Number 1437: Orlando issue

I thought Amazing World of DC Comics, DC’s in-house fanzine, was a fine product. It featured not only an insider look at the operations of a comic book publisher, but sometimes unpublished stories from the DC inventory.

The “Special Joe Orlando Issue” spotlighted artist/editor Orlando. He edited some of the mystery comics, and the humor comic, Plop! The issue has an unpublished story from Plop!, written by Mad-regular Don Edwing and drawn by Dave Manak. There is also the story, originally from EC’s Weird Fantasy #18 (1953), drawn by Joe, “Judgment Day.” It was one of EC’s “preachies,” as EC publisher Bill Gaines called them, stories that featured social issues. In this case it is racial segregation. The story loses some of its punch with black line printing, since the idea is the robots are blue and orange.

Then, as now, DC and Mad were owned by the same company, so seeing an EC story in a DC-published fanzine wasn’t so surprising.

An interview with Orlando was headed by this vintage  “Artist of the Issue” photo from EC Comics.