I've seen some recent online posts that have me thinking about DC Comics' licensed titles. Nowadays, we mostly think of DC and Marvel comic books within the parameters of the characters each company owns. But it used to be common for both companies to pay a license to adapt some property from other media into a four-color newsstand funnybook. Dell and then Gold Key Comics were the kingpins of licensed titles, and Charlton Comics also had quite a few licenses, but DC and Marvel likewise produced their share of comics based on outside sources.
in the '70s, Marvel did particularly well with their license of Conan the Barbarian, perhaps less so with Doc Savage. I would guess that DC's most popular licensed title in the '70s was Tarzan. I'd look to the eighty-issue run of The Adventures Of Jerry Lewis from 1957-1971 as a significantly long life on the spinner rack, especially if we add the preceding forty issues when it was The Adventures Of Dean Martin And Jerry Lewis (1952-1957). I gotta figure ol' Jerry outsold a lot of the individual Justice League of America members' books, and The Adventures Of Jerry Lewis outlasted Aquaman, The Atom, and Hawkman. (I was a fan, and I celebrated the DC Comics legacy of Jerry Lewis in a piece called "The Lovable Lunkhead Returns.")
I wanted to come up with a list of DC's licensed titles. I decided to limit the list to the 1960s and '70s--my first era of reading comics--so the list excludes older series like Mutt & Jeff (103 issues 1939-1958, before moving over to Dell), Jackie Gleason & The Honeymooners, and Mr. District Attorney, among many others. And it stops short of DC's 1980s and beyond licenses of Atari Force, Masters Of The Universe, the Phantom, Star Trek, and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt.
A few notes: This list excludes Rima The Jungle Girl, a public domain character DC adapted for her own series. I'm listing the 1973-75 Black Magic series (which reprinted '50s horror stories by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, originally published by Prize Comics) and the one-shot Sherlock Holmes because I presume DC licensed both, but I concede the possibility that the company could have acquired ownership of the former, and the latter could have been considered in the public domain (though I'm not sure that's true).
The list does include Shazam! Even though DC eventually bought the rights to the original Captain Marvel, Cap and his Marvel Family cohorts were initially licensed by DC from original publisher Fawcett Comics. DC didn't own the characters outright until decades after the Shazam! book was cancelled.
Let's have a look at that list:
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