A Charlton Mystery

Warning: The following story is a mystery with no verifiable ending…just speculation. If you're the kind of person who likes your questions to have solid, inarguable answers, you might want to find something else on the Internet to read instead of the following…

Charlton Press was a comic book company that existed roughly from 1945 to 1986. They published a lot of comic books and back when I was a kid, I kind of rooted for them the way you might root for any underdog. They didn't have a lot of memorable characters and their books were cheaply printed and the stories were often kind of sappy. Real good artwork did appear in them but not often. As I later learned, the company had a reputation for paying its writers and artists poorly and…well, it showed.

Sometimes though they got more than they paid for. A guy named Joe Gill wrote an awful lot of them and he'd just bang out story after story after story, whether he had an idea for one or not. Occasionally, he hit a vein of gold. Sometimes, Steve Ditko drew for them as did a couple other good artists like Dick Giordano and Rocke Mastroserio. I started buying Charltons when I was about ten and with few-and-far-between exceptions, I liked them then more than I did when I got older.

Most of those I bought, I bought at second-hand book stores, most of which charged a nickel each or you could get six comics for a quarter. Needless to say, I only bought comics at such stores in multiples of six. That was how I started buying comics from different companies. For a while, I was only buying DCs but one day at some store, I found some quantity of DCs I wanted like 23 or 35…where one more comic would be free. So I'd take some interesting-looking Marvel home as my free comic and I'd like it so much that I'd find myself collecting DCs and Marvels…

…and then one day at some store, the pile of DCs and Marvels I wanted would be, say, 47 and since one more comic was free, I'd try a comic from some other company. I'm pretty sure that's how I started buying Charltons.

Used book shops were a good place to buy Charltons, not just because they were cheaper but because those stores were a good place to find them. Many of the stores I frequented here in Los Angeles to buy new comics simply didn't carry them. The few that had any Charlton comics didn't have many. Even later when I began to learn some things about comic book distribution back then, I couldn't understand why Charlton's product wasn't as available as comics from DC, Marvel, Archie, Harvey, Dell, Gold Key or one or two others.

I still don't know why but that's not the mystery that this post is about. The mystery that this post is about occurred one day at a used bookseller on Santa Monica Boulevard near Sawtelle. I'd picked out some comics to purchase when the guy who ran the place asked me if I collected Charlton Comics. I said I did and he took me into the back room and showed me five boxes of comics he'd recently acquired. Let me describe what was in them…

Each box had about a hundred Charlton Comics. Every single comic was in perfect condition as if they'd just come from the printer and never been read. And what they represented was one copy of every single comic that Charlton had published in about the last two years.

There were copies of Army Attack, Army War Heroes, Battlefield Action, Billy the Kid, Black Fury, Blue Beetle, Brides in Love, Cheyenne Kid, Fightin' Army, Fightin' Five, Fightin' Marines, Fightin' Navy, First Kiss, Freddy, Frontier Scout Daniel Boone, Gorgo, Gunmaster, Hot Rod Racers, I Love You, Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Just Married, Konga, Li'l Genius, Love Diary, Marine War Heroes, Marines Attack, Montana Kid, My Little Margie, Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds, Navy War Heroes, Outlaws of the West, Romantic Story, Sarge Steel, Secrets of Young Brides, Six Gun Heroes, Strange Suspense Stories, Submarine Attack, Sweethearts, Teen Confessions, Teenage Hotrodders, Teenage Love, Texas Rangers in Action, U.S. Air Force, Unusual Tales, War Heroes, Wyatt Earp and maybe a dozen others.

The storekeeper told me someone had brought them in and swapped them for two cents per comic in store credit, not cash, and had picked out ten bucks worth of old books (not comics). He would let me have the lot of them for twenty dollars. I offered fifteen. He said, "It's a deal if you get them out of here today."

I was about thirteen years old when this happened. I didn't have a lot of money but I had enough for this transaction. During all this, my father had been patiently waiting in his car outside, reading the newspaper. When I think about how good comic books have been to my life, I am grateful for my father's willingness in those years to drive me to second-hand bookstores and sit outside in his car reading the newspaper while I went in.

He was a little startled when I came out carrying crates of comics but by that age, he was used to his son surprising him…and he figured I knew what I was doing even though I didn't always figure that. I had to make five trips to his car.

The comics were not in order and it wasn't until I got them home and did some sorting that I realized what I'd acquired. It was, as I said, one of every comic book Charlton had issued for two years. That wasn't readily apparent to me until I realized that Six Gun Heroes had changed its title to Gunmaster and continued the numbering. Or that Charlton published five issues of Blue Beetle numbered #1-5, then they stopped Unusual Tales after #49 and followed it with Blue Beetle #50. So the numbering of Blue Beetle went #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #50, #51 and so on…

Charlton did things like that all the time and back then, there were no reference books in which I could look this stuff up. I had to figure it out for myself.

But that also is not the Charlton Mystery that this post is about. The mystery is: "Where the heck did this collection come from?"

How or why could or would anyone collect one copy of every Charlton comic for two years straight? They didn't miss one issue, even with Charlton's rotten distribution and its comics changing names as effortlessly as some people change socks. I could understand (maybe) being a lover of Charlton's romance comics or their war comics or every comic they put out with the words "Fightin' or "Attack" in its title…but every Charlton comic? And in perfect condition? How? Why?

Here's the best theory I came up with and if you have a better one, I'd love to hear it…

Someone in Los Angeles had a relative who worked for Charlton…or some business connection. Maybe some artist or writer who worked for the firm lived out here. Charlton for some reason sent them, individually or collectively, one copy of every comic that came off their presses and the recipient just tossed them all in boxes. That would explain the perfect condition. One day, they looked at the accumulation and said, "I'm sick of having this stuff piling up like this. I'm going to take them to a used book shop and I'll take anything they'll give me for them."

That's all I've got. I don't even have all those comics. I traded or sold 'em off long ago but I still sometimes wonder where they came from.