Parent company | Tower Publications |
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Status | defunct, 1969 |
Founded | 1965 |
Founder | Harry Shorten |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | New York City |
Key people |
Harry Shorten Wally Wood Samm Schwartz |
Publication types | Comic books |
Tower Comics was an American comic book publishing company best known for Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, a strange combination of secret agents and superheroes; and Samm Schwartz's Tippy Teen, an Archie Andrews clone. The comics were published by Harry Shorten and edited by Wally Wood and Samm Schwartz.
Tower Comics set themselves apart by publishing 25-cent, 64-page comics, during a time of 12-cent, 32-page comics. The comics were something of a throw-back to the Golden Age, in that they had more pages than most of their contemporaries and usually featured five or six independent stories, with all the main characters coming together for the final story of the issue, a common Golden Age plotting device used in team books such as DC Comics's Justice Society of America.
Tower publisher Harry Shorten "cut a dream deal with Wally Wood" in which Shorten would be the managing editor and "Wood would be granted a wide latitude of creative and business freedom devoid of a 9-to-5 office job or hefty administrative duties, and be allowed to concentrate on creating characters and concepts for an expanding line of superhero comics." When it became obvious Wood could not handle the volume of material Shorten wanted to publish, he hired Samm Schwartz, who had worked for many years as an Archie Comics artist. Schwartz handled the scheduling of all the material and assignments of scripts and art other than Wood's own.
Notable creators associated with Tower included Wood, Schwartz, Dan Adkins, Gil Kane, Reed Crandall, Steve Ditko, Richard Bassford, Len Brown, Steve Skeates, Larry Ivie, Bill Pearson, Russ Jones, Roger Brand, and Tim Battersby-Brent.