The AC Blue Beetle!

When at long last Charlton Comics gave up the ghost and closed its factory, the assets went far and wide. As we all know, DC Comics scooped up the Action-Heroes (Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, Judomaster, Peacemaker and for a time Thunderbolt) as a favor to former Charlton editor Dick Giordano. But at that same time Bill Black of AC Comics had also acquired some of Charlton's backlog and a promise to publish. He was eventually given a year to follow through on what he had picked up, and the result was Americomics #3 which featured two stories starring various versions of Blue Beetle. In the first story which was originally intended for the Charlton Bullseye we get a match-up between Ted Kord and Dan Garrett, one different from what DC would produce some years later. We also get a second story starring the Golden Age Blue Beetle. Pat Broderick's cover for the issue is one of my favorite pieces by him. 

 Also slated was a proposed teaming of the Action-Heroes, now dubbed the "Sentinels of Justice". We get Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, Question and Nightshade in action. One issue was produced and that was all. Black had hoped for more but his creative team could only conjure one issue before the year time limit was up. We would catch glimpses of the heroes together in DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths and of course most famously the heroes would populate The Watchmen in altered forms. Eventually we'd get The L.A.W. mini-series drawn by Dick Giordano, but that would be decades later. I'll have more on that later this year. 

More Charlton action tomorrow. 

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