Post by Adminenkainen on Aug 10, 2015 18:36:49 GMT
Centaur was a comic book publisher out of Chicago, Ill. The comic book publishing world was centered in New York for so long that it's intriguing to imagine what it would have been like had DC and Timely/Marvel failed and Chicago become the center of the comic book publishing world. But that was unlikely to have ever happened, as small an operation as Centaur was.
Centaur didn't have a lot of artists working for them, and those they did have were not very good. So, rather than fill up their early issues with complete dreck, they contracted with Chesler for some good stuff. This is what Chesler did; they were not a publisher themselves (well, not regularly), but created content they sold to other small press comic book publishers. If you ever see a Will Eisner or a Fred Guardineer story in a Centaur comic, it was really Chesler content.
Paying Chesler must have been tough for an outfit as small as Centaur, so it appears they sold their best original property to new publisher, Quality Comics, in 1937. That character -- indeed, Centaur's chief claim to fame -- was the Clock. Appearing in comics two years before Superman, the Clock was the first masked hero born in the comic book medium. It wasn't particularly good...but at least it was first.
Relatively flush with capital from selling off the Clock, Centaur expanded and picked up two big names. One was Winsor McCay -- no, not the Winsor McCay who created the newspaper masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland. This was Winsor McCay, Jr., his son. Junior had not half the talent of his father, but he had something just as important to Centaur -- permission from his dad to make a living drawing and selling comic strips starring the Little Nemo cast.
And Centaur lucked into one other new freelancer -- Bill Everett. Bill started working for Centaur just before striking gold with one of the great Golden Age comic book characters, the Sub-Mariner, for Timely Comics. The Sub-Mariner made a lot of money for Timely Comics, but Bill didn't see as much of it as he liked, so he bailed on Timely after awhile, hoping his next big hit character would be at Centaur or some other company. That, sadly, never happened, even though Everett's origin for Amazing Man has been appropriated by numerous superheroes since then.
Today, one of the nicest things about Centaur is that the entirety of their published ouevre has fallen into the public domain. Indeed, the Clock was one of the first characters featured in artwork created or borrowed for Hideouts & Hoodlums.
Centaur didn't have a lot of artists working for them, and those they did have were not very good. So, rather than fill up their early issues with complete dreck, they contracted with Chesler for some good stuff. This is what Chesler did; they were not a publisher themselves (well, not regularly), but created content they sold to other small press comic book publishers. If you ever see a Will Eisner or a Fred Guardineer story in a Centaur comic, it was really Chesler content.
Paying Chesler must have been tough for an outfit as small as Centaur, so it appears they sold their best original property to new publisher, Quality Comics, in 1937. That character -- indeed, Centaur's chief claim to fame -- was the Clock. Appearing in comics two years before Superman, the Clock was the first masked hero born in the comic book medium. It wasn't particularly good...but at least it was first.
Relatively flush with capital from selling off the Clock, Centaur expanded and picked up two big names. One was Winsor McCay -- no, not the Winsor McCay who created the newspaper masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland. This was Winsor McCay, Jr., his son. Junior had not half the talent of his father, but he had something just as important to Centaur -- permission from his dad to make a living drawing and selling comic strips starring the Little Nemo cast.
And Centaur lucked into one other new freelancer -- Bill Everett. Bill started working for Centaur just before striking gold with one of the great Golden Age comic book characters, the Sub-Mariner, for Timely Comics. The Sub-Mariner made a lot of money for Timely Comics, but Bill didn't see as much of it as he liked, so he bailed on Timely after awhile, hoping his next big hit character would be at Centaur or some other company. That, sadly, never happened, even though Everett's origin for Amazing Man has been appropriated by numerous superheroes since then.
Today, one of the nicest things about Centaur is that the entirety of their published ouevre has fallen into the public domain. Indeed, the Clock was one of the first characters featured in artwork created or borrowed for Hideouts & Hoodlums.
