494 QUALITY COMICS
studios. At their peak, Quality’s nine titles collectively sold over one million copies per
month. As the popularity of superhero comics declined, Quality Comics’ new ventures
included producing romance comics and the adventures of treasury agent T-Man.
When Jerry Iger left Quality Comics, he took the Phantom Lady from Quality to
Fox Features, where the character became sexier to the point of controversy. During the
United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency’s 1954 hearings and the
Comics Code Authority’s resultant creation, Quality remained among the few pub-
lishers with content considered consistently suitable for children. Nevertheless, Arnold
closed a fi nancially troubled Quality Comics in 1956, selling many creative properties
to DC Comics , and retired.
Over the decades, Quality characters appeared sporadically in DC Comics publica-
tions. Uncle Sam, the Human Bomb, and several others became the Freedom Fighters,
a superhero team from the parallel universe of Earth X where World War II had never
ended. One of the most durable Quality characters would prove to be Plastic Man , Jack
Cole’s “India Rubber Man” character that enjoyed several DC revivals and appeared in
animated cartoons. All of DC’s Quality characters became part of the same continuity
as other DC Comics characters as of Crisis on Infi nite Earths #11 (1986).
Selected Bibliography: Duin, Steve, and Mike Richardson. Comics Between the Panels.
Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1998; Harvey, Robert C. Th e Art of the Comic
Book. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996; Herman, H. Silver Age: Th e Sec-
ond Generation of Comic Book Artists. Neshannock, PA: Hermes Press, 2004; Kaplan,
A. From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books. Philadelphia: Th e Jewish Publi-
cation Society, 2008; Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: Th e Transformation of
Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001; Wright,
Nicky. Th e Classic Era of American Comics. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2000.
Travis Langley
