Those Little Monsters!

Long time vis­i­tors to my site might recall that around Hal­loween, I have a tra­di­tion of doing some­thing Franken­stein-relat­ed. This year, it’s a fake com­ic cov­er for Gold Key’s The Lit­tle Mon­sters!

If you grew up in the ’60s, and you want­ed a com­ic book fea­tur­ing your favorite car­toon char­ac­ter, most like­ly you were going to buy a Gold Key com­ic. They had man­aged to sew up the rights to pret­ty much all of them. And with edi­to­r­i­al offices here on the west coast (most of the pub­lish­ers were based in New York City), it placed Gold Key in a unique posi­tion, giv­ing them access to artists who in many cas­es had actu­al­ly worked on those cartoons.

Though the bulk of Gold Key’s books were licensed prop­er­ties, they also came up with some of their own indige­nous cre­ations. This book was one of them. Some­thing that was def­i­nite­ly part of the pop cul­ture land­scape at the time were old mon­ster movies and TV shows (one of the cool parts of being a kid in the ’60s), and clear­ly The Lit­tle Mon­sters was inspired by that.

The Lit­tle Mon­sters must have sold fair­ly well, as the book made it through 44 issues spread over some 14 years (though based on the cov­ers, some issues look to have been reprints). Appar­ent­ly, who wrote and drew all these comics is a bit of a mys­tery. I found cred­its on comics.org for one issue that list­ed John Carey and Pete Alvara­do as hav­ing done art on some sto­ries. Both artists had worked for the ani­ma­tion stu­dios, and also did a lot of comics work for Gold Key. So maybe Carey and/or Alvara­do con­tributed to the oth­er issues too.

I’ve only got one issue of The Lit­tle Mon­sters myself (#7), but it’s a lot of fun. The art has a lot of charm to it, who­ev­er did it. One sto­ry, “The Return of the Spi­der,” seems to have been inspired by the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the Bat­man TV show that would’ve been air­ing around that time.

Hope you enjoyed my take on the Lit­tle Mon­sters. Have a safe and hap­py Halloween!