Dick Giordano became editor at Charlton Comics in July 1965 with the idea of creating a line of what he called “Action Heroes.”
“I just made that phrase up because I thought we should be distinguishable from DC or Marvel,” Giordano said in TwoMorrows Charlton Companion. “We should publish adventures of heroes that didn’t have superpowers.”
Giordano inherited a couple of super-powered heroes, Captain Atom and Son of Vulcan. But while Giordano’s newer ones were flamboyant, their feet stayed on the ground.
Take Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, for example. An orphan raised and trained in a Tibetan monastery, Peter learned to focus his will to accomplish extraordinary feats, but he didn’t particularly want to.
Charlton’s earlier Gunmaster had been set in the frontier West, and their new character Judomaster operated in a later historic era — World War II.
“Judomaster was U.S. Army Sgt. Rip Jagger, fighting that war on the Pacific front,” Don Markstein wrote. “Early in the war, he saved a young native girl from a Japanese sniper. She turned out to be the granddaughter of the local chief, who gratefully taught the sergeant all the handiest martial arts. Fastest-learned ones, too, apparently, because Rip very quickly became so adept, it made him uniquely qualified to wear a fancy costume as leader of a guerrilla movement, which freed the island from the Japanese. Afterward, he continued using the outfit as a superhero suit, maintaining a secret identity just like all the rest.”
In an ironic contrast to Captain America and the other flag-draped heroes, Judomaster’s costume resembled the bright colors of the Japanese flag.
Meanwhile, Charlton presses continued to churn out a wide variety of other genres — war, humor, romance, westerns, monsters and ghosts, and even hot rod comics (a surprisingly durable line for them).
‘Without the Charlton Comics set of heroes, we would not have had Alan Moore’s Watchmen,” Paul Power noted. “I enjoyed Dick Giordano’s line of action heroes. No wonder DC wanted him.”
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