Comic Cavalcade Views

General Goods

Most American comic book publishers in the 1930s and '40s Golden Age of comic books published anthology titles that showcased a variety of characters, usually with one star -- such as Green Lantern in All-American Comics or Wonder Woman in Sensation Comics. Comic Cavalcade, however, featured both those star characters as well as the Flash, a star in his own namesake title as well as the spin-off All-Flash.

At 96 pages initially, Comic Cavalcade was about one-and-one-half-times the length of the average comic book of the time. It was priced at 15 cents, when the average comic cost a dime. Many stories in Comic Cavalcade were scripted by other than the characters regular writers, for deadline reasons. Batman writer Bill Finger, for example, would occasionally write Flash stories for Comic Cavalcade when regular Flash writer Gardner Fox was preoccupied with other projects.

Overall, about thirty titles were affected. Much of the unpublished work saw print in Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, a Summer 1978 two-issue series which published the work in limited quantity solely to establish the company's copyright.[2][3] (The title was a play on DC's 1940s series Comic Cavalcade). Some of the material already produced for the cancelled publications was later used in other series, however. The two volumes, composed of some of these stories along with earlier inventoried stories, were printed by DC staff members in black-and-white on the office photocopier. A total of 35 copies of each volume were produced, and distributed to the creators of the material, to the U.S. copyright office, and to Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide as proof of their existence.