American Comics Group (ACG) was a small publisher during the Golden and Silver Age of comic books that published several well-remembered characters and titles. The company existed from 1943 to 1967.
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Background
The company evolved out of a company owned by Benjamin W. Sangor. In the mid 1930s, Sangor and Richard E. Hughes began to produce a short lived pre-packaged comics supplement for newspapers. In 1939, the Sangor Shop (as it was informerly known) began producing comics for Sangor's son-in-law Ned L. Pines. The Sangor Shop produced characters and stories The Black Terror, Pyroman, and Fighting Yank for Pines' Nedor Comics and produced most of the comics for Pines until 1945.
Independent publishing
In 1943, they started to publish their own work, by 1948 under the name of American Comics Group. Their titles were typical of the times, including horror, crime, mystery, funny animals, and the like. Almost all stories after 1957, were written by editor Richard Hughes under a variety of pseudonyms. Their big claim to fame was when they created the character of Herbie (Herbie Popnecker) for their Forbidden Worlds title (in issue #73, Dec. 1958). He would later get his own title and be turned into a "super hero" called the "Fat Fury". ACG would create other super-heroes in 1965 like Magicman starting in Forbidden Worlds #125, Nemesis in Adventures into the Unknown (starting with #154) and John Force, Magic Agent in his own title in 1962, then later in Unknown Worlds. A distinctive trait of the company's horror comics (and of their supernatural stories, such as Magicman) was that all ghosts were invariably colored light green.
Legacy and rights
By 1967, the company had ended publication. ACG was owned or co-owned by Fred Iger from 1948 to 1967. Iger also owned part of DC Comics. Harry Donenfeld, founder of DC was a co-owner in the 1960s. ACG was distributed by Independent News Co, which also distributed and part of the same company as DC. For some reason, after ACG went under, the rights to the characters languished. Then in the 1980s or so, Roger Broughton obtained the rights to the ACG materials, and started doing reprints of Herbie and other characters under his Avalon/ Sword-in-the-Stone/A+/ACG/Charlton imprint. Broughton also licensed Herbie to Dark Horse Comics for a 12-issue reprint series, but only 2 issues came out.
Comics Published
The links in this section go to the cover galleries of the GCD (Grand Comic-Book Database), with links to story summaries.
- Adventures into the Unknown
- Cookie
- Forbidden Worlds
- Giggle Comics
- Ha Ha Comics
- Herbie
- Unknown Worlds
- and many more...
References
- There is a book on ACG: Forbidden Adventures: The History of the American Comics Group by Michael Vance ISBN 0-313-29678-2.
