Target Comics #10
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeTarget Comics Vol. 6 #10 (February 1946) sits in the final stretch of one of the Golden Age's most eclectic anthology runs — a title whose very name was eventually given to its own superhero lead. By this point in the series, the wartime urgency that had reshaped Target Comics since 1942 had faded, and the issue reflects a deliberate editorial pivot toward peacetime entertainment: humor strips, adventure serials, and genre variety replace the earlier war-focused content. As a surviving artefact of Novelty Press — the comic-book arm of the Curtis Publishing Company, responsible for The Saturday Evening Post — it documents how a major mainstream publisher navigated the postwar recalibration of the comics market. No landmark first appearances are recorded for this specific issue, which means its historical weight derives primarily from its place within the broader Target Comics run rather than from any single debut.
This anthology issue contains multiple stories featuring superheroes engaged in wartime and espionage missions. One story depicts costumed heroes executing a Japanese general beneath a samurai statue, with a hero in yellow subsequently engaged in combat with enemy forces. Another narrative follows a character named Dan who rescues a woman during a sleigh ride down a snowy hill and is rewarded by her. A third story involves FBI agent Lewis and Guatemalan secret service agents tasking an operative to impersonate the kidnapped Presidente of Guatamia to prevent a revolution by anti-American forces, requiring him to appear at the Presidential Palace.
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Novelty Press, operating as the comics imprint of the Curtis Publishing Company, published Target Comics continuously from February 1940 through 1949, completing 105 issues in total. The 1946 issues, including Vol. 6 #10, were produced during a period when the book's creator-roster had evolved considerably from its early days: Don Rico, who handled covers and the Gary Stark feature during this period, was midway through a 1946–1948 tenure at Novelty producing work for both Target Comics and Blue Bolt Comics before eventually returning to Timely/Atlas. The series had long since shed the Funnies Inc. packager arrangement that supplied its earliest material — the era of Bill Everett, Joe Simon, and Basil Wolverton's Spacehawk was well in the past — and the editorial team was leaning on a reliable stable of house artists including Nina Albright (The Cadet) and Ken Battefield (The Target and the Targeteers).
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published February 1946 by Novelty Press (the comics imprint of Curtis Publishing Company, publisher of The Saturday Evening Post); catalogued as Target Comics Vol. 6 #10.
- Cover art by Nina Albright, who also drew the interior Cadet feature starring Kit Carter and Dan Merry.
- Don Rico — who would later co-create the Black Widow (Natasha Romanova) at Marvel — contributed cover art and interior Gary Stark story art to the surrounding volume; Rico worked primarily for Novelty Press from 1946 to 1948.
- Interior features include The Target and the Targeteers (art by Ken Battefield), The Chameleon starring Pete Stockbridge (art by Bill Allison), Candid Charlie (art by Gordon Guth), Speck, Spot, and Sis (art by Alonzo Vincent), Dan'l Flannel (art by Gus Schrotter), and the Targetoons humor pages by Milt Hammer.
- The Target himself — the superhero who gave the series its retroactive identity — had debuted in the much earlier Target Comics Vol. 1 #10 (November 1940), created by Dick Briefer under the pen name Dick Hamilton; by 1946 he was a well-established ongoing character drawn by Ken Battefield.
- The early Target and Targeteers run had been penciled by Bob Wood, with Jerry Robinson (co-creator of Robin and the Joker) and George Roussos providing inks, backgrounds, and lettering — that founding creative team was long gone by the 1946 issues.
- Target Comics ran for 105 issues (1940–1949); The Targeteers last appeared in issue #95, with the title carrying other features through its conclusion.
- In 2008, The Target and the Targeteers — as public-domain characters — were revived in Dynamite Entertainment's Project Superpowers miniseries, and Golden Age Target stories were reprinted in the Age of Adventure anthology Legendary Heroes #2 that same year.
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