I was going to do an overview of Marvel's Thor, starting from the earliest days of the Journey into Mystery issues, for October's blog entry, but having the builders in the house has meant my scanner is packed away, which was a bit of a roadblock. So I've decided to offer a pictorial special instead. Back in the early days of my obsession with comics, before I stumbled across Marvel's titles, I was a reader of Batman and Superman comics. Looking back on those early 1960s DC covers I've noticed some weird tropes and trends. One of the oddest was Sheldon Moldoff's ever-present drawings of "Scaredy-Robin". Nearly every cover of Detective Comics from 1959 to 1963 had a profile image of Robin, apparently frozen in terror at the situation depicted on the cover. Sheldon Moldoff's trademark Robin portrait found its way onto too many Detective and Batman covers at the beginning of the 1960s. Why this was is anyone's guess. Perhaps it was Moldoff...
AS THE DAYS of Marty Goodman's Atlas Comics drew to a close in the late 1950s, the publisher was casting around for the Next Big Thing. Locked in to a draconian distribution contract with arch rivals DC Comics, Goodman was limited to a tight eight titles per month and if he needed to launch a new title, he was forced to cancel an existing one. So, feeling that mystery and science fiction was the coming trend Goodman decided to launch three new comics to complement the existing Journey into Mystery, World of Fantasy and Strange Tales titles. The new books were Strange Worlds , beginning in December 1958 and replacing the cancelled Navy Combat , and Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish , both debuting in January 1959, replacing the cancelled Homer the Happy Ghost and Miss America . Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales had been around since the twilight of the Golden Age and changed in content according to Martin Goodman's take on his customers' tastes. So they bega...