That’s right! We do more than just toys! We reprint comic books too. Why?
Well… you could say it’s the whole reason Mountain Town Toys exists in the first place.
I love comic books. I grew up scrounging flea markets and yard sales for toys, but more often I went home with a box of comics. They were cheaper, and in the early 90s they were Everywhere. So I grew up with Silver and Bronze age comics, and I knew a lot more about the JLA circa 10 years earlier than I did about the comics that were being published at the time.
I still remember being 6 or 7 years old, standing in the local comic shop, fawning over a copy of The Defenders issue 1 (circa 1972). Dad was generous enough to get it for me, and I still have it (although at this point it is a bit tattered.) I was hooked. There was a time when I had nearly the full run of the comic, from issue 1 up through it’s re-title as the New Defenders in the early 80s. (The comic book shop would shut down or relocate within a few months of us buying that issue. I don’t remember visiting it a second time.)
This interest in comics continued on in to my adult life, but instead of the finest comics the 1970s had to offer, I found myself drifting in to the Golden Age. Horror comics from EC and Charlton, sci-fi from Ditko and Wolverton, super heroes like The Black Terror, The Blue Beetle, and my perennial favorite Microface (reprint and action figure coming soon!)
I learned a lot about this era of comics, and I grew frustrated that even reprints would often fetch prices near $100. A lot of these titles are in the public domain! It’s legal for anyone to duplicate and reprint them, remix them and create new things. I talked to my dad about this a lot, and next thing I knew he’d talked me in to opening a toy store!
So I took it upon myself to find the best cheap way to reprint these old comic books, and make them available at a reasonable quality and a reasonable price. I’ve come across a couple of ways to get it done, from full sized black and white trade digests like our Spacehawk collection to digest sized, full color single issues, like our Space Patrol (1952) and our Space Patrol (1939).
I’ve spent a good part of the last six years carefully collecting researching, restoring, and reprinting these golden age public domain comic books, and I am working to get all of these reprints available here. If you Sign Up for our Newsletter, you can be among the first to know when new comic books hit the site. They are consistently among our best sellers, and I hope you enjoy them!
And, of course, these comic books were the inspiration behind our Earth’s First Comicbook Heroes line of Mego style action figures.
There are some really Weird characters featured in the depths of the golden age of comic books, and I’m excited that I’ll get to talk about them here, share them with you all, and make toys of many of them. It should be a fun journey to share.