A detailed, heavily researched book-in-progress covering the more than 160 year history of the American comic book business. E-mail is:  Robert@BLBcomics.com. Portions excerpted from Comics Archeology 101 © 2008  Robert L. Beerbohm www.BLBcomics.com


Working for Eastern Color at this same time were quite a few future legends of the comics business, such as Max Gaines, Lev Gleason and a fellow named Harold Moore (all sales staff directly underneath the supervision of Wilden-berg), Sol Harrison as a color separator, and George Dougherty Sr. as a printer.

Janosik, Wildenberg, Gaines, Gleason and crew obtained publishing rights to certain Associated, Bell, Fisher, McNaught and Public Ledger Syndicate comics, had an artist make up a few dummies by hand. The sales staff then walked them around to their biggest prospects. Wildenberg received a telegram from Proctor & Gamble for an order of a million copies for a 32-page color comic magazine called Funnies on Parade. The entire print run was given away in just a few weeks in the Spring of 1933. Most copies no longer exist and it is now hard to find copies of Funnies On Parade. All of them worked on the Funnies on Parade project. Morris Margolis was brought in from Charlton in Derby, Connecticut to solve binding problems centered on getting the pages in proper numerical sequence on that last fold to "modern" comic book size. Most of them were infected with the comics bug for most of the rest of their lives.

The success of Funnies on Parade quickly led to Eastern publishing additional giveaway books in the same format by late 1933, including the 32-page Famous Funnies A Carnival of Comics, the 100-page A Century of Comics and the 52-page Skippy's Own Book of Comics.

The latter by Percy Crsoby became the first "new" format comic book about a single character. Out of all the comic strips on the market in 1933, Eastern Color’s growing comics market as devised by Harry Wildenberg, M.C. Gaines and Lev Gleason chose the Percy Crosby creation in Skippy’s Own Book of Comics to be its first standalone title. This first solo effort in their new 52-page newsprint Funnies On Parade format had an initial print run of half a million, as did their 100-pager.

The idea that anyone would pay for them seemed fantastic to Wildenberg, so Max Gaines stickered ten cents on several dozen of the latest premium, Famous Funnies A Carnival of Comics, as a test, and talked a couple newsstands into participating in this experiment. The copies sold out over the weekend and newsies asked for more.

Eastern sales staffers then approached Woolworth's. The late Oscar Fitz-Alan Douglas, sales brains of Woolworth, showed some interest, but after several months of deliberation decided Famous Funnies A Carnival of Comics would not give enough value for ten cents. Kress, Kresge, McCrory, and several other dime stores turned them down even more abruptly. Wildenberg next went to George Hecht, editor of Parents Magazine, and tried to persuade him to run a comic supplement or publish a "higher level" comic magazine. Hecht also frowned on the idea.

In Wildenberg's 1949 interview, he noted that "even the comic syndicates couldn't see it. 'Who's going to read old comics?' they asked."

With the failures of EmBee’s Comic Monthly (1922) and Eastern and Dell’s tabloid size The Funnies (1929) still fresh in some minds, no one could see why children would pay ten cents for a comic magazine when they could get all they wanted for free in a Sunday newspaper. But Wildenberg had become convinced that children as well as grown-ups were not getting all the comics they wanted in the Sunday papers; otherwise, the Gulf Comic Weekly and the premium comics would not have met with such success. Wildenberg said, "I decided that if boys and girls were willing to work for premium coupons to obtain comic books, they might be willing to pay ten cents on the newsstands." This conviction was also strengthened by Max Gaines' ten cent sticker experiment.

George Janosik, the president of Eastern Color, then called on George Delacorte to form another 50-50 joint venture to publish and market a  comic book "magazine" for retail sales as they did with The Funnies just a few years previously, but this time American News turned them down cold. The magazine monopoly remembered the abortive The Funnies from just a few years before. After much discussion on how to proceed, Delacorte finally agreed to publish it and a partnership was formed. Feeling cautious, they printed 40,000 copies for distribution to a few chain stores who agreed to try it out. Known today as Famous Funnies Series One, it clocks in at 68 pages, with half its pages coming from reprints of the reprints in Funnies on Parade and half from Famous Funnies A Carnival of Comics. It is the scarcest issue.

With 68 full-color pages at only ten cents a piece, it sold out in thirty days with not a single returned copy. Delacorte refused to print a second edition. "Advertisers won't use it," he complained. "They say it's not dignified enough." The profit, however, was approximately $2,000. This particular edition is the rarest of all these early Eastern comic book experiments.

In early 1934, while riding the train, another Eastern Color employee named Harold A. Moore read an account from a prominent New York newspaper that indicated they owed much of their circulation success to their comics section. Mr. Moore went back to Harry Gold, President of American News, with the article in hand. He succeeded in acquiring a print order for 250,000 copies for a proposed monthly comics magazine.

In May 1934, Famous Funnies #1 (with a July cover date) hit the newsstands with Steven O. Douglass as its only editor (even though Harold Moore was listed as such in #1) until it ceased publication some twenty years later. It was a 64-page version of the 32-page giveaways, and more importantly, it still sold for a dime!

The first issue lost $4,150.60. Ninety percent of the copies sold out and a second issue dated September debuted in July. From then on, the comic book was published monthly. Famous Funnies also began carrying original material, apparently as early as the second issue. With Famous Funnies #3, Buck Rogers took center stage and stayed there for the next twenty years, with covers by Frank Frazetta towards the end of the run–some of his best comics work ever.

Delacorte got cold feet and sold back his interest to Eastern, even though the seventh issue cleared a profit of $2,664.25.

Wildenberg emphasized that Eastern could make a manufacturer's profit by printing its own books as well as the publishing profits once it was distributed. Every issue showed greater sales than the preceding one, until within a year, close to a million 64-page books were being sold monthly at ten cents apiece; Eastern received the lion's share of the receipts, and soon found it was netting $30,000 per issue. The comic syndicates received $640 ($10 a page) for publishing rights. Original material could be obtained from budding professionals for just $5 a page.  According to Will Eisner in R. C. Harvey's The Art of the Comic Book, the prices then paid for original material had a long range effect of keeping creator wages low for years.

Initially, Eastern's experiment was eyed with skepticism by the publishing world, but within a year or so after Famous Funnies was nonchalantly placed on sale alongside slicker magazines like Atlantic Monthly or Harper's, at least five other competitors tried this brand new format.

However, one other abortive periodical comics experiment was launched cover dated a full two months before the highly successful newsstand Famous Funnies format would have an important influence on a chain of events which led ultimately to Superman being published.

Comic Cuts #1, May 19, 1934, debuted published by H.L. Baker Co., Inc., 195 Main St, Buffalo, New York with editorial and execuitive offices at 381 Fourth St, NYC,  same address as ULTEM (Centaur) would use just a couple years later - this address housed a number of publishers fighting to exist during the Great Depression.

The Indica inside Comic Cuts says H. L. Baker was President & Treasurer and J. D. Geller was Vice President and Sec-retary. It lasted nine issues with the final one cover-dated July 28. It appears Jake  Geller, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, acquired American rights to a number of comic strips from the publisher Amalgamated Press, publisher of Comic Cuts in England. He partnered in the publishing with H. L. Baker and they acquired the backing of S-M News Co., Inc. as their distributor. Most distributors back then functioned on many important levels. It was common practice for the distributor back then to front the funds to pay the paper company and the printer, collecting the revenue from the 900 I.D. distributors located around the country after months of on-sale time, then paying the publisher.

In late 1934, army officer/diplomat turned pulp writer turned publisher Major Wheeler-Nicholson (1890-1968) formed the under-funded National Allied Publishing which introduced New Fun #1 (Feb 1935) at almost tabloid-size.

New Fun was also distributed by S-M News. It is entirely possible Wheeler-Nicholson somehow convinced them he could produce a superior “home-grown” package as the imported strips were not selling well.  New Fun was basically the same as Comic Cuts while also containing all original USA material such as carried in The Funnies (1929-30) from Dell/Eastern. With New Fun, what S-M News offered was more familiar American home grown. Coulton Waugh speculated in his 1947 history book The Comics on page 342: "...The Major had gone back to the 1929 idea of The Funnies, for the contents of New Fun were original material. (It should be recorded here that original art work had appeared in a one-color book called Detective Dan...)"

However, Lloyd Jacquet, a person definitely in a position to know better, wrote as Chapter One of a proposed “History of the Comic Book” in 1957, “When Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson set up his card table and chair in an eleventh floor office of the Hathaway Building in New York City that Fall of 1934, these most modest beginnings sparked off what can rightly be called the ‘comic book era.’ When he came back to the U.S. after his last stay abroad, he looked over the American newsstand, and thought that the European juvenile weekly papers, with their picture-story continuities, their colorful illustrations, and their low price would appeal to the American boys and girls in the same way.

"(The Major) knew that those European publications were made up of new material, specially drawn and produced for each little magazine. He also knew that the American presentation of such material would have to be different, and merely importing, or translating European produced features for republication here was not the answer. This was about the time I joined with him in his project.  It was still embryonic, but beginning to take form under Nicholson's direction.  We were in the depression then, & it was not too difficult to secure writers and artists - but it was a task to instruct them as to exactly what was wanted. We finally rounded up a small but gifted group of creative people, and we produced our first issue of a monthly magazine composed of original features and material, and which was called, simply, “FUN.”

Around this same time in late 1934,  M.C. Gaines left  Eastern Color moving over to the McClure Newspaper Syndicate to become their manager of their Color Printing Department He immediately went to work convincing clients to issue promotional comics.

Also, long-time comics publisher Whitman brought out the first original material movie adaptation, Tim McCoy Police Car 17, in the tabloid New Fun format with stiff card covers. A few years before, they had introduced the new comics formats known as the Big Little Book and the Big Big Book. The BLB and BBB formats would go toe-to-toe with Eastern's creation throughout the 1930s, but Eastern would win out with their new comics magazine format.

The very last 10" x 10" comic books pioneered by Cupples & Leon were published by the David McKay Publishing Company around mid-1935 with such titles as Popeye, Little Annie Rooney, others.

Around this same time the Major published his 2nd comic book in which the editorial mentions amongst other exciting stories they were going to be showcasing the adventures of “hero supermen of the days to come.”

By late 1935, Max Gaines (with his youthful assistant Sheldon Mayer) reached a business agreement with George Delacorte (who was re-entering the comic book business a third time) and McClure Syndicate (a growing newspaper comic strip enterprise) to be come editor of reprint newspaper comic strips in Popular Comics.

Also by late ‘35, Lev Gleason, another pioneer who participated in mercantiling Funnies on Parade and the early Famous Funnies, had become the first editor of United Feature's own Tip Top Comics with its first issue cover dated April 1936. In 1939 he would begin publishing his own titles starting with Silver Streak Comics, created by the comics genius, Jack Cole, best known for Plastic Man. A few years later Gleason created the crime comic book as a separate popular genre by 1942 with Crime Does Not Pay with a long run until 1955.

Wheeler-Nicholson introduced the concept of “the annual” into this new format with Big Book of Fun Comics #1 cover dated March 1936. It featured reprints from his earlier efforts in New Fun #1-5 as he struggled to make a go of it.

Industry giant King Features introduced King Comics #1 cover dated April 1936 through publisher David McKay, with Ruth Plumly Thompson as editor. McKay had already been issuing various format comic books with King Feature characters for a few years, including Mickey Mouse, Henry, Popeye and Secret Agent X-9, wherein Dashiell Hammett received cover billing and Alex Raymond was listed inside simply as "illustrator." McKay readily adapted to trying several formats. Soon many young comic book illustrators were copying Raymond.

The next month, William Cook & John Mahon, former disgruntled employees of Major Wheeler-Nicholson, issued  their first issue of The Comics Magazine #1 in May 1936.

This was followed by Henle Publishing issuing Wow What A Magazine, which contained the earliest comic work of Will Eisner, Bob Kane, Dick Briefer & others. By the end of 1936, Cook and Mahon pioneered the first single theme comic books: Funny Picture Stories #1 in Nov. 1936 (adventure), Detective Picture Stories #1 in Feb. 1937 (crime), as well as Western Picture Stories #1 in Feb. 1937 (the Western). The company would eventually be known historically as Centaur Comics, and serve as the subject of endless debate among fan historians regarding their earliest origins as to who the owners were, where they came from and where they went.

Dell issued the second western genre comic book titled Western Action Thrillers #1 in April 1937. It was ten cents for one hundred pages as well as 100 Pages of Comics #101, containing Big Little Book art reworked back into sequential comics.

Harry ‘A’ Chesler eventually jumped ship from the Major, issuing his first comic books with Star Comics and Star Ranger Funnies, dated Feb 1937. Later that year, he sold these two titles to Ultem while remaining editor, and his newly set up art shop supplied contents. He then began Feature Funnies #1 in Oct. 1937, headlining newspaper comics boxing champ  Joe Palooka, at one time the #1 newspaper comic strip in America.

Feature Funnies #2 sported a Rube Goldberg cover while #3 contains “Hawk of the Sea,” Will Eisner’s first work for what would soon become the Quality Comics Group when Everett “Busy” Arnold bought the company.

Feature Funnies #3 also contains the first appearance of The Clock by George Brenner - the first costumed comic book hero.

Almost forty years after the first newspaper strip comic book compilations were issued by William Randolph Hearst at the dawn of international popularity for American comic strips, the race was on to get titles out of the starting block.

In late 1937 the Major began stumbling when he couldn't pay his printing bill to Harry Donenfeld. In recent interviews, Harry's son, Irwin, who as a 12-year old read the original art to Superman in the first issue of Action Comics #1 and Batman in Detective Comics #27 said "in 1932 my father and Paul Sampliner started Independent News with Liebowitz as the accountant. The company was begun with Paul Sampliner's mother's money. If it hadn't been for her investments into building the distribution as well as purchasing color printing presses, there might never have been a DC Comics....My father took over Wheeler-Nicholson’s company with the Major’s books literally on the printing presses. Harry had to absorb debt that could not otherwise be paid.” Irwin told this writer “ my dad did not originally willingly enter the comics business...”

Continued in Origin of the Modern Comic Book Part Three (3)