 |
ROGER's MODERN REPRINTS
COVER GALLERY & CHECKLIST |
 |
Roger
Perez
"Metarog" |
The story behind these Charlton reprints has never been fully revealed or at the very least there are conflicting stories behind their origin.
I am pretty sure of a few things... back in 1977 Charlton was on its last legs and had severe financial problems. They were approached (I assume) by a company who wanted to reprint some of Charlton's comics to distribute in Department, Grocery and Drugstores. They only reprinted comics in which Charlton had all the original plates or Silver Prints available. |
Apparently quite of few of the originals had been lost, destroyed or damaged because there are some inexplicable gaps in the titles published. The titles printed varied widely as some are from the early 60s and others from the mid 70's. The reprints were short-lived and only lasted into 1978.
As far as the comics themselves I can tell you that the quality of production is very poor. Almost every one I have has one of several defects found throughout the line.
- Browning and/or brittle covers
- Untrimmed interior pages
- Splotchy or smudged coloring
- Almost illegible lettering
I have some that look new inside... very supple crisp pages but the cover is brittle like some 1940's comics I have. None of the Marvels or DCs I have seen have this level of cover brittleness. Most of the interior pages look like they were trimmed off with a saw of some sort and you can see the serated edges especially on the bottom of the pages. Some of the coloring/art/lettering is so smudged you really can't tell what is going on in the page.
As far as the quality of the stories... overall they are pretty bad. The E-man comics are pretty funny and Byrne's Doomsday+1 is quite good. Yang has some good plot elements as well but other than that I did not enjoy them very much. The only good thing for us completists is that the set is small and very cheap as you can pick them up out of 25 cent boxes with no problem.
It has just come to my attention that the Modern reprints were indeed marketed to stores in polybagged 3-Paks like the Whitmans from DC, Marvel and Gold Key. The 3-Paks are quite rare but Gifflefunk found a Captain Atom/Blue Beetle combo. I also found another 3-Pak with an E-Man and Yang issue and both are pictured at the bottom of the gallery.
Additionally, there are two more Modern publications that are not part of the original Charlton reprint set. The first is a 1978 oversized treasury-size version of Marvel Super Special #8 from Modern Promotions. It can be easily distinquished from the regular Marvel version by the publisher information in the upper left hand corner of the cover. The other and apparently last publication by Modern is the 3-issue mini-series of Voltron in 1985. Unlike all the other Modern issues these appear to be original material.
Thanks to StlComics member Gifflefunk for providing a 3-Pak scan and to our own James Jobe for coding and setting up the gallery for this project. |
|
