King Comics #6
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeKing Comics #6 (September 1936) is one of the earliest issues in David McKay Publications' groundbreaking King Comics anthology — the title that brought King Features Syndicate's newspaper strip stars, including Flash Gordon, Popeye (via Thimble Theatre), and Mandrake the Magician, to the fledgling comic-book format for the first time. Published just five months into the series' April 1936 launch, this issue is a direct artifact of the transitional moment when American comics graduated from newsprint inserts to the staple-bound magazine format that would define the medium for generations. The anthology's weekly-magazine approach, with multiple strips sharing a single issue, helped establish what a mainstream comic book 'looked like' before the superhero genre reshaped everything — making these early issues essential documents of the pre-Golden Age ecosystem.
"The Mask" follows Tony Colby, a police commissioner who investigates a series of murders linked to a criminal gang led by Rusty Bolton. After discovering evidence against Bolton and tracking the gang's operations through car chases and shootouts, Tony infiltrates a Nazi machine-gun outpost to stop their military coordination. Gaskell, the spy using radio waves to communicate with the studio's frequency, confesses to his crimes after being cornered, and Tony defeats the gang in an underground control room, resolving the case and clearing the way for future adventures.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
David McKay Publications launched King Comics in April 1936 as a licensed vehicle to collect King Features Syndicate strip reprints in standard comic-book form, following the company's earlier 1935 experiments with standalone strip collections. The series was edited throughout its run by Ruth Plumly Thompson — best known as the primary successor author of the Oz book series — who used the punning pen name 'Jo King' in the indicia. Covers for the series were drawn by Joe Musial, a King Features staff artist, whose Popeye-centric covers gave the anthology a consistent identity across its long run. The strips reprinted were predominantly Sunday pages, with a smaller number of daily strips also included, and the comic originally ran to approximately 68 full-color pages per issue at a ten-cent cover price.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Cover-dated September 1936 — the sixth issue of the King Comics run, published just five months after the series debuted in April 1936.
- Reprints King Features Syndicate Sunday newspaper strips; the Grand Comics Database confirms the issue includes Thimble Theatre (E.C. Segar's Popeye strip) pages from January–February 1936 and Flash Gordon pages from the same period.
- Flash Gordon content is scripted by Don Moore and drawn by Alex Raymond — the GCD notes that Don Moore was co-creator and writer of Flash Gordon from the very beginning of the strip, despite Raymond long receiving sole credit.
- Mandrake the Magician strips by Lee Falk and Phil Davis are present, continuing the Mandrake-and-Lothar storyline involving 'the Little People' that ran across issues #4–#7.
- Cover art and series covers throughout this run were produced by Joe Musial, a King Features staff cartoonist.
- Ruth Plumly Thompson (credited as 'Jo King') served as editor of King Comics from its inception, simultaneously editing the companion title Ace Comics for David McKay.
- The series as a whole ran from April 1936 through early 1952, making King Comics one of the longest-running anthology titles of the pre-superhero and early Golden Age era.
- The anthology format of King Comics — packaging multiple licensed strip characters into a single magazine — helped normalize the multi-strip comic-book anthology structure that dominated newsstand publishing throughout the late 1930s and 1940s.
Full credits
Reprints
Reprinted in Four Color #25 (1942)
Key issues in King Comics
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