Summary: FBI Agent by Day, Commie-fighting cold war superhero by night. We look at Jim Drake, the Black Cobra who appeared in three issues of his own magazine in 1954-55. <br> Read the Black Cobra from Ajax Comics for free at the <a href="http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?cid=735">Digital Comic Museum.</a> <br> Transcript below:<br> Meet a Cold War man of mystery who was so mysterious even his writers weren’t clear if he had superpowers. We’ll tell you all about it as we look at The Black Cobra, straight ahead.<br><br> <br> Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.<br> If we think of comics, particularly superhero comics during the Golden Age, we think of Marvel and we think of DC. While those two companies dominated, they were far from the only game in town. With the success of characters like Captain America, Captain Marvel and of course Superman, there was a plethora of companies that were offering their comics. And you can actually read many of them online for free, and I probably should have mentioned that when I did the program a few weeks back on how to read comics for free, but this is somewhat of a different category. <br> The Digital Comic Museum, digitalcomicmuseum.org collects public domain comic books. Back during the Golden Age and even the early Silver Age of comics copyright only lasted twenty-eight years. You could renew it for an additional twenty-eight year term and that’s what’s happened to most of the really popular entertainment of that time, and then it’s been further extended by the Government. But if you didn’t get in that first twenty-eight year renewal prior to 1964 your work would fall into the public domain. Superhero comics boomed during World War II but then went bust after the war, and many companies went belly-up. Therefore, when it came time to renew the copyright on their comics and their characters there was no one to renew it. And Digital Comics Museum captures all these comics which you can read and download for free. Now if you would like to read them on their website you can do that pretty easily. If you would like to download them, most of their files are in what’s known as a CBR format which is a comic book archive, so you need a CBR Reader. For my Kindle I use ComiCat – it’s a very simple program, I just get the comics onto my Kindle and it will display them.<br> Now Black Cobra which we’re going to talk about today is a somewhat obscure comic that you can find there. However, there are others that are a little bit better known that are also available there. DC has bought the rights to various characters but doesn’t own all of their past stories, among them, Captain Marvel and Plastic Man. They bought all of the comic characters from Fawcett and Quality Comics, but all of the stories from this era are actually free-for-all that you can go ahead and read, and some just really interesting titles. There’s so much there that I might want to get to one day. But we’re going to start with Black Cobra because he’s got a relatively short run, and also I’m working on a book where I use some public domain superheroes, so I’m kind of sharing some of my research on these characters with you.<br> The one I’m talking about is actually the second character named Black Cobra. The mid-1950s saw a brief attempt to revive superheroes, and it only had been a few years after the Golden Age bust. And you can trace the root of it back to Atlas which was the precursor company for Marvel which revived the Submariner, Human Torch and Captain America, and particularly Captain America was focused on fighting communism. The others were there to a certain extent, and there were other characters during this brief period before the Silver Age properly began with the return of The Flash with Barry Alle...
