Sunday, September 6, 2009

Free Comics Monday: Mystery Men Comics

All Smash FunniesRecently, I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Mike Rickaby, publisher of the CE Publishing Group who is another big fan of Golden Age comics and also the publisher of his own Golden Age style comic All Smash Funnies which you can acquire from ComicXpress.

The first issue is a royal treasure trove of mystery men characters (The Chameleon, The Snow Man, Mercury and The Black Rose) and is crowned with a fantastic cover illustration by master artist Don Perlin.

Reading this comic got me to thinking about the original Mystery Men comic, so I dug up a couple of issues for today's FCM.

Mystery Men Comics was first published August 1939 by Fox Feature Syndicate, which was a company started by Victor A. Fox and Bob Farrell. Fox Features is most famous for Lou Fine's the Flame and Matt Baker's revamped Phantom Lady. Mystery Men was an anthology title which featured The Green Mask, Blue Beetle and the Dick Breifer character Rex Dexter of Mars.

Mystery Men 3

[ Mystery Men 3 ]

Throughout the 1940s, Fox produced comics in a typically wide variety of genres, but was best known for superheroes and humor. With the post-war decline in superheroes' popularity, Fox, like other publishers, concentrated on horror and crime comics, including some of the most notorious of the latter. Following the establishment of Comics Code Authority in the mid-1950s, Fox went out of business, selling the rights to the Blue Beetle to Charlton Comics. ~wikipedia


Mystery Men 05

[ Mystery Men 5 ]

- Enjoy!

2 comments:

GACN said...

Good stuff today! Mystery Men is one of the best runs! I believe only one more issue has to show up to make the entire series available online.

I will check out that other publisher - thanks for the heads up!

Boox

Jim Shelley said...

Thank you Boox! I just recently discoveredt the Mystery Men series when I was looking up information about Blue Beetle.
------------
btw - saw your comments in GAUK forum about the Marvel 70th comics and agree with you about the way the new versions of the GA stuff looks.

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