Any info on Rural Home?

[profpike]

I was looking at some super hero books by Rural Home. The art looks really good for a minor publisher. There is not that much info available on them. Anyone I know work for them? What does our panel of experts know?

[bchat]

Most of the info I have on Rural Home is on another computer, so I'm doing this from memory.  I'm sure whatever I get wrong will be corrected by someone else.

The Rural Home books were produced and perhaps co-owned by Bernard Baily, and featured artwork by Hing Chu, Harold De Lay, Henry Carl Kiefer, William Merle Allison, and many others.  IF I remember correctly what I read in another online forum, Rural Home exceeded their paper quota and was bascially shutdown by the government, with about 3 million comics (I haven't seen how many titles that actually includes) getting pulped as a result.

[profpike]

Thanks. It's hard to find info about them.

[Bob Hughes]

I'm not sure that Rural Home is actually a company.  It's some sort of operation designed to get around paper quotas by using defunct magazines as the source.  Publishers Distribution  Company seems to have been behind it.  One of the conspirators went to jail for violating paper rules.  A lot of books were confiscated and sold at auction by the government and then reissued to the general public with a new owners name overprinted over the original.  There was an article printed in Comic Book Marketplace about this called Black Market Comics of the Golden Age.