Astro Boy (NOW Comics) - End of The Series

End of The Series

There was a small team of artists working on the series, many of them completing two or more tasks. NOW Comics was slowly reaching bankruptcy, and company president Tony C. Caputo would reportedly "forget" to pay his employees, or simply cut down their payrolls. This begun to greatly affect the quality of Ken Steacy's later issues. Eventually, despite rising sales for Brian Thomas's issues, the series was cancelled and removed from circulation, while NOW's version of Speed Racer continued on for a few years afterwards. A short Astro Boy story by Thomas, originally made in mid-1987, did appear in issue #17 of NOW Comics's Speed Racer comic. It was published February, 1989; the same month as Osamu Tezuka's death.