1305: Lone Ranger #18 (1974)

The ads in this one are basically the ads of my youth: 100 Piece Toy Soldier Set ("packed in this footlocker!"), Roach Studios iron-in transfers, 204 Revolutionary War Soldiers ("only $2.25"), and, of course, the back page ad for Daisy air rifles. The basic Gold Key line-up for a long, long time in the 1970s.

One of the most interesting things about this comic is that it contains two stories and both of them are reprints from the 1950s - specifically from Dell's Lone Rangercomic of that period. So much of the material that was published under the Gold Key banner is reprints that aren't actually marked as such within the comic book itself. Presumably, the feeling was that, over the course of twenty years, the readership of the Lone Ranger had completely changed generationally, and so who would even know the difference? In contradistinction to companies like Marvel and DC that were rabidly marking their reprints as "Collector's Item Classics!!!", Gold Key (and others) just quietly asked their customers to look the other way.

Interestingly, both of the stories in this issues have a certain 1950s feel, which is exactly the phenomenon that we hope to be able to categorize. Gold Key felt old-fashioned in the 1970s because they were old-fashioned, which certainly couldn't have much helped the longevity of the brand. They would stop distributing seven years after this comic book was published.

While the topic of comics reprints and consecration has been a big topic for a while (see several of the chapters in the newly released anthology Comics Memory, for example), reprints that aren't announced as reprints are one of the massively understudied hallmarks of the 1960s and 1970s.