I am hereby resuming a series of posts that I stopped a month ago due to some major distractions, some of them involving the 45th President of the United States. So before you read what comes next, you might want to reacquaint yourself with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 or even Part 4. This fifth part will be waiting here for you when you return…
At the age of ten, I had been an avid lover of comic books for at least a third of my life…which may sound like a lot but today, it's more like 95%. In 1962, most of what I was reading was Dell Comics, especially those that featured characters seen in cartoons from the Disney Studios, Warner Brothers, MGM, Walter Lantz, Terrytoons, Hanna-Barbera and Jay Ward. All of these comics said "Dell" on the covers…
…until one day, they didn't.
I'm going to get way too deep into trivia here. Forgive me but this was a traumatic, life-changing moment in my existence. It began at a Von's Market at which my family used to shop. Below is a photo taken years later at the corner of Pico Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Almost nothing in the photo is still there except that the buses which run on Pico are still blue and #7. If you click on the picture, you can see more of it.
So one day when I accompanied my mother there for groceries, I hit the comic book rack and found a lot of new comics, some of which startled me. Bugs Bunny comics had always come from Dell Comics but this new Bugs Bunny comic book came from a company I'd never seen before: Gold Key. I don't remember how many books I was able to purchase that day but I'm pretty sure of these two…
This was on or a few days after Thursday, June 28, 1962 because that's the day those comics went on sale. Also on sale that day were these comics bearing the Gold Key logo : Checkmate #1, King Leonardo and His Short Subjects #1, Little Lulu #165, Snagglepuss #1, Walter Lantz Woody Woodpecker #73 and Dr. Solar #1. I was ten years old and emotionally unable to process all this change.
Bugs, Rocky, His Highness King Leonardo, Lulu, Snagglepuss and Woody had always appeared in Dell Comics before this. In fact, I think there was a recent Dell issue of King Leonardo still on that rack. Checkmate was based on a prime-time detective series that I actually watched and knew had been canceled. Dr. Solar wasn't based on anything I'd ever seen before.
I instantly came to the obvious conclusion that Dell had just changed its name to Gold Key. And that was a sound bit of deduction until I noticed that the new issues of two Dell mainstays — Walt Disney's Comics and Stories and Donald Duck — still had Dell cover symbols.
So I didn't know what the hell was going on and it only got worse. Over the following weeks, there were more issues of comics that had previously said "Dell" on their covers that now said "Gold Key" but there were also comics that had previously said "Dell" on their covers that still said "Dell" on their covers. There were also an awful lot of brand new comics coming out, some with "Dell" on their covers (like Felix the Cat #1 and a new Disney book — Goofy #1) and brand new comics (like New Terrytoons #1 and Fractured Fairy Tales #1) that said "Gold Key" on their covers.
As I mentioned in Part 4 of this series, my family and I sometimes drove past a building on Santa Monica Boulevard for a company called Western Publishing and I knew that Dell Comics came from that building. For a few weeks in July of '62, I almost wanted my folks to drive me down there so I could pound on the door and scream, "WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING TO MY COMIC BOOKS???!!"
I resisted the impulse and soon, things settled down. The next issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories that came out came out with a Gold Key logo as did all the future Disney comics. I reconciled myself to the notion that Dell had split into two companies, one named Dell and one named Gold Key, and each had some of my favorite comics. As I would learn a decade later, this wasn't exactly true but it was close.
But that didn't end the trauma. There was something else odd about some (not all) of these new Gold Key comics — something on the insides. I'll do some show-'n'-tell about it in the next installment of this series, coming soon. Or at least sooner than this installment did.