[crashryan]

This is an amazing collection. Astonishing that the Fox years alone amount to nearly a thousand pages of Blue Beetle. There's no question that the Beetle started as a Green Hornet clone. That sure didn't last long. One issue! I presume Victor Fox felt that long underwear heroes were where it was at and ordered the change. Though the Beetle's costume remained mostly consistent after his fourth appearance, the details changed from artist to artist. Most noticeably some artists drew the chain mail texture on BB's costume while others left it plain so it looked like cloth. The medallion on BB's forehead appeared, disappeared, and changed size and shape. It also changed color from blue to yellow and back again. In a couple of stories the Beetle wears a holstered pistol a la The Phantom. Unless I missed something he never actually drew that gun. He's shown using a gun from time to time but when he does it seems to come from nowhere.

Link to the book: Blue Beetle Complete Collection Vol. 1: The Fox Years - Part 1

[FraBig]

Yeah, his early Fox period (1939-1942) is definitely the richer one in terms of pages, a total of 994 considering comic stories, text stories and covers. He'll then come back to Fox in 1944 and appear for roughly 30 issues up until 1950.

In some later stories at Fox they will change his gloves to red (firstly only on covers, then in the interiors too) and that will stuck until the very end! Even 1964's rebooted Blue Beetle wears red gloves.