Charlton Comics

~ the obituary ~

Charlton came out of the song-lyric magazine trade. Santangelo was an Italian immigrant in the Connecticut construction business who started reprinting lyrics in 1931 without bothering about permissions, served time for it, and came out with a business partner. By 1940 the two of them had a company named after their sons, both of whom were called Charles, and by 1945 it was Charlton Publications with a comics line attached.

What made the operation unusual was that it owned every step. The presses, the engraving, the paper stock and eventually the distribution all sat inside the same company in Derby, and that vertical stack is why Charlton could sell comics nobody else could afford to print. It also meant the company never had to please a partner, so it published whatever filled pages: horror, romance, war, ghost stories, hot rods, and licensed cartoon characters by the crate.

The people who worked there remember the pay rates, which were the worst in American comics, and the freedom, which was the best. Artists were getting five to seven dollars a page, low money even by the standards of the time. Steve Ditko went back and forth between Marvel and Charlton for years anyway and put some of his strangest work on Charlton paper, including the horror titles and the superheroes later known as the Action Heroes. Captain Atom, the Ted Kord Blue Beetle, the Question and Peacemaker were all built in Derby, at a company so tight with money that it was the last American publisher to raise its cover price from ten cents to twelve, in 1962.

Then the ground moved. Licensed titles lapsed, the presses aged past the point where patching them helped, and the company had no money to replace them. Publication was suspended in 1984. A revival was attempted in 1985 with a new editor and it did not take, and later that same year the comics operation went out of business. The Comics Journal ran the news under the headline "Charlton Goes Down for the Count."

~ the case file ~

~ the press logic ~

The detail that explains Charlton better than any editorial decision is mechanical. Its big presses were enormously expensive to shut down and start up again, and they were cleaned twice a year, so the sensible thing was to never stop them. Comic books were cheap, fast, printable filler that kept the rollers turning between the profitable jobs. An entire forty-year publishing house existed as a byproduct of an industrial scheduling problem.

Charlton was gone the year after I was born, on another continent, in a format that never shipped here, so there is nothing to remember and no version of this where I could have picked one up. What carried is the economics. Cheap paper and a press that has to stay warm produced a place where an artist with no interest in house style could work unsupervised, and that arrangement has never been improved on by anyone with a budget.

~ five thousand dollars a character ~

In 1983 DC Comics bought most of the Action Heroes. Paul Levitz paid $5,000 per character, and it was partly a gift to Dick Giordano, DC's managing editor and a former Charlton man. Those characters then went into DC's main line through Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985.

They had been the first choice for something else. Alan Moore wanted the Charlton heroes for Watchmen, and DC decided to keep them for its own continuity instead, so Moore built analogues. Rorschach is the Question with the morality left running past the end, and Doctor Manhattan is what happens if you take Captain Atom seriously. The most influential comic of the 1980s is a redraft of a line that was already dead when it went to press, bought for the price of a used car.

~ the demolition ~

Charlton Publications, the parent with the magazines, kept going until 1991. The Derby building and the presses inside it stood until 1999, when they were demolished.

The name did not stay buried. In March 2014 a group of fans and former Charlton artists put out an anthology called The Charlton Arrow, and the small press that grew around it has kept publishing new work under the old banner since. Connecticut Public went to cover it and got one of the artists describing the Derby factory from memory: the publisher's office, then the editors, then the room where the magazines were stapled, all of it inside one building.

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