Charlton comics with the wrong covers?

[Kevin Yong]

Hi. I just got back from a very brief visit to the San Diego Comic-Con, and wanted to share the story of my strangest discovery from the back issue bins.

I purchased two Charlton books from 1960 in a random bin of $2 clearance comics. They both have identical covers identifying them as "Brides in Love #18". However, not only are the interior pages different, they're not even romance comics! The interior of one book is a Western, and the other one is war stories! 

(I'm not sure how to do image attachments to forum posts, but I've got snapshots of the book covers and interior splash pages posted online over at my personal blog if anyone wants to take a look.)

The legal text on the inside front covers has the typical Charlton lack of proper copyright notice, and would thus be free to scan and share on the site. However, considering that the mystery contents of the books are unrelated to their covers, I'm not sure how I'd categorize those uploads even if I scanned them.

I know Charlton had a lot of quality control issues regarding the print quality and page trimming on a lot of their books I've seen, but this is my first encounter with them packaging the wrong books under wrong covers. Has anyone else run across this sort of thing before?

 

[JonTheScanner]

Presumably, this was an actual cover used on a Charlton comic and actual interiors used in other comics. In the ideal world, all three would be scanned and there'd be no need to scan your comic.

"Fast Gun" was the first story in Outlaws of the West #25 May 1960
"The Replacement" was the lead story in Fightin' Marines #35 May 1960

so those are presumably the interiors and are after the 1959 cut-off for DCM in any case.

The closest I've seen to this is DC's failing to change the indicia on inside front covers on occasion. DC's line was divided into two parts which had the same ads (of course some ads were sold to both halves) and I assume they'd on occasion forget to change the text slug for the indicia when they switched to printing the covers for a different book or ran the wrong ifc pages back through for the wrong front cover.

[Kevin Yong]

Presumably, this was an actual cover used on a Charlton comic and actual interiors used in other comics. In the ideal world, all three would be scanned and there'd be no need to scan your comic...

Thanks for the info on the interior stories! That gives me a lot more to work with in trying to track down more details on these misprints. 

From what I can see from a quick look around, none of the comics mentioned are available here at DCM (1960 is too late) or at the comicbookplus.com site's Silver Age section. Maybe I'll ask around over at their forum too. Like I said, I don't mind scanning these to share, but I'm really not sure how best to categorize them.

[Yoc]

Hi Kevin,
I'd expect CB+ would welcome them on the site once you've figured out what to call them.

[JonTheScanner]

Both of the potential "interior" comics I mentioned are indexed on GCD -- that's where I found them, so just go there and look and see if all the contents match.