The Australian run of Classics Illustrated, commencing in 1947, is Ayers & James most enduring and famous comics legacy, although the company is associated with thousands of comics from the 1940s until the 1970s.

Most of this publishing output is disguised behind diverse trading names or successors—such as Red Circle Press, Illustrated Publications, Approved Publications and others—all associated with the later Magazine Management company.

This website is a collaborative effort! Since AusReprints.com went online in 2003, I've made surprising progress documenting Australian reprint comics. But I need your help with issues I don't have.

The easiest way to help is to email me a high quality scan of missing or poor quality covers. If you have the time, I also welcome story details and full content information. All contributions can be emailed to me at the link at the bottom of this page.

Capitalising on the success of KG Murray's Superman reprints, Atlas Publications entered the comics field in January 1948 with Captain Atom, a full colour comic by Australians Arthur Mather and Jack Bellew (as John Welles). Wartime bans on imported periodicals were still in place at the time, creating strong demand for new local periodicals.

While early Atlas comics mimicked the look of Murray's contemporary comics, the company quickly created a strong identity by being one of the few Australian comics' publishers to consistently brand its publications on the cover. Until 1951, most of its comics were also printed in a distinctive landscape format that was better suited to its dominant newspaper reprints.

In 1946, during the post-war boom in Australian comics, the Vee Publishing Co. entered the market with an extensive programme of US Fawcett reprints. This company became Larry Cleland Pty. Ltd around 1949/50, although Stanley Larry Cleland had been associated with the company since its foundation.

Cleland has no publishing record prior to Vee Publishing, and it is unknown how he secured the rights to Fawcett's material. However, the company quickly expanded its range of black and white reprint editions to include a dozen or more humour, super hero and western comics.

While The Phantom is Frew Publications' most famous and only remaining comic, from the late 1940s the company also published a wide range of other reprints and original Australian comics.

In 1948, Ron Forsyth, Jim Richardson, Jack Eisen and Peter Watson put in £500 each to found Frew, using an acronym of their four surnames to name the new company—although Eisen and Watson withdrew before the first comic was produced. For the next 40 years, Forsyth and Richardson shaped the company into an Australian icon.

Newton Comics was a short-lived range of Marvel reprints produced in 1975 and 1976 as part of an excentric publishing empire based around Maxwell Newton's six year run on the trashy tabloid, the Melbourne Sunday Observer.

When publisher Gordon Barton abandoned his Observer in 1971, Newton quickly put out a replacement through Regal Press. The comics were part of a range of magazines and external jobs that kept the presses running throughout the week, not just the two days needed for the Sunday Observer. Other projects included teen mags such as Scream and Sweet, entertainment publications National Tattler and TV Guide, and the pornographic Pleazure, Eros and Kings Cross Whisper.

From 1946 until 1983, the K.G. Murray Publishing Company produced comics under a range of imprints—Climax Comics, Blue Star, Colour Comics, Planet Comics and finally Murray Comics.

While most of these were DC reprints, some included original Australian work and reprints from such diverse publishers as ACG, Charlton, Avalon, Novelty Press, Quality, Comic Media, Ziff-Davis, St. John, Ajax-Farrell, Fiction House and Atlas/Marvel. From the late 1960s, some series included translated comics, particularly from Spain's Selecciones Ilustradas agency.

Australian access to international comics was limited until the 1980s, resulting in a strong local comic industry, including reprint comics.

Many of the earliest and most popular Australian comics were based on reprints of newspaper strips, reflecting international trends and later providing an opportunity to circumvent import restrictions. The mid-1930s saw significant expansion of syndicated newspaper material in Australia, particularly following formation of the Yaffa Syndicate to distribute material from King Features Syndicate.

Between 1983 and 1986, the Federal Publishing Company (FPC) reprinted contemporary DC and Marvel comics, occasionally dipping into a backlist of stories acquired from the K. G. Murray Publishing Company.

FPC was a new publishing division of Hannanprint, formed through the acquisition of leisure and special interest publications from ACP Publishing, the company that acquired Murray from its founding family in 1972. Hannanprint's Eastern Suburbs Newspapers (subsequently ESN The Litho Centre) also became the printers for the comics at that time.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Yaffa Publishing Group produced a range of mainly reprint comics under "Yaffa" and "Page" imprints or company divisions.

David Yaffa founded his company around 1925 with the publication of Newspaper News (later AdNews), an advertising and marketing magazine. The Yaffa Syndicate's earliest comics involvement was the distribution of newspaper strips from King Features Syndicate (such as Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford and Mandrake the Magician). Page Publications, the imprint of most of Yaffa's comics, was established as a separate entity in the 1960s.

From about 1950 to 1966, Horwitz Publications was a large publisher of war, western and crime comics, including popular titles such as Navy Combat, Fast Gun, Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill.

Horwitz predominantly reprinted US comics, sourced mainly from Timely/Atlas/Marvel, but with other US publishers and newspaper strip reprints. In the late 1950s, it created some local comics, notably adaptations of its Carter Brown novels and The Phantom Commando, created by John Dixon but passed to Maurice Bramley (b 1910) who drew it until 1956.

From around 1975 to 1984, Gredown published a diverse range of magazine-size comics, predominanly horror but also western, science fiction and other genres. Beginning as sequentially-numbered magazine-size series, the comics later became mainly one-shots with a wildly eccentric range of titles.

Little is know about Gredown's origins, although it seems the company was formed to compete with KG Murray. Greg Murray appears to have established Gredown after his father, Kenneth G. Murray was bought out by Australian Consolidated Press (APC) in 1974. The earliest Gredown publications were magazines, but the company's output was soon focused on reprint comics.

Just after Christmas 1948, during the holiday silly season when newspapers desperately seek copy to fill their pages, the Sydney Morning Herald opened up debate about the impact of comics on young people.

The final pages of this article reproduce in full the sensationalist and shallow article that may have helped crystalised popular discontent over comics corrupting Australian youth. It represents a fascinating early skirmish in the cultural tensions that erupted into overt censorship during the 1950s, particularly focused around Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954.

Back in late 2003, a copy of an old Australian comic dating from the mid-1940s sold for nearly AU$350 on eBay Australia.

There's nothing unusual about this in itself – the last five years or so have seen dozens of vintage Australian comics being auctioned online for similar amounts.

Despite his long association with the K.G. Murray Publishing Company, very little is known about the late (2/12/1916 – 8/6/2000), a talented and prolific artist who produced countless covers for Murray's range of American reprint comics.

However, as the following 1977 profile written by Australian comics' historian John Ryan demonstrates, this was just one aspect of Amos' lengthy and diverse career.

If the name Don Richardson sounds unfamiliar to you, don't worry—you won't find his name appearing on any of the comic books in your collection.

I'd never heard of Don either, until I received an email from him, quite out of the blue, on 11 January 2004.

One of the pleasures of flicking through old Australian comics is that you never know what you'll find.

This was certainly the case when I picked up a secondhand copy of Super Giant Album 23, which was originally published by the KG Murray Publishing Company (Sydney).

If you've been charting the fortunes of Australian-made comics for the last 25 years or so, then chances are you've come across the name Richard Rae.

You might have been one of the first Aussie comic fans of the early 1980s who picked up one of the many comic books which Richard wrote and published during 1980-1983, such as Star Heroes, The Greatest Super Hero and Fantastic Australian Heroes.

Australian reprints of American comic books published between 1950s-1980s have become popular items with modern-day collectors.

During this period, the K. G. Murray (KGM) company dominated Australian comics publishing, yet comic books were just one part of this phenomenally successful publishing enterprise.