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Author:
Title: WARRIOR COMICS No. 1
Place Published:
Publisher:H.C. Blackerby
Date Published: 1945
Description: CGC certified: VF (8.0). Grader's notes: "Shadow full left of back cover; light crunch right top of whole book; light spine stress lines to cover." Cream to off-white pages.

GPAnalysis: An 8.0 sold for $288 in 12/19.

Overstreet: "1930s DC reprints. Wing Brady, The Iron Man, Mark Markon." CGC Census: 42 graded copies (41 Universal, 1 Qualified). Gerber's Photo-Journal Guide Scarcity Index: 8 ("Rare: 11-20 copies").

Credits: Cover: Uncredited. Scripts: Tom Hickey, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, J. Andrew Gaulden. Art: Kelly Peterson.Swipe Speculation: The uncredited cover is a swipe of a panel from Leo O'Mealia's "Barry O'Neill" story in More Fun Vol. 1, #8 (February, 1936). The guts are mainly reprints from More Fun mags, with an original "The Iron Man" eight-pager scripted by Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, continued from "Hoofs of the Tartar Horde" in More Fun Comics #30 (March-April, 1938).

So, how exactly did this wacky mag (and its close cousins, Atomic Comics #1, Bingo Comics #1, Federal Men Comics #2, and Cavalier Comics #2) come to be? Why are they full of DC-derivative material? It's a tangled mystery subject to speculation, with few conclusive answers to be found, but here's what a savvy chap called "DCindexer" opined in the "First Homage to an Earlier Cover" thread on the classiccomics.org site in January, 2015:

"As to why these five issues exist, I can only speculate that the contents were sold to a comic book packager after WWII. Comic book packagers were common in those days. Packagers like Funnies, Inc., Harry Chesler, and the Iger studio supplied comics to a variety of publishers. It may be that this material was dumped by a Nicholson era employee or DC founder Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson himself. The packager then sold the contents to a variety of publishers trying to break into comics. This theory is supported by the fact that Iger material was used to fill out the remaining issues of Atomic Comics. The other titles had no follow-ups."****************************************
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