Leading Comics

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Leading Comics
Cover of Leading Comics #9, featuring the Seven Soldiers of Victory.
Publisher	DC Comics
Schedule	Quarterly, later bi-monthly
Format	Ongoning while in publication
Publication date	Winter 1941-1942 - Feb/Mar 1950
Number of issues	41

Leading Comics is a comic book published during the 1940s and early 1950s, a period known to fans and historians as the Golden Age of Comic Books. The publisher was originally known as All-American Publications, sister company to National Comics (later National Periodical Publications), before merging with National in 1945 and taking on the current name of DC Comics, a subsidiary of Time Warner. An anthology comic, Leading Comics featured several stories in each issue.

Leading is the comic book series that introduced the world to the Seven Soldiers of Victory, the second superhero team in the Golden Age of the DC Universe, debuting one year after DC introduced the Justice Society of America in All Star Comics. They first appeared in Leading Comics #1 (Winter 1941-1942), and appeared in the next fourteen issues.

Cover of Leading Comics #59, featuring Peter Porkchops (left).

When the superhero genre faded in popularity in the late 1940s, DC Comics decided to focus more on other genres, such as science fiction, westerns, humor and romance, with Leading Comics as the first DC title to drop its superheroes. With its Summer 1945 issue, Leading dropped the Seven Soldiers of Victory and switched to funny animals, with the introduction of Nero Fox (a fox who was billed as the "jive-jumpin' emperor of ancient Rome"). In issue #23 (March 1947), Nero Fox was dropped as the cover-featured first story in each issue, to be replaced by Peter Porkchops, a pig (created by Otto Feuer), in his first appearance. Peter appeared in Leading Comics (retitled Leading Screen Comics in 1950) regularly until issue #62 (September 1955).