Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and seventieth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.

As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends. Click here for Part 2 of this week's legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

Martin Goodman sold off his first masked hero.

STATUS:

True

The very first pulp magazine that Martin Goodman ever published also included his first masked hero, specifically The Masked Rider, published by "Ranger Press"...

This was obviously Goodman cashing in on the success of the Lone Ranger radio series, as he beat the Lone Ranger to the pulps, as the popular western hero didn't get a pulp magazine of his own until a little while later...

When Goodman moved into comic books, the Masked Rider came along for the, well, you know, ride, appearing in Marvel Comics #1, only now the character was called Masked RAIDER...

Last year, Al Ewing brought the character back in Marvel Comics #1000 as the Masked Raider...

Why not Masked RIDER?

Well, you see, in the meantime, Marvel actually SOLD the character of Masked RIDER in 1940!

Standard Publishing, who published comics under the Standard and Nedor brands, had actually already had a character called Masked Rider in one of their early comics...

But then they decided to still purchase the rights to the Masked Rider from Goodman and continued publishing his magazine (now more of a standard western) until well into the 1950s...

They also introduced the Masked Rider into their comics, in Startling Stories #1 in 1940...

Obviously, Standard eventually went out of business and sold to Fawcett, who ALSO went out of business. Still, the rights were likely purchased by SOMEone, so Marvel is sticking with Masked RAIDER in their comics.

In the latest TV Legends Revealed - Who really wrote the theme song for Growing Pains?

OK, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

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Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends. -- half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...

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