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Controversial Comics - Changed, Recalled, Destroyed!



Batman's penis.
Elecktra nude.
And other oddities.

I read the Alan Milgrom one 20 years ago, where Al Milgrom drew a celebrational dig about Bob Harras being fired from Marvel's editor in chief position, drawn into the book-titles on a bookshelf in a panel background on one page.
I also have the CRISIS hardcover mentioned with the error panel.
And the MATRIX pre-movie anthology advance-promotional release.


There's another one not mentioned that I learned about during a brief period I worked for Tekno Comics, an issue of the Leonard Nimoy-created PRIMORTALS series, where a cover artist secretly drew a penis into a freaky looking alien's head. So Tekno caught it after the fact, withheld that cover version, shredded most of the copies, and did a new printing with another cover. But I saw copies in the company's own inventory files that still existed of the penis-head cover, even after the shredding.
https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=146601

The penis-cover is on issue 4. Both that one, and the alternate replacement cover for issue 4, are shown at the above link.

Publishers keep copies of their comics issues on file, to give prospective advertisers, to show how ads look in their published titles. And they offered me to take and keep copies of any of their titles I wanted to have. I took several dozen issues on their offer, and I don't think they would have cared if I took a few hundred, they had thousands more to spare.

I also met Mitchell Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers, the two lawyers who started and owned the company. Prior to starting up Tekno Comix (also later re-named toward the end as Big Entertainment ), both were copyright lawyers who with their legal experience started the Sci Fi channel (since then sold, and re--branded as Sy Fy) and made a fortune.
After the Sci-Fi channel, they next decided comics were a growing field and invested in starting Tekno Comics as their new venture for a few years.
But they lost a good percentage of what they made on the Sci-Fi channel on their Tekno venture. They closed in 1996 or early 1997, which as you may recall was roughly the same time Marvel also filed for bankruptcy.
It was a bad time for the industry as a whole, with distribution problems, and too many titles on the stands, many of them of low quality.
Hence, the market collapse.