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COMICS
AVON PUBLISHING
Space Detective (four issues):
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Avon Books was founded in 1941 by the American News Corporation (ANC) to create a rival to Pocket Books. They hired brother and sister Joseph Myers and Edna Myers Williams to establish the company. ANC bought out J.S. Ogilvie Publications, a pulp magazine publisher partly owned by both the Myers, and renamed it "Avon Publications". They also got into comic books. "The early Avons were somewhat similar in appearance to the existing paperbacks of Pocket Books, resulting in an immediate and largely ineffective lawsuit by that company. Despite this superficial similarity, though, from early on Myers differentiated Avon by placing an emphasis on popular appeal rather than loftier concepts of literary merit."[1] The first 40 titles were not numbered. First editions of the first dozen or so have front and rear endpapers with an illustration of a globe. The emphasis on "popular appeal" led Avon to publish ghost stories, sexually-suggestive love stories, fantasy novels and science fiction in its early years, which were far removed in audience appeal from the somewhat more literary Pocket competition.
As well as normal-sized paperbacks, Avon published digest-format paperbacks (the size and shape of the present-day Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine) in series. These included Murder Mystery Monthly, Modern Short Story Monthly and Avon Fantasy Readers. Many authors highly prized by present-day collectors were published in these editions, including A. Merritt, James M. Cain, H. P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler and Robert E. Howard.
In 1953, Avon Books sold books in the price range of 25¢ to 50¢ (for the Avon "G" series, the "G" standing for "Giant") and were selling more than 20 million copies a year. Their books were characterized by Time Magazine as "westerns, whodunits and the kind of boy-meets-girl story that can be illustrated by a ripe cheesecake jacket." [2] At around this time, Avon also began to publish under other imprints, including Eton (1951–1953), Novel Library, Broadway and Diversey. Avon's 35-cent "T" series, introduced in 1953, also had strong mass-market appeal and contains many outstanding examples of the then-popular juvenile delinquent story. The T series also contained many movie tie-in editions and the stand-bys of mysteries and science fiction.
MORE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avon_(publishers
MORE: http://fantasy-ink.blogspot.com/2009/06/space-detective.html
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WALLY WOOD
His first comic book works are for the Fox Company illustrating romance stories, and his first trace-able story appears in My Confessions #7 in August 1949. Then in 1950 he began doing stories for a number of publishers. For one of them, Avon Publishing, he drew a large output. Crime, romance, science fiction and horror. He was able to work so fast in fact that he was Avon's most prolific contributor, illustrating many complete books for them. Some of those books with titles like "Flying Saucers", "An Earthman On Venus" and "Fu-Manchu" they were very popular and sold very well.
But Avon was not the only company to mine Wood's talents. He began drawing "Captain Science" comics in November 1950 for Youthful Magazines, and when that title ceased in 1951 Wally began another sci-fi hero, "Space Detective" for Avon.
MORE: http://www.comic-art.com/biographies/wood0001.htm
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