AC Comics
Entry updated 16 September 2021. Tagged: Comics, Publisher.
US publisher of various Comics titles, founded in Florida in 1969 by Bill Black, known originally as Paragon Publications and from 1982 to 1984 as Americomics. While primarily publishing a great deal of 1940s Golden Age comics material in various genres, AC Comics is best known for its female Superhero titles. The most famous of these is Femforce (1985-current), believed to be the first all-female superhero team in US comics. This team's roster changes on a regular basis and includes some characters from defunct publishers which have fallen into the public domain, such as Miss Liberty, the size-changing Garganta, and Phantom Lady. Original characters also appear, including Dragonfly, created in 1982 by Rik Levins (1950-2010). The company was criticized in the 1980s for portraying such female characters in a hypersexualized manner, not without some justification, though such portrayals are endemic throughout the US comics industry; some considered AC's presentation to be refreshingly tongue-in-cheek.
Other AC titles include Mystery Men of Comics and the now defunct Sentinels of Justice, whose original version featured the gadget-using hero the Blue Beetle before DC Comics bought rights to this character. A second version of the Sentinels team featured mainly female characters such as Nightveil and (another size-changing heroine) Tara. AC also produces short low-budget films dealing with its characters, plus related merchandise. Comics scripter T Casey Brennan (1948- ), best-known for his work on various Horror comics for diverse publishers, has occasionally written for AC. [GSt]
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