The “inspiration” for today’s Comic Book Compulsive comes directly from Alter Ego #17. It’s one of those “goes without saying” things that really does need to be said at least every once in a while; if you have any interest at all in Gold and Silver Age comics you absolutely must read Alter Ego on a regular basis. Because no matter how much you think you know on the subject there’s always more you don’t know; case in point, L.B. Cole’s Star Publications and it’s connection to Novelty Press, one of my favorite Golden Age publishers.

Novelty Press only published a handful of titles, chief among them Blue Bolt and Target Comics, but for the first couple of years Novelty had creators like Carl Burgos, Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Tarpe Mills, Joe Simon and Basil Wolverton working for them and their stories were full of wild energy and exciting characters. But slowly but surely all that was interesting about Novelty started to disappear and the strips became rather blandly wholesome; I always said that they started producing the kind of comics that parents and grandparents would want their kids to read. I always wondered why that was but while researching this I discovered that Novelty was an imprint of Curtis Publishing, publisher of the blandly wholesome Saturday Evening Post.

After a nine year run Novelty went out of business and in 1949 L.B. Cole bought their assets and started Star Publications. In the beginning he did very well just repackaging unpublished inventory material featuring his signature covers, but eventually he created new material featuring some of Novelty’s characters. Including a fairly obscure one, Toni Gayle, a young model/detective who operated in the back page of the title Young King Cole.

The character continued, sort of, at Star though in this version Toni Gayle became “Toni Gay” stopped all that detective nonsense and became a would-be model who along with would-be actor boyfriend Butch Dykeman attended the Adonis School of Arts and had typical teen type adventures. It’s easy to read all sorts of salacious intent into Golden Age comics for cheap laughs, but for the most part you have to assume that the creators intent was most likely entirely innocent, but with names like “Toni Gay” and “Butch Dykeman” it’s pretty clear that somebody at Star was having fun slipping in something that went flying over the heads of most readers. Exhibit #1; this page from the Toni Gay story from Popular Teenagers #6 (which was reprinted in Mr. Monster’s Super Duper Special way back in 1986)

To be absolutely honest the contents of Popular Teenagers #5 are pretty much mediocre teen comics, though it should be noted that these weren’t direct Archie imitators, and the main reason I’m including this issue here is due to the strength of L.B. Cole’s cover alone. It’s a beautiful image, an attractive design, and then there’s the title. The existence of a comic called Popular Teenagers holds out the possibility that one day there could be a title called Unpopular Teenagers (I can write some real life stories for that one), but that’s not what I’m talking about. For some reason someone decided to abbreviate “Popular” into “Pop”, in spite of the fact that (supposedly) the term “pop” (as in popular music) wasn’t in common parlance until the late 50′s — and this comic was published in 1950. And for some reason I just like idea of their being “Pop Teenagers”.

As you can see for yourself the interiors are OK, but nothing sensational. Except for Ginger Bunn which was drawn by Manny Stallman, even the Grand Comic Book Database has no idea who drew these stories. Still if nothing else they’re interesting artifacts for another time which increasingly seems like another world.