Deluxe Comics was a short-lived comic book

Comic book

A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

 publishing company which published one title, Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents is a fictional team of superheroes that appeared in comic books originally published by Tower Comics in the 1960s. They were an arm of the United Nations and were notable for their depiction of the heroes as everyday people whose heroic careers were merely their day jobs...

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History

Deluxe Comics was a division of Singer Publishing, founded by David M. Singer. It lasted from 1984 to 1986.

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents controversy

In 1984, Deluxe began publishing Wally Wood

Wally Wood

Wallace Allan Wood was an American comic book writer, artist and independent publisher, best known for his work in EC Comics and Mad. He was one of Mads founding cartoonists in 1952. Although much of his early professional artwork is signed Wallace Wood, he became known as Wally Wood, a name he...

's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, featuring some of the best artists of the era, including George Pérez

George Pérez

George Pérez is a Puerto Rican-American writer and illustrator of comic books, known for his work on various titles, including Avengers, Teen Titans and Wonder Woman.-Biography:...

, Dave Cockrum

Dave Cockrum

David Emmett Cockrum was an American comic book artist known for his co-creation of the new X-Men characters Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus...

, Keith Giffen

Keith Giffen

Keith Ian Giffen is an American comic book illustrator and writer.-Biography:Giffen was born in Queens, New York City....

, Murphy Anderson

Murphy Anderson

Murphy Anderson is an American comic book artist, known as one of the premier inkers of his era, who has worked for companies such as DC Comics for over fifty years, starting in the 1930s-'40s Golden Age of Comic Books...

 and Jerry Ordway

Jerry Ordway

Jeremiah "Jerry" Ordway is an American writer, penciller, inker and painter of comic books.He is known for his inking work on a wide variety of DC Comics titles, including the continuity-redefining classic Crisis on Infinite Earths , his long run working on the Superman titles from 1986–1993, and...

. Singer claimed the group was in the public domain, a claim disputed by John Carbonaro. Carbonaro was publisher of JC Comics

JC Comics

JC Comics , was a short-lived comic book company owned by John Carbonaro . JC published a few titles in the early 1980s, most notably comics featuring the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents....

, which had acquired the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents rights from defunct publisher Tower Comics

Tower Comics

Tower Comics was an American comic book publishing company best known for Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, a strange combination of secret agents and superheroes; and Samm Schwartz's Tippy Teen, an Archie Andrews clone...

 (which had gone out of business in 1969). In fact, JC had published several issues of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents in 1983, the last of which was published through Archie Comics

Archie Comics

Archie Comics is an American comic book publisher headquartered in the Village of Mamaroneck, Town of Mamaroneck, New York, known for its many series featuring the fictional teenagers Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge, Reggie Mantle and Jughead Jones. The characters were created by...

' Red Circle Comics

Red Circle Comics

Red Circle Comics was an imprint used by Archie Comics Publications, Inc. to publish non-Archie characters, especially their superheroes, in the 1970s and '80s.-Phase 1: 1970s:...

 line.

A lawsuit initiated by Carbonaro was eventually settled in US District Court in favor of Carbonaro, with Singer acknowledging Carbonaro’s registered copyrights and trademark. Under the settlement, Carbonaro also received, among other things, an assignment of all rights to “Wally Woods T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents,” previously published by Singer, and an undisclosed sum of money.

Closure

Deluxe Comics closed its doors in 1986 when several major distributors failed to pay sizeable past-due invoices.

Lodestone Comics

Lodestone Comics was a sister company to Deluxe Comics and published five short lived titles: Codename Danger, Evangeline

Evangeline (comics)

Evangeline is a 1980s comic book co-created and written initially by then-husband and wife team Chuck Dixon & Judith Hunt, with pencils by Hunt inks by Ricardo Villagran. Letters were by cartoonist and letterer Ed J...

 Special, the Futurians

Futurians (comics)

The Futurians was a superhero team created by Dave Cockrum, who first appeared in 1983 in the ninth of the Marvel Graphic Novels series, then in a three-issue run published by Lodestone Comics....

, the March Hare, and a one shot edition of The Honeymooners

The Honeymooners

The Honeymooners is an American situation comedy television show, based on a recurring 1951–'55 sketch of the same name. It originally aired on the DuMont network's Cavalcade of Stars and subsequently on the CBS network's The Jackie Gleason Show hosted by Jackie Gleason, and filmed before a live...

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