Fight Comics

Fight Comics, another 1940 title from the prolific Fiction House, delivered exactly what its name promised: two-fisted action across war, adventure, aviation, and jungle settings. It embodied the Golden Age anthology format, in which a single issue rotated through several serialized features rather than centering on one hero—a way to test characters and give readers variety for their dime.

Launching on the eve of America's entry into the Second World War, the title tapped directly into the era's appetite for combat and heroics, and its content shifted with the times as the war unfolded. Like its Fiction House stablemates, Fight Comics married pulp-magazine storytelling to bold, energetic comic-book art, and it featured the kind of glamorous, capable adventuring women that were a hallmark of the publisher's line.

Fight Comics is representative of the sheer volume of material that poured onto newsstands during the boom—much of it produced quickly by studios of young talent working for hire. Because Fiction House folded and its copyrights were not maintained, the title is now in the public domain, part of the freely preservable record of how comics filled the wartime home front's demand for action.