Monday, April 27, 2015

Manic Monday--Don't Make The Boy Scouts Angry!

So, Liberty Scouts Comics #2 (1941) featured the debut of...The Liberty Scouts!!

#2 was the first issue, as there was no #1. In the Golden Age, bookkeeping was far more casual.

2 months later Liberty Scouts Comics #3 appeared...

Who are the Liberty Scouts? Here's a truncated version of their origin from #3:



There was nothing at all remarkable about the adventures of Smokey, Skipper and Strut...just three feisty, non-powered youths who fought Nazi.

Well, there was one remarkable thing, as this piece in #3 attests:

Yeah, the Boy Scouts of America sicced their lawyers on Centaur Comics, because "you might conceivably think our magazine is being published by them." Heaven forfend any publication having "Scouts" in the title!!

Well, Centaur folded quickly, as the next thing we see of these lads is:

This oddity wasn't published by Centaur, but by Chicago Mail Order, who was nebulously related to Centaur, a a freebie. Note that the cover is just the cover from Liberty Scouts Comics #2 with a redrawn logo. The contents were apparently a straight reprint of:

Oh, dear. Our friends the Liberty Scouts Guards were demoted to a back-up feature (in this issue, the very last story, even), while former back-up Man Of War got the cover and the title!

Well, Man Of War Comics didn't last any longer than Liberty Scouts Comics--just two issues--so we can't blame the Boy Scout's litigiousness for all of their problems.

The moral of the story--don't plan on publishing The Justice Scouts or X-Scouts unless your lawyers are pretty good...

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