The Comics That Were Never Sold

Somewhere in 1937, DC printed a comic called Action Comics. It had no finished stories, possibly no interior art worth the name, and it was never offered to a single reader. Its entire purpose was to exist, briefly, so that the company could tell a trademark office the title was in use.

The real Action Comics #1, the one with Superman on the cover, arrived the following year. The record holds both.

These books are called ashcans, and this record contains 339 of them. They are the strangest category in comics: printed, dated, catalogued, and never meant to be read.

To hold a trademark on a magazine title you had to publish under it. Publishers therefore produced a token run: often a few copies, sometimes a cover pasted onto whatever interior pages were lying around, occasionally a different comic entirely with a new cover stapled on. It was dated, it technically existed, and the name was claimed.

The name comes from where they went afterwards. They were not distributed, they were not sold, and most were thrown out. The handful that survived did so because somebody in the office kept one.

Sort the 339 by decade and the practice splits cleanly into two unrelated phenomena that happen to share a name:

Decade	Ashcan series on record
1930s	8
1940s	31
1950s	10
1960s	2
1990s	133
2000s	45
2010s	40
2020s	70

The Golden Age books are legal instruments. The 1990s books are merchandise: preview editions printed in small numbers and given to retailers or sold at conventions, deliberately scarce, aimed squarely at a speculator market that would buy anything scarce. Same word, opposite purpose. The 1990s alone account for more ashcans than the entire Golden Age.

By publisher, the Golden Age league table is led by DC with 50 ashcan series on record, ahead of Fawcett's 7 and a scattering from Quality and others. Read the DC list chronologically and you are watching a company think:

Federal Men Comics (1936) · Action Comics (1937) · Action Funnies (1937) · Superman Comics (1939) · All-American Comics (1939) · Flash Comics (1939) · Radio Funnies (1939) · Double Action Comics (1939) · All Star Comics (1940) · Once Upon a Time (1940) · Old Glory Comics (1941) · World's Best Comics (1941) · All-Flash Quarterly (1941) · Wonder Woman (1942) · Superboy (1942) · Boy Commandos (1942)

Some became famous titles. Some, Radio Funnies and Once Upon a Time among them, were names claimed and never used. The list is a publisher's option book, preserved by accident.

1940 was the year Fawcett entered comics, and the record shows it arriving with a fistful of trademark filings at once: Thrill Comics, Flash Comics, Nickel Comics, 5 Cent Comics, Slam-Bang Comics and Spotlight, all ashcanned that year.

Thrill Comics is the important one. It carried the character who would become Captain Marvel, and it is the direct ancestor of Whiz Comics #2, the book collectors chase as the character's first appearance. The title changed between the ashcan and the newsstand; the contents largely did not.

Whiz Comics on eBay ›

This is the most-asked question in Golden Age collecting, and the ashcan is the answer. Fawcett printed the Thrill Comics ashcan as issue #1. When the book reached newsstands under the new title, the numbering carried over from the ashcan rather than restarting.

So Whiz Comics #2 is the first issue anyone could buy, and a Whiz Comics #1 does not exist in any form a reader ever held. Every index, every price guide and every listing has had to explain this for eighty years.

Here is the best thing in the whole dataset. In 1939, DC ashcanned a title called Flash Comics. In 1940, Fawcett ashcanned a title called Flash Comics. Both are in this record, under both publishers, one year apart.

DC's became the real Flash Comics #1, introducing Jay Garrick and Hawkman. Fawcett's did not, because the name was taken, and the Fawcett book went out as Whiz Comics instead.

Two publishers reaching for the same word in the same eighteen months, the loser's attempt preserved only because somebody catalogued a comic nobody was allowed to sell. The trademark race is not a story told about the Golden Age. It is a row in the database.

DC ashcanned both Wonder Woman and Superboy in 1942. Neither character needed a title that year; Wonder Woman was running in other books and Superboy would not headline for some time.

That is the whole logic of the practice in one line. You did not ashcan a title because you were ready to publish it. You ashcanned it because you were not ready, and did not want anyone else taking the name while you got there.

Then the word changes meaning entirely. The 1990s produced 133 ashcan series on record, led by Scout Comics at 45 and Chaos! Comics at 23, with Marvel, Harris, Image, Dark Horse and Malibu all contributing.

These were promotional previews: printed small, handed out at conventions or to retailers, sometimes numbered and signed. Nobody was protecting a trademark. They were making a scarce object for a market that had decided scarce objects appreciate, during precisely the years that theory was being tested to destruction.

The 2020s account for 70 ashcan series in this record, more than the 2000s or 2010s. The format outlived the speculation boom that revived it and settled into a permanent role as a promotional object, printed in small numbers, given away, and then traded.

The Golden Age version was a legal fiction. The modern version is a marketing device wearing the same name, and the record keeps them in the same drawer because the catalogue has no opinion about intent.

Not an ashcan, but the same family: a 1939 giveaway intended for cinemas, printed as a promotional sample, containing the first appearance of the Sub-Mariner months before Marvel Comics #1.

The promotion was cancelled. A small number of copies survived, and they are among the most valuable comics in existence, because the thing nobody was supposed to keep is the thing almost nobody kept.

A Golden Age ashcan can be worth a great deal, which is a peculiar outcome for an object with no story, no finished art, and no reader. Its value is entirely evidentiary: it is proof that a company was thinking about a title on a particular date.

This site does not publish values, but it will tell you the thing that actually matters for one of these books, which is whether the copy in front of you is what the seller says it is. An ashcan is by definition a book with no established appearance, which makes provenance the entire purchase.

Every figure above comes from counting series whose recorded title contains the word ashcan, which is how this catalogue marks them. That is a reliable way to count what has been identified and a poor way to count what exists: an ashcan that was never catalogued, or one catalogued under a different convention, is invisible here.

Which is fitting, for a category of comic whose defining characteristic is that it was supposed to disappear. The 339 in this record are the ones that failed to.

Ashcans are the closest comics come to having paperwork. They were printed to satisfy a legal requirement, not a reader, and they survive in numbers small enough that each one is essentially an accident. Read the Golden Age list in order and you can watch publishers racing each other for names, claiming titles years before they had characters to put in them, and occasionally losing a word to a competitor and shipping under a different one.

A note on sources. Counts above were taken from this record on the day of writing; the history is the commonly documented account and every issue referenced has been checked against the files here. If you hold a copy of something in the 339 and know more about it than the catalogue does, corrections@comicrecord.com is read and credited.