National Comics #1
National Comics #1 marks the Golden Age debut of Uncle Sam, Quality Comics' patriotic superhero who predated Captain America by nearly a year and became the publisher's flagship character, running as the lead feature through issue #45. The issue is a remarkable snapshot of the pre-war American comic-book industry's response to rising fascism: its lead story directly allegorizes the Nazi Brown Shirts as domestic 'Purple Shirts' threatening American democracy, years before the United States formally entered World War II. As an anthology, the issue simultaneously launched more than a dozen original features — spanning superheroics, aviation adventure, boxing, crime-busting, science fiction, and folklore — making it one of the most densely creative single issues Quality Comics ever produced. All of these characters eventually passed into DC Comics' stewardship when DC acquired the Quality library in the late 1950s.
Sell my copy
Have this issue — or a whole collection? Get a fair offer from us, skip the marketplace fees and the hassle.
We Buy Collections ▸History
Quality Comics publisher Everett M. Arnold assembled the title under the editorial hand of Will Eisner, who had recently sold his stake in the Eisner & Iger studio to focus on his own projects. The GCD records the on-sale date as the week of April 14–20, 1940, sourced from the contemporary fanzine Fantasy News, even though the issue carries a July 1940 cover date — a discrepancy that has led some historians to speculate the July date was chosen to align Uncle Sam's debut symbolically with the Fourth of July. Eisner provided layouts for the Uncle Sam feature, with finished art handled by Dave Berg according to Lambiek, though Lou Fine's name is consistently associated with the character's visual development; the GCD attributes co-creation credit to both Eisner and Fine. The entire creative team — writers and artists alike — worked under house pseudonyms throughout the run, a standard Quality Comics practice of the era.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of Uncle Sam: a supernatural patriotic hero conceived as the spirit of a Revolutionary War soldier who returns whenever the United States faces existential threat, created by Will Eisner (with Lou Fine credited as co-creator by the GCD).
- First appearance and origin of Buddy (later established as Buddy Smith), Uncle Sam's young sidekick, whose grandfather Ezra Smith is killed by the fascist Purple Shirts in the debut story — Buddy's surname and family relationship were not confirmed in Quality Comics itself, only retroactively in DC's Secret Origins #19 (October 1987).
- First appearances of nine additional features and their casts: Prop Powers (aviation hero), Sally O'Neil Policewoman, Kid Dixon (boxing), Merlin the Magician (Jock Kellog, inheritor of Merlin's magical cloak), Wonder Boy (alien survivor whose home planet Viro is destroyed), Cyclone (a far-future space-race pilot, set in the year 3000), Pen Miller (cartoonist-detective), Paul Bunyan (folklore giant adapted as a pulp hero), and the Kid Patrol (a group of street kids including George Washington Abraham Lincoln 'Sunshine' Jones, Porky, Spunky, Suzy, Teddy, and Officer Pat Malone).
- President Franklin D. Roosevelt appears in the lead Uncle Sam story, kidnapped by the Purple Shirts villain Andel Cobra — a rare fictional use of a sitting U.S. president in a Golden Age superhero comic.
- Will Eisner served as editor of the issue; nearly every creative contributor worked under a house pen name (e.g., George Tuska as 'Bob Reynolds' on Kid Dixon, Dan Zolnerowich as 'Lance Blackwood' on Merlin, Toni Blum and Chuck Mazoujian as 'Frank Kearn' on Sally O'Neil).
- The series ran for 75 issues (July 1940 – November 1949); Uncle Sam headlined through issue #45 (December 1944), later earning his own spin-off title, Uncle Sam Quarterly, which ran eight issues from 1941 to 1943.
- The Uncle Sam feature from this issue has been reprinted in at least four collections, including Jerry Iger's National Comics (Blackthorne, 1985), Take That, Adolf!: The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War (Fantagraphics, 2017), and Gwandanaland Comics' The Complete Uncle Sam: Volume 3 and The Golden Age Firsts of Quality Comics: Volume 1 (both 2017–2018).
- Uncle Sam and other Quality Comics characters were integrated into DC continuity beginning with Justice League of America #107 (September–October 1973), with Uncle Sam subsequently leading the Freedom Fighters team; the character has since been reimagined in multiple DC projects including a 1998 Vertigo prestige-format miniseries painted by Alex Ross.
Cast · 19 characters
Full credits
Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers
▸ Reveal full plot — may contain spoilers
Andel Cobra tries to organize American dust bowl refugees into his own version of Hitler's Brown Shirts, called the Purple Shirts. The Purple Shirts manage to kidnap President Roosevelt, and later Uncle Sam. But Sam's rhetoric stirred some of the recruits, inciting them to rebel against the Purple Shirts. Unfortunately, these "terrorists" killed the father of young Buddy Smith, whom Uncle Sam adopted as his sidekick.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).