Tower Comics

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.

History
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. Tower Comics was part of Tower Books, a now long-defunct paperback book publisher.

The company lasted from about 1965 to 1969. At some point in the early 1980s John Carbonaro purchased the rights to the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and associated characters and published them in his JC Comics line. In 1984, Deluxe Comics launched their own line of new T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents stories, claiming the characters had fallen into the public domain. Carbonaro sued, and was eventually awarded full legal rights to the property. In the early 2000s DC began to reprint the original Tower stories as part of their DC Archive Editions, and in 2010 DC began publishing a new T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents series, having announced the year before that they has secured the lawful right to do so.

Titles published

 * Dynamo (4 issues, a T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents spin-off)
 * Fight the Enemy (3 issues, war title)
 * NoMan (2 issues, a T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents spin-off)
 * Teen-in (4 issues, teen comics)
 * T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (20 issues, Nov. 1965–Nov. 1969)
 * Tippy Teen (27 issues, teen comics)
 * Tippy's Friends Go-go and Animal (15 issues, teen comics)
 * Undersea Agent (6 issues, minimal ties with T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents)

Paperback collections

 * Dynamo, Man of High Camp (Tower Book 42-660) 1966 — reprints T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1
 * NoMan, the Invisible THUNDER Agent (Tower Book 42-672) 1966 — reprints NoMan stories from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #2-5
 * Menthor, the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agent with the Super Helmet (Tower Book 42-674) 1966 — reprints Menthor stories from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #2-5
 * The Terrific Trio (Tower Book 42-687) 1966 — reprints stories T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #2,3,6