| Gold Key Comics |
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Gold Key Comics was an imprint of Western Publishing . It was created in 1962, when Western switched to in-house publishing rather than packaging content for branding and distribution by its business partner, Dell Comics . Gold Key featured a number of licensed properties and several original titles (including a number of publications that spun-off from Dells' '' Four Color '' series). It maintained decent sales numbers throughout the 1960s, thanks to its offering many titles based upon popular TV series of the day, as well as an extensive amount of titles based upon both Walt Disney Studios and Warner Brothers animated properties. It was also the first company to publish comic books based upon '' Star Trek ''. In the 1970s, when the comics industry experienced a downswing, Gold Key was among the hardest hit. By 1977, all of the company's original series had been cancelled (most had been dropped circa 1973-1974), and its licensed series were virtually all reprint-only, although Gold Key was still able to obtain the rights to publish a comic book series based upon '' Buck Rogers In The 25th Century '' between 1979 and 1981, although it lost the lucrative publishing rights for ''Star Trek'' to Marvel Comics in 1979. In 1981, Western dropped the "Gold Key" name and switched to "Whitman Comics", a branding also used for the company's coloring books. With the transition of comic book sales from newstands to Comic Book Store s, Whitman switched to alternate methods of distribution, such as bagged set of comics in Department Stores . These attempts proved unsuccessful, and by 1984, Western was out of the comic book business. Three of Gold Key's original characters — Magnus, Robot Fighter , Doctor Solar and Turok, Son Of Stone — were used in the 1990s to launch Valiant Comics ' "Valiant Universe". Dark Horse Comics has published reprints, including several in hardcover collections, of such original Gold Key titles as ''Magnus, Robot Fighter'', ''Doctor Solar'', ''M.A.R.S. Patrol'', and the Russ Manning -produced ''Tarzan'' series. The Checker Book Publishing Group , in conjunction with Paramount Pictures , began reprinting the Gold Key ''Star Trek'' series in 2004. SELECTED TITLES
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