The American Comics Group vs Ace Magazines Pre-Code Horror War

Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Ace Periodicals, American Comics Group, pre-code horror

In a pivotal moment for Pre-Code Horror, American Comics Group and Ace Magazines waged a war involving a character and two “Unknown” titles.

Our recent post about the 1950 Ace Magazines release Challenge of the Unknown #6 reminded me of the unusual nature of that one-issue title.  Looking at it in the context of horror comics history, it is Ace’s “proper” debut into Pre-Code Horror, after dabbling in the horror genre in Super-Mystery Comics and Four Favorites a few years earlier.  Soon after Challenge of the Unknown, Ace launched four successful horror titles with The Beyond, Baffling Mysteries, The Hand of Fate, and Web of Mystery — all of which lasted until the end of the Pre-Code Horror era in 1954/1955.

But Challenge of the Unknown itself only lasted a single issue (Ace’s Love Experiences romance title accounts for the first five issues of the series numbering), and the opening page of the debut of The Beyond two months later has a small but visible note “Challenge of the Unknown” on the lower right corner of the story artwork.  It’s clear that Ace had intended to continue Challenge of the Unknown, but chose to reboot its Pre-Code Horror launch with The Beyond instead.

As it turns out, this move was the result of an unfair competition suit against Ace Magazines filed by B&I Publishing — one of the corporate entities that we now refer to as the American Comics Group, or ACG.  ACG claimed that Challenge of the Unknown was designed to imitate their long-running Adventures into the Unknown title.  As part of this lawsuit, ACG was granted a temporary injunction “enjoining the defendant from using the name ‘Unknown’ as part of the title of its magazine in such form or manner as to create danger of confusion with the plaintiff’s magazine and also enjoining the simulation of the format and general appearance of the plaintiff’s magazine.”

From a historical perspective, Adventures into the Unknown is a vastly underrated comic book title. Regarded as the first ongoing American comic book horror series, the title lasted 174 issues from Fall 1948 to August 1967 — several months before other publishers began to ease into horror-focused titles, and about a year and a half before EC Comics’ horror titles began in earnest.

Unknown Pre-Code Horror Preludes

Challenge of the Unknown #6 hit newsstands at the end of May 1950, and ACG filed this lawsuit and had their request for an injunction granted by the end of June.  Fascinatingly, the text of Judge Greenberg’s decision to grant the injunction makes it clear that this was not the first time that ACG and Ace had tangled over this issue, saying, “It is, of course, clear that neither party is entitled to the exclusive use of so common a word as ‘Unknown,’ as a reference to the weird and mysterious. The defendant claims to have created a mystic character called ‘Unknown,’ who became familiar to readers of the comic magazines and, indeed, when the plaintiff first adopted the title of its magazine required the plaintiff to change the size of the type of part of its title.”

This would appear to be a reference to the fact that ACG changed the title logo of Adventures into the Unknown with issue #4 to make “Adventures into” a more prominent part of the logo, to avoid confusion with the regular Ace feature The Unknown.  The Ace character, The Unknown, debuted in Four Favorites #21 (hitting newsstands in November 1945) directly after the last Four Favorites appearance of the masked superhero character The Unknown Soldier in the previous issue, giving rise to speculation over the decades that the two characters are actually one and the same.  The character initially seemed like little more than a copy of The Shadow in both appearance and speech in his debut, as he introduced and narrated stories of crime and mystery, but he quickly came to evolve in both appearance and nature into a spectral, supernatural figure who observed how human whims can dramatically change a person’s fate.  The Unknown appeared continuously from late 1945 through mid-1949 via Four Favorites and Super-Mystery Comics, last appearing using that name when the latter title ended.

The ACG lawsuit against Ace would significantly alter the course of Ace’s Pre-Code Horror line.  In addition to abandoning the Challenge of the Unknown title altogether, they adopted a different cover design style, presumably to sidestep Judge Greenberg’s assertion that “The appearance of its cover is so similar to and suggestive of the plaintiff’s magazine as to leave no doubt that there was a design to imitate.”

The Unknown Hand of Fate

When the Unknown character returned, he had been renamed Fate for his introduction in the debut of The Hand of Fate series, cover-dated December 1951.  The character continued to appear in that title through the end of the series with issue #25 in 1954.  The entire Ace horror line of The Beyond, Baffling Mysteries, The Hand of Fate, and Web of Mystery had all ended by the end of 1955, as the Comics Code came into practice.  By then, various Ace comic book series had been cited during this moral panic era by the U.S. Senate and the NY State Legislature, and in Fredric Wertham‘s Seduction of the Innocent and Geoffrey Wagner‘s Parade of Pleasure.  Ace exited the comic book business in 1956, but by that time had shifted from pulps to paperbacks with the 1952 establishment of Ace Books, now an imprint of Penguin Random House.

It’s also interesting to contemplate the butterfly effect of the untimely demise of the Challenge of the Unknown title.  If Ace had been able to continue using that title, and it continued until the demise of their horror line in late 1955, would DC Comics have used the name Challengers of the Unknown for the Jack Kirby and Dave Wood-created paranormal adventurers when they debuted roughly 14 months later in Showcase #6?  Difficult to say for sure, but Ace’s Challenge of the Unknown #6 remains an important and underappreciated footnote in Pre-Code Horror history.

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