Miss(ing) Liberty Superheroes

Green Publishing was an abnormal line of comics during the Golden Age. They reprinted stories that previously ran in books by other publishers like Fox Feature Syndicate, Novelty, Star, and even early DC Comics. A good portion of their material came from MLJ, otherwise known as Archie Comics, which included some of their superhero characters. A one-shot they released in 1945 was titled Miss Liberty with a picture of a girl on the front near the logo that you would think would be somewhere in the actual comic. The comic instead had MLJ characters in it with Steel Sterling on the cover, plus Shield and Wizard stories making up the interior along with their sidekicks Dusty the Boy Detective and Roy the Super Boy(who occasionally teamed up to form the Boy Buddies). Miss Liberty was nothing more than a headliner on her own title which featured no female superheroes in it at all, even though later that same year Green Publishing would use the same logo for their ongoing anthology of Liberty Comics. This was a mixed bag title that also reprinted stories from Archie Comics, some would have comedies like Pokey Oakey, Suzie, and Gloomy Gus. Other issues would feature MLJ superheroes such as Black Hood, even though this didn't stop Green Publishing to continue creating original characters for the front cover that never appear in the comic itself. Issue #10 featured a masked superhero dubbed by fans as Liberty Boy who is supposedly chasing after a ghoul running away with a damsel in distress. The comic itself doesn't have Liberty Boy anywhere in its contents, instead reprinting stories of Boy Buddies and The Hangman, so why they even bothered making this monster hunting spandex jockey for the cover instead of just using the superheroes they already had inside is flummoxing. Yet again a few issues later in Issue #14, Liberty Comics had another original cover model that comic historians had labeled Liberty Man who was in a red and blue outfit venturing into an ancient Egyptian tomb. Liberty Man also does not get a single panel for himself in the entire comic as it instead had adventurer characters like Cobat, El Kuraan, Dinky Dibbs, and Saunders Of State. Miss Liberty, Liberty Boy, and Liberty Man would have made for an interesting superhero family in the tradition of the Marvel Family from Shazam, but they were only used for show and not for blow. Seems like a total waste of potentially decent characters, especially if Liberty Boy was a professional vampire slayer decades before Buffy made it cool again.

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