After the name switch took place from Western/Dell to Western/Gold Key, a 13 year run of comics featuring the Stooges was about to be born. During this time, the comic book quality never really improved. It was very much like the former Dell comics in style and appearance. It wasn't at all the quality of the early St. John's type comics. In fact, they had more of a sweat shop, "Let's get 'em out the door" feel. Some of the issues that appeared to be fighting against heavy production deadlines, featured the same exact photo on the cover as other issues. What is that all about? One cover, towards the end of the Gold Key run, Issue # 51, even featured an illustrated cover. This was in no way consistent with the standards the company had been following for over 9 years. The Gold Key series definitely looked great...the covers were very colorful and featured the Stooges in some funny poses hamming it up for their fans. Some people just feel that the Publishing Company must have had their head in the clouds on many occasions. Maybe the Stooges series, not being Western Publishing's only series often times got put on the back-burner. Even though the Western/Gold Key series had its faults, it was still the longest-running series featuring the Three Stooges, and that says a lot!

Gold Key was also responsible for completing what K.K. Publications started with a series they called their March of Comics series. This was a smaller (half-sized) version of the Gold Key comics. These comics were also Photo Covers as was the Gold Key Series, but the interesting thing about these comics, is that they didn't cost the reader a penny. They were Giveaway comics handed out by shoe stores. There were nine March of Comics issues produced and they spanned about 9 years in production with one being produced every year. Although free to the reader, to a collector these smaller comics surprisingly sport a heftier price tag than their full-sized counterparts. This is more than likely due to their scarcity and the fact that they were individualized. They usually featured the logos of the shoe store handing them out on their front covers. Toward the end of the March of Comics run, K.K. Publications put out two of their own full size comics under the name of Top Comics.

Around the same time frame, Gold Key started producing their "Movie Classics" comic series. One of these issues featured the Stooges. It told the story associated with the feature film "The Three Stooges in Orbit". The comic was nothing more than photographic still images, directly from the movie itself, hitting the key points in the move as the story progressed. How lame! This comic, nevertheless, sports the same price tag as it's comic counterparts produced under the same name.

In addition to their normal comic routine, occasionally, Gold Key would publish comic book adaptions from the Three Stooges feature films with the same name. For instance, issues # 15, and # 22 were spin-offs from the films "The Three Stooges go Around the World in a Daze", and "The Outlaws is Coming". Unlike the Movie Classics Series issue "The Three Stooges in Orbit", these comics actually featured some illustrations. Yeah!, isn't that what a comic book is supposed to do??? They featured a comical interpretation and short story telling a stripped down version of the associated movie's plot.

From 1972-1974, Gold Key, with the help of Norman Maurer decided to try one more series featuring, not the stooges...but their young hippie sons. Wow, how crazy! No one could pull off that kind of nonsense, could they? Yes! in fact, they could. "They" being Norman Maurer, that is. In many respects, The Little Stooges, as they were appropriately called were more entertaining than the Three Stooges series was (for Western), mainly because Maurer was again behind the helm. He wrote the stories, and created the artwork for the new series and because of that, it did quite well. It should be noted that Jeff Maurer, Normans son, also wrote and helped out with several of the new stories.

Despite the success of the Little Stooges series, it had a formidable obstacle in the changing economy. Comic book companies were treading on bad times, and sales throughout the industry were down. Their struggle to survive was mirrored in comic book prices: an inflationary twelve cents! And that was for just one story per issue! Yikes! Even in economically troubled times, The Little Stooges did well enough to warrant seven issues, equaling the output of issues from the St. John's series. The last edition was published in March of 1974, thus ending the Stooges' 14-year association with Western Publishing.

Towards the end of the Gold Key regime, the Publishing company flirted with the idea of another name change and even went so far as to put the Whitman logo on some of the comic books. That's why you'll see a Whitman logo on a comic, and might possibly even see a Gold Key on the same issue. For whatever reason, the name change never completely happened before the decline of the Stooges series, because of that, most of the Stooges Comics even in the final years, still have a Gold Key Logo. It should be mentioned that the Western Publishing/Dell/Gold Key marriage, represented one of the longest Comic series ever produced. Because of that alone, Western Publishing deserves a big hand from every serious Stooges Collector today. Cheers!