On the seventh day of Christmas, your GoCollect gave to you: A Shortboxed Giveaway of a 7.0 graded The Eternals #1! And a blog about Golden Age Highlight: The Black Terror. Here's how you can win today's 12 Days of Giveaways.As part of our 12 Days of Giveaways, Shortboxed has decided to sponsor 6 days and this is their fourth! They also decided to provide some unique blog content for you to enjoy (see below).

Shortboxed is the mobile app marketplace to buy and sell graded comic books. It's the easiest way to list your graded comics for sale and get them in front of thousands of collectors daily. You can download Shortboxed now on iOS and Android.

What is the Giveaway?

Shortboxed has chosen to giveaway a 7.0 graded The Eternals #1 This was released in 1976 making it a bronze age comic and 44 years old! This grade has an estimated FMV of $100 right now. 

How to enter the Shortboxed Giveaway

To enter today's 12 Days of Giveaways, head over to Instagram and be sure to follow both GoCollect and Shortboxed and like the most recent post from both. Then head over to the giveaway page and fill it out! It's that simple! We will announce today's winner Friday at 5pm EST.  You have until midnight tonight to enter!  Stay tuned every day until Christmas for more giveaways. If you want the chance to win every day, you have to follow the instructions every day - so don't miss out!

Now - check out their blog about Golden Age Highlight: The Black Terror!

Golden Age Highlight: The Black Terror

(This article originally published on Shortboxed)

Back in the Golden Age of comics, heroes like The Black Terror filled newsstands with tales of crime fighting and patriotic anti-Axis war victories. Perhaps forgotten or unheard of by many non-Golden Age comic collectors, long-time collector and Overstreet Advisor Stephen Gentner gives us an intro into the beloved hero.

Origin of the Black Terror

Kindly Bob Benton is a pharmacist. Somewhat milk-toasty, he plied his trade filling prescriptions, and helping people in his pharmacy. Bob has a creative, intellectually curious nature, which led him to work on various formulas. What a perfect profession from which to pursue them! One of the areas Benton worked with was in the formulation of “formic ethers.” Inhaling these ethers in an accidental fashion, (ala Jay Garrick The Flash,) Bob Benton gains super strength, and virtual physical invulnerability! Bob realizes what great good he can achieve with these new found powers fighting crime, and fashions a black costume using the skull and crossbones from a poison bottle as an iconic template! The Black Terror, The Nemesis of Crime is born!

It’s funny, all the good jobs like philanthropists, reporters, millionaires, industrial magnates were already taken for a secret identity. I guess it was either be a pharmacist, or a cement-pourer! The Terror’s invulnerability was problematic; bullets bounced off of him, but if a crook or Nazi goon slugged him in the back of the head, he went down like a load of bricks! A kid assistant named Tim Roland working in Benton’s Pharmacy similarly is exposed to “the formic ethers, Dude”…and joins the Black Terror as his sidekick. In the series, he is never called anything other than Tim, and appears sans mask on a few covers of The Black Terror. Together, they are soon known as “The Terror Twins.” The Terrors had a pretty lean budget…one story has them chasing villains on a bicycle built for two! The Black Terror is sometimes also known simply as just, “The Terror.”

The Schomburg Effect

The primary reason for the success of the Black Terror was the artistic excellence of Alex Schomburg, IMO. Although The Terror’s first appearance in Exciting Comics #9, Jan 1941 was drawn by Elmer Wexler, I believe it was Alex Schomburg’s perfectionist nature in edge embellishments and outstanding proportional cover design that made Black Terror sell! The publisher, Nedor, had a fan favorite with the Black Terror. Upon that popularity came The Black Terror #1, published in 1942. America’s Best Comics also followed in Feb 1942 with The Black Terror as the headliner character with the other Standard/Nedor heroes. Alex started covers on The Black Terror with issue #2.

Schomburg said it was difficult to make an all black costume look good. He said “black” required extra effort to bring out the musculature and body contours with white edging and gold/yellow accents. His chest emblem of course being the skull and crossbones!

The Black Terror arrived just as the United States entered World War Two. Standard/Nedor joined many other comic publishers producing propaganda and patriotic covers with their heroes battling the evil Axis. Alex Schomburg’s wartime cover concepts are a study unto themselves, with proportion bending, stereotyped Axis caricatures getting the hell beaten out of them wonderfully on each WWII cover! It is this area which brought me decades ago to pursue this wonderful character in the hands of the master Alex Schomburg!

Personal Favorites

Below are five of my absolute favorite Black Terror centric covers. All are pulled from my personal collection just for this article. The Black Terror copies are Mile Highs. Exciting Comics #28 is very scarce and rare. America's Best Comics #7 is my favorite propaganda cover in that title. And of course, the infamous Candy Bar cover.

About the Author

Stephen Gentner has been an Advisor to the Overstreet Guide for 25 years. He wrote dozens of articles for the Comic Book Marketplace in the 1990s. He also proved to Mr. Overstreet that the Sandman’s first appearance was in New York World’s Fair Comics of 1939. You can follow Stephen on Instagram @collecto6.