Great Comics #1, published by Novack Publishing Company in 1945, is a one-shot Golden Age anthology wrapped in a striking underwater-battle cover by the celebrated "poster color" artist L. B. Cole. Inside, the issue mixes genres freely: the crime feature The Defenders (a young trio — Guy, Bert, and Ronny) unravels the blackmail mystery "The Man in the Gray Coat"; the wartime spy thriller Captain Power chases the enemy agent Mitsui through Rangoon in "The Secret of the Mexican Doll"; the aviation war story Bombing Mission Executed follows a downed flyer, Captain Jed Allen; and lighter fare rounds it out with the science-fiction gag strip Toto the Boy from Mars, the comedic Superstitious Al-O-Ysius, funny-animal humor, and a prose story.

Novack was a short-lived, obscure publisher, and Great Comics #1 is essentially a repackaged grab-bag typical of small wartime outfits — some copies even circulated as variants with overprinted indicia and swapped-in material from other titles. What gives the book its lasting identity is the L. B. Cole cover, prized by collectors for its bold primary colors against dark backgrounds, a hallmark that later made Cole one of the most recognizable cover artists of the era.

Today the issue is of interest chiefly as a collector's L. B. Cole cover and as a window into mid-1940s American anthology comics, including their unvarnished wartime propaganda. Because its U.S. copyright appears never to have been renewed, the comic has entered the public domain in the United States and can be read through archives such as Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comic Museum — though its era-specific racial caricatures make it a document that needs contextualizing rather than uncritical reprinting.