Schomburg’s America’s Best Comics 18 and the Prelude to the Cold War

Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored | Tagged: Alex Schomburg, Black Terror, cold war, Fighting Yank

America’s Best Comics #18 has a stand-out Alex Schomburg cover, and a story about the foundational moment of the Atomic Age on the inside

With a cover date of June 1946 and an on-sale date of April 11, the contents of America’s Best Comics #18 were likely in various stages of production over the prior few months.  The Black Terror, Pyroman, and Doc Strange stories were clearly conceived while World War II was still ongoing, and had been hastily reframed in an attempt to make it clear they had taken place before it had ended.  On the other hand, the Fighting Yank story is clearly the product of the early weeks of 1946, based a plot that revolved around the United Nations grappling with a world that included the atomic bomb.  Meanwhile, the Alex Schomburg cover is timeless: hooded cultists, a woman in bondage facing imminent peril from a branding iron, and Doc Strange, Fighting Yank, and the Black Hood all wading into the mix.  While the Scomburg cover is, as always, the key attraction here (and an underappreciated gem of a cover at that) there’s all kinds of stuff going on under the hood of America’s Best Comics #18 (Nedor, 1946), and there’s a gorgeous CGC VF 8.0 Cream to off-white pages copy up for auction at the 2025 December 11 Golden Age Comics Century Showcase Auction IV #40315.

The contrast between the Black Terror WWII-era story and the Fighting Yank’s Cold War-era tale is a stark illustration of the shifting tides of history in early 1946.  The Black Terror story contains a number of brutal references to the Holocaust, rooted in the darkest moments of the war itself, while the Fighting Yank story could be considered a prototype of the sort of Cold War spy thriller that would become common in comics over the next decade.  The Fighting Yank saga, centered on a United Nations conference regarding the “New Atomic Bomb,” reflects the real-world diplomatic maneuvering that was taking place as this story was likely in development in the early months of 1946.  By June 1946, such diplomatic efforts resulted in the United States presenting the Baruch Plan to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. The plan proposed the international control of atomic energy to ensure it was used only for peaceful purposes, which is exactly the topic of the conference in “The Balkanian Plot” storyline. The failure of this plan, due to Soviet opposition, would lead directly to the nuclear arms race. The comics’ villain, Farkas of “Balkania”, is uncoincidentally a thinly veiled stand-in for the Soviet sphere of influence. America’s Best Comics #18 was processing the shifting alliances of the post-WWII era in real-time.

It’s been eight years since a copy nicer than this CGC 8.0 has come up for public auction, and only a handful of copies above CGC 5.5 have shown up for sale in the meantime.  Only 10 copies have been graded at CGC 8.0 or higher.  With an underappreciated Schomburg cover on the outside, plus a fascinating reflection of 1946 history on the inside, there’s a high-grade CGC VF 8.0 Cream to off-white pages copy up for auction at the 2025 December 11 Golden Age Comics Century Showcase Auction IV #40315.

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