I have no idea if this belongs in the Rural Home discussion, but in the process of putting away the books that returned today from Narfstar, I discovered the following:
Within the covers of Liberty Comics #14 (dated May of 1946) lurks the contents of Red Circle #5. Had Red Circle (published by Rural Home and copyright by Enwil Associates) continued monthly from #3, issue #5 would have been May 1945.
I have two other issues of Liberty (#10 and #11) both of which reprint MLJ comics from 1943 and 1944 (Black Hood and Laugh, respectively), so I initially assumed that my #14, with the covers split with simply a "marriage" with the wrong cover around a mismatched interior. That was until I looked at the GAC copy of Liberty #14 and discovered that it had the same contents.
So we seem to have a company that produced LOTS of covers for books that never got published (Blazing 6, Blue Circle 6, etc.) that were later wrapped around coverless Fox comics in the 50s and sold on the newsstands despite the mismatched covers and the 1945 indicia dates. Okay, that's weird enough, but to discover that the guts of comics like Red Circle #5 existed and were used by yet ANOTHER company a year later is too much for my poor mind to comprehend.
This may be old news to those of you who've downloaded Liberty Comics or have seen other examples. If so, forgive my bemusement. However, if this is new news, can anyone shed even a bit more light on the subject.
As a TOTAL aside, while I was reboxing the comics, I also double-checked my memory on the role of Rae Hermann at Continental and found an Ownership Statement in Catman #30 (Dec. 1945) that listed R.R. Hermann as the Managing Editor. It was shortly thereafter that Catman ceased publishing and that the earliest titles like Patches began to transform from their Continental/Et-Es-Go versions into those that would eventually morph into Orbit.
Something very interesting is going on here.
Peace, Jim (|:{>