Cole Black Comics - Volume 1, Number 6 ~ September 2006. The print-run was just a few dozen. This copy is VF/NM. You are not likely to find one better.

This was the last issue of the original Cole Black series drawn and it din not see print until this very limited edition twenty years later. It continues the story-line which Hartberg abandoned in the mid-1980s.

Remember the black and white explosion of the 1980s? Well, Cole Black was a hard-boiled detective comic series during that time. Cole was originally intended for publication in Marvel's Epic magazine back in the early-1980s but a change in editorial direction scrapped the project. Determined to see his creation in print, writer/artist Rocky Hartberg proceed to self-publish Cole Black. The first five issues were unique in that they were presented in newspaper strip format. Then Rocky shifted directions, formats, and storylines. Issue volume 2, number 1, was a "normal" format comic that took the detective, eventually, into World War II.

Some fans noticed that something seemed to be missing between vol. 1, #5, and vol. 2, #1. They were right. An entire finished issue of Cole Black had been skipped. Like the issues in volume 2, this missing issue was in standard comic book format. It was intended to have a color cover and 24 page black and white interior. But, more importantly, it wrapped up the story line from #5. Boardman Books has produced an extremely limited edition of Cole Black #6, the missing issue, reproduced from the original art. See my eBay store for copies.

I'm pleased to be able to offer a variety of comic book and related original art from underground cartoonist Rocky Hartberg. From the 1970s through the early-1990s Rocky Hartberg's comic art could be found in a variety of fanzines and comic books. Hartberg, a commercial artist, began collecting comics in the 1960s. He has a particular interest in the golden age especially the comics work of Will Eisner, Reed Crandall, and others. In the 1970s, while studying art, Hartberg turned his own skills to the comics medium. His work was published in a variety of fanzines which eventually led to the publication of White Knight Comics in 1978 and the acceptance of Hartberg's golden age comic strip style hard-boiled detective, Cole Black, for inclusion in Marvel's Epic Magazine in 1980.

Cole Black was deliberately created in comic strip format and in a style reminiscent of goldenage but when editors changed at Epic, Hartberg found his project out of style with the magazine. It was eventually cancelled. Determined to press on with the Cole Black character, Hartberg self-published Cole Black in an eight issue run that was moderately successful for the first five issues, massively successful with issue six (volume 2, #1), and that then crashed and burned for two issues as the independent black and white market collapsed in the late-1980s. The last issue of Cole Black was number eight (volume 2, #3). Three additional issues of Cole Black were in various stages of completion including the missing volume one, number six.