SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON - About Gold Key Comics

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About Gold Key Comics

The early 60s is known among comics fans as "The Silver Age of Comics." That era witnessed a lively revival of the superhero genre in comics, the most significant jump in comics sales since the boom times of the Golden Age back in the World War II era. After the first wave of TV mania hit in the 50s, a dry spell set in for the magazine publishing industry that many of the weaker contenders in the pulp magazine and comics market didn't survive. The tide began to turn toward the very end of the 50s, and the magazine market began to expand again.

America was taking a shine to the new superheroes appearing on the stands under the Marvel banner, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Mighty Thor, and the rest. Even the venerable DC dared to jump on the new superhero bandwagon by introducing new versions of many Golden Age characters that didn't survive the 50s, like Green Lantern, Hawkman, Green Arrow, and the others.

In 1962, Western Publishing Company severed a long-standing relationship with Dell Publications which was established in 1935. After this decision was made, Western began its own comics line, Gold Key Comics. (Dell continued to publish its own Dell Comics line for a few years afterward.) Western is perhaps better known for their childrens' publishing branch, Golden Press, as the publishers of the Little Golden Books. Western held practically all the licenses for publishing comic versions of the characters in the respective Disney, Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbara cartoon stables, and had firmly established ties with the TV and film brass. The licensed titles that formerly appeared with the Dell label reappeared on the stands under the Gold Key logo.

Gold Key's approach to doing comics was distinctly different from the other major publishers. They operated out of two publishing offices: one located in mid-town Manhattan, like most of their competitors, and another, located in Beverly Hills, convenient to the home bases of their Hollywood licensors. Because of their bi-coastal business arrangement, they also made more extensive use of a pool of West Coast artists whose work wasn't seen in comics from the rest of the mainstream New York comic publishers. At first, Gold Key Comics were packaged like all standard 36-page comics of the times, but with special premium features, priced competitively at 12 cents (US) and carrying no advertising. Gold Key also distinguished their small selection of superheroes and adventure titles from their competitors on the newsstand by using slick, uncluttered cover layouts featuring a striking full-color painting every issue, instead of the customary line art covers seen most everywhere else. (This was a hold-over from the Dell era.) As an added bonus, the earliest issues of Gold Key's books also featured a pin-up version of the front cover art, reproduced on the back cover sans title overlays.

Another unique aspect of Gold Key's covers was their conspicuous lack of the Comics Code Authority seal. The Comics Code was the self-regulatory "Hayes office"-like standards-and-practices review agency that the comics industry submitted itself to in the late '50s. This was instituted by the publishers themselves in the wake of the strong anti-comics fervor provoked in the mid-1950s after the publication of Dr. Fredric Wertham's flawed "comics cause juvenile delinquency" diatribe, The Seduction of the Innocent. In part, the measure of putting this seal of approval helped convince parents that it was safe for their kids to buy comics again, and was a major contributing factor to the Silver Age sales boom, and yet Gold Key never displayed the CCA seal. Instead, they actually promoted themselves as maintaining somewhat stricter standards than the CCA, and banked on the solid, wholesome and reliable corporate image projected by their comics' attractive, high-quality packaging and well-known business affiliation with Walt Disney Productions and Golden Press. Indeed, Gold Key Comics had inherited quite a legacy. In 1953, when Dr. Wertham's criticism of the industry was affecting all else, and superheroes' popularity was at its lowest ebb, Dell's Walt Disney's Comics and Stories set an all-time sales record for comics, with about 1.8 million monthly issues per month at its peak.

Gold Key had plenty of work on their hands with their licensed comics, which included sure-fire heroic adventure titles like The Phantom and Tarzan of the Apes but they also saw fit to join the growing Silver Age comics market with several original characters, including memorable superhero titles like Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom and Magnus, Robot Fighter: 4000 A.D.

(For further info about the overall historical context of the Silver Age of Comics, visit the The Comic Page web site.)

So things stood late in 1962. Rocket technology was behind the two major news events of that October -- the fifth manned Mercury mission, which flew the first week of the month and the Cuban missile crisis, which developed shortly thereafter.

Wally Schirra had just completed orbiting the Earth 6 times in Mercury Capsule #8, also known as "Sigma 7." This flight was the most successful to date, making Schirra the third US astronaut to orbit the Earth, and culminating with a splash-down landing at a point closer to the projected target than any previous mission. Unfortuately, NASA's patriotic pride was still smarting from the fact that Soviet cosmonaut Adrian Nikolyev had set an impressive manned orbital record of 64 orbits aboard Vostok 3 back in August. Then the news turned its attention from the rocketry of peace to the rocketry of war, as the leaders of the two superpowers confronted each other over the Soviet missiles found to be based in Cuba.

It had only been a year and a half since Alan Shepard flew the first Mercury mission, after which President Kennedy gave his historic "we choose to go to the moon" speech. It was still very early in the race to the Moon, but it seemed Americans' hopes were firmly behind the rockets of peace. The implication of human footprints on the moon wasn't lost on a generation preparing to consider the notion of entire families setting out into the new frontier of space, just as earlier generations had done in moving entire households to the West in covered wagons ... and after the wagons came the railroad. It was in this historical setting that, around Thanksgiving that year, Gold Key introduced their new line of comics, including a quarterly entitled Space Family Robinson.

This page last modified June 30, 2008.

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