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tp inside,fc sl. color touch at bottom of cover
100 pgs; Fred Ray cvr; Siegel & Finger stories; Flessel & Kane art


World's Best Comics #1 is a beloved Golden Age rarity as the only copy of this title — which would become the long-running World's Finest with its second issue! The runaway success of the 1939 and 1940 New York World's Fair square bound comics had prompted DC to launch a quarterly compilation comic with many of the same features, thereby establishing the first major superhero anthology comic of its kind to run regularly. World's Finest would then go on to last, with few variations on its formula, for nearly 50 years. World's Best Comics #1 also boasts the first appearance of the "Big Two," Superman and Batman, on the same cover of a newsstand comic (the 1940 NYWF comic being sold largely at the fair itself), which gave kids around the country the thrill of a lifetime.


Artists Information

A celebrity comic artist of the Golden Age, co-created Batman and Robin with Bill Finger, as his brainchild became more in demand he hired an army of ghost artists to illustrate the dearth of Batman features on the market, but all were credited to Kane. His other achievements include the creation of Catwoman, Two-Face and cartoon character Courageous Cat. Kane was the object of some controversy for taking credit for the art and inspiration of others, but he was also undoubtedly an important figure in the history of comics. He published an updated version of his autobiography "Batman and Me: The Saga Continues" shortly before his death in 1998. He got his start at the Eisner/Iger studio and was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Creig Flessel was one of the pioneers of comic art, starting out at the birth of the industry Flessel was a Pulp illustrator who made the transition to comics early on, his most prominent pulp work was on the Shadow, a precursor to hero comics. Flessel was responsible for many of the pre-Batman Detective covers, as well as a variety of anthology features in the title, he was also closely associated with the Golden Age Sandman, he moved on to freelance for some of the B-level publishers after his time at DC. Later in his career Flessel did a lot of ghost work for DC and also drew cartoons for Playboy, he passed away in 2008, but will always be lauded as one of the first comic artists in the history of the form.

Frederic E. "Fred" Ray, Jr. was an American comic book artist and commercial illustrator best known as the primary Superman cover-artist of the 1940s, whose work helped shape the defining look of the iconic superhero character, and for his more than two decades as artist of the DC Comics feature "Tomahawk"