I'd read this a little while back from one of the history of comics books that expanded upon the business workings of DC / National and their crooked newsstand distribution business.

Darn it I wish I could think of the name of that book.

One of the best on the subject I'd ever read.

DC simply didn't see Marvel coming, and thought they were untouchable.

Up until Marvel, DC was exactly that, at least in the spandex market.

DC figured, oh well, they'll never be a legitimate threat to us, so why not make some money off of them ?

I wasn't taking a direct shot at DC in my earlier post; it's just that most newsstand distribution, at least back then, has been documented as being very monopolistic, and, like this book detailed, had mafia connections.

FYI, Marvel was not the only comics line distributed by Independent News. ACG also was, and was also restricted in the number of titles they could offer.

1968 was a very special year for me. It was the year I started getting an allowance ($20 a month, of which I was expected to save half) and began seriously collecting comics. I was thrilled by the expansion, eagerly snatching up those early issues of Captaion America, Iron Man, Sub-Mariner, Dr. Strange, Nick Fury, Captain Marvel, and Silver Surfer, as well as Fantastic Four, Thor, Amazing Spider-Man, Daredevil, and The Avengers. It wasn't until my senior year (1974-75) that I picked up the two issues of Spectacular Spider-Man, not until college that I acquired the '68 issues of Incredible Hulk, Sgt. Fury, and X-Men, and not until recent years that I started collecting Captain Savage, a run I only completed last year. I've never seen an issue of either Groovy or Pussycat.

The only DC titles I picked up at the time were those featuring Batman, including Brave & Bold, World's Finest and Justice League.

Cei-U!
I summon that long-vanished 10-year-old!

If only you could go back in time and tell your young self: the best possible savings strategy in 1968 (better than the bank, anyway) would be to buy up as many 12 cent comics as possible, store them in perfect condition, and sell them in the early 1990s before the market crashed.

Ohhhhh, we have Richie Rich among us! Mine was 50 cents.

There always seemed to me something of The Dirty Dozen in the Captain Savage series. The Raiders, while not criminals, were a far more motley crew than Fury’s Howling Commandos, drawn from different services as well as the usual stereotypical different backgrounds.

Savage was a submarine captain; his sergeant (Yakkety Yates) was a Marine who was somewhat resentful of Savage; his Man Friday, “Blarney” Stone, had come along with Savage when he formed the Raiders. Essentially, though, the group was the Howlers on the other side of the International Date Line: Stone and Dum Dum Dugan were the gruff but lovable Irish guys; Jacques “Frenchy” LaRocque was a lover boy like Dino; Jay Little Bear filled the racial stereotype slot a la Gabe Jones, with a bow and arrow replacing Gabe’s bugle; Yates was a little bit Dum Dum, leavened with a dash of Fury himself; Lee “Nondescript” Baker might as well have been wearing a Cannon Fodder sweatshirt. He was as bland as could be, an idealistic teacher turned commando, Junior Juniper with even less personality. They even added a Percy Pinkerton-type when Rolfe Harrison, an Australian, joined them on a few missions.

With the appropriate name changes, the dialogue from a Savage issue is impossible to distinguish from a Fury issue.

Marvel never seemed to be able to get a handle on the series, and too often simply made it the Howlers in the Pacific. I’m guessing they set the series in the Pacific because the Howlers owned the ETO. Unlike the DC war characters, the Howlers were bigger than the war; they were more like G.I. superheroes than G.I.s Thus there was no room for a similar group. The problem with that was that for whatever reason, war comics set in the Pacific never seemed to have the same cachet or popularity as those set in Europe, with Gunner and Sarge in Our Fighting Forces being the only exception I can recall. (Much later, the USS Stevens series by Sam Glanzman was both popular and excellent, but as good as it was, it was never a headliner.

DC had tried with Capt. Storm, on the heels of JFK and PT 109, but it lasted 18 issues, one less than Captain Savage. (Ironically the final issue of Storm was published simultaneously with the second issue of Savage.) There was a reason that Storm, Gunner, and Sarge became three of the four Losers. Other than that, all there had been, IIRC, was the Fighting Devil-Dog strip in OFF featuring Sgt. Rock's brother Lt. Larry Rock, but that only ran a couple of issues.

The Savage series lurched around a bit, rarely venturing far from the Fury formula, or even from the Fury cast. Virtually every issue featured some link to the Howlers, a Howler, Baron Strucker, or Hydra. The Samurai Squadron were the Raiders’ own Blitzkrieg Squad. Ben Grimm, naturally, appeared. It’s as if Marvel didn’t trust the idea enough or hadn’t thought it out enough to let it just find its sea-legs, so to speak.

As innovative as Marvel was, and as much as I loved the expansion of the line in 1968, one might argue that Marvel was becoming imprisoned by the tropes that had led to their initial success.

I ... uh ... might have made the occasional unauthorized withdrawal from my great-aunt's & mother's purses. Those 80-Page Giants & Sgt. Furys & Hulks & Not Brand Ecchs weren't going to buy themselves.