One of the panels I'm really looking forward to at the Comic-Con International in San Diego is the one we're doing at 10:30 on Saturday morning (July 19) in Room 8. It's on the history of Western Publishing Company, which produced the contents of Dell Comics (until around 1962) and Gold Key Comics (thereafter). If you're baffled — as so many seem to be — about the history of this unique company, this article that I wrote will explain a teensy bit of it to you and you can learn a little more at the panel. Actually, I'm hoping this will be the first of several annual panels on the topic, as there are a couple of folks I'd love to interview about Western but they're unable to make it this year. But we'll have plenty to discuss without them. We'll have Paul Norris and Mike Royer, both of whom did tons of comics for Western Publishing's West Coast office (as did I) and we'll have Len Wein and Frank Bolle, both of whom worked for the company's East Coast office. And we'll have collector/historian Maggie Thompson and I'm hoping for a few more last-minute additions.
If we all do our job, you'll get the beginnings of a portrait of an amazing company — one that often thought more like printers than publishers, and more like book publishers than comic book publishers. I am a big believer in the philosophy that the company does not create the comic; people do. In the field, we too often speak of "DC did this" or "Marvel did this," when it would be vastly more accurate to speak of specific human beings working for those companies doing such things…people who change from time to time. I recently read an as-yet-unpublished article by someone analyzing Marvel's business strategies over the last half-century as if that plan all came from one mind with one philosophy of publishing. (Marvel has rarely had one mindset at a given time, let alone over an extended period, and quite a few folks who've gotten into positions of power there have been of the mind that their predecessors were complete idiots who were mismanaging the firm into oblivion.)
All that said, there is a rough continuity of thought behind how Western operated — or at least, some prevailing views that ran very much counter to what the boys at DC, Marvel or other companies were then thinking. So we'll talk about that. And we'll talk about Carl Barks and Disney Comics in general. And Magnus, Robot Fighter. And Tarzan and Korak. And Star Trek. And Little Lulu and John Stanley and Oscar LeBeck and Chase Craig and Harvey Eisenberg and Dr. Solar and Walt Kelly and Roger Armstrong and Pete Alvarado and Hanna-Barbera comics and Dan Spiegle and Woody Woodpecker and Russ Manning and Paul S. Newman and Gaylord DuBois and Wally Green and all those movie and TV adaptations and…
Boy, this is sounding like it's going to have to be a couple of annual panels. Be there for the first of them.