" Nixon, and your crazy bohemian uncle keeps talking about how there's absolutely no way Bobby Kennedy won't be the next Prez, you can poo-poo those old squares and instead vote on something important: your favorite
Top Comics! They may remain a mystery, but the delight lingers on!
52 WEEK 46: This comic is fun. Whoa, looks like Mary Marvel isn't the only one who takes the lightning of Shazam straight to the chest, huh? Egg Fu, Doctor Cyclops, T.O. Morrow, Dr. Sivana (and the rest of the eggheads on Oolong Island) batten down the hatches as Black Adam comes flying in...and he ain't selling magazine subscriptions! (Although that would kinda be an interesting issue, wouldn't it?) The mad scientists are all written with a quirky tongue-in-cheek that wouldn't be out of place in, say, an episode of The Venture Brothers, and even the slowwwwwwwest arrest in the history of Metropolis doesn't detract from the chuckles over a bidding war for Red Tornado on eBay.
52 WEEK 47: This comic is fun...sorta. Which leads us right into this week's book-stabbin', Robin-guestin', Animal-Mannin', Montoya-Questionin' installment of 52, which after the kick-ass action of last week seems to be spinning its wheels and biding its time. Maybe Messrs. Johns, Morrison, et. al. are just getting everyone onstage for the big Cossack number, but there's more setting and situation than conflict and forward motion in this issue. With five weeks to go, better ramp up the action, and fast: there's a lot to get in. But I am enjoying the concept that as the series spirals towards its complicated conclusion, more and more of the big players of the DCU are stepping back into the spotlight and getting ready to dust off their supersuits for One Year Later.
SIMPSONS COMICS #128: This comic is fun. The Simpsons comic tends to do straight parody more often than the TV series, but even when they're spoofing TV themselves, the four-color floppy does a solid job of providing some decent belly-laughs and a compelling and intricately-involved plot. This parody of 24 covers one hour in the life of Springfield per page, and there's at least one decent joke or sight gag on every page. All this plus a special guest-appearance by Jack Bauer! (And, if you don't blink, Bender's in this one too!) You'll enjoy this if you're a 24 or Simpsons fan, and if you like both, why, this is seventh heaven.
THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #2: This comic is sorta fun. Since I'm a week late in reviewing this, I don't know what I have to add to the comments of everyone in the blogosphere that, geez, that is a skeevy scene, isn't it? While Supergirl in this issue is more cheerful and sunny than in her own weird-ass book, hoo boy, Hal Jordan don't need to share those thoughts with us, does he? Most of all, it colors a perfectly decent book with a fun updated twist on Haney- and Schwartz-era characters and concepts with a cheap suggestive snarkiness that doesn't add anything to the characterization or plot. As Captain America might say, "Eyes front, soldier...we've got a job to do."
THE SPIRIT #4: This comic is fun. Gorgeous design (a cover you might actually think is covered with sand until you try to brush it away), sharp and genuinely witty dialogue (now that's a way to do suggestion, guys. Also? Use adults.), the ever-intricate mystery of the Octagon and The Octopus, desert sequences so starkly lit you can feel the heat, and a battle of the sexes, The Desperate Ones-style, and one of Eisner's classic femme fatales extensively updated by Darwyn Cooke but never seeming out-of-place or untrue to the source material. And, like an Easter Egg spread out over two pages, Cooke continues his winning streak of innovative and beautiful splash pages with the trademark Eisner titles spelled out in the art (in this one, the wavering hazy shadows of desert cactus and our heroes spell out Denny Colt's alias.) There's a delight to this series all-too-missing from so many other monthly comics: check out the cocky grin on the Spirit as he surprises Silk Satin at a Mexican border hotel stake-out, or the charming snake oil of a slick villain with a heart of gold, or the calm confidence of Ebony zooming through back streets in his cab. Every issue is a sheer knockout, and while I would certainly forgive a slight slip in the excellence in this series, that's four Spirits a row that rack up the honor of the most fun comic of the week. And a fun comic like that...that will make you feel better when you're blue.
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