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B y K U R T F. M I T C H E L L w i t h R OY T H O M A S
Dedication To Mitch and Dee, My First Heroes Writer: Consultant: Editor: Logo Design: Layout: Proofreading: Cover Design: Publisher:
Kurt F. Mitchell Roy Thomas Keith Dallas Bill Walko David Paul Greenawalt Scott Peters Jon B. Cooke John Morrow
Publisher’s Note: Some of the images in this book are of varying quality, since many vintage pages are available only from less-than-ideal microfiche reproductions. In every instance, we used the best images available to us. Also, some of the comics covered here depict ethnic and racial stereotypes and slurs that were commonplace in the 1940s, but are offensive by today’s standards. In the interest of an accurate documentation of comics history, they are not being censored, so we ask for your understanding, and to keep this context in mind, when viewing them. Special Thanks to Rich Fowlks and John Wells for providing many of the images presented in this volume.
TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • 919-449-0344 email: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • May 2019 • Printed in China ISBN 978-1-60549-089-2
American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944 is published by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. Kurt F. Mitchell, Writer. Keith Dallas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. All characters depicted herein are TM and © their respective owners, as noted where they appear. All textual material in this book is © 2019 TwoMorrows Publishing. Archie, Black Hood, The Comet, The Fox, The Hangman, Madame Satan, Mr. Justice, Principal Weatherbee, Reggie Mantle, The Shield, Shield Sterling, Veronica Lodge, The Web, The Wizard TM and © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Li’l Abner TM and © Capp Enterprises Inc. Doc Savage, The Shadow TM and © Condé Nast. Aquaman, Atom, Batman, Black Condor, Blackhawk, Blue Beetle, Bulletman, Bulletgirl, Boy Commandos, Captain Triumph, Commando Yank, Doctor Fate, Dr. Mid-Nite, Doll Man, Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Guardian, Hawkman, Hawkwoman, Hour-Man, Johnny Quick, Johnny Thunder, Joker, Justice Society of America, Kid Eternity, Lex Luthor, Liberty Belle, Lois Lane, Midnight, Minute-Man, Mr. Scarlet, Penguin, Phantom Eagle, Plastic Man, Prankster, Red Tornado, Robin, Sandman, Sargon the Sorcerer, Scarecrow, Seven Soldiers of Victory, Shazam Heroes, Solomon Grundy, Spy Smasher, Spectre, Starman, Star Spangled Kid, Stripesy, Superman, Uncle Sam, Vigilante, Wildcat, Wildfire, Wonder Woman TM and © DC Comics. Buck Rogers TM and © The Dille Family Trust. Bambi, Donald Duck, Dumbo, Goofy, Mickey Mouse, Pinocchio, Pluto TM and © Disney Enterprises Inc. Tarzan TM and © ERB, Inc. Sheena TM and © Galaxy Publishing and Valdoro Entertainment. Green Hornet TM and © The Green Hornet, Inc. Popeye, Prince Valiant TM and © King Features Syndicate, Inc., LLC. Angel, Captain America, Destroyer, Human Torch, Miss America, Patsy Walker, Red Raven, Sub-Mariner, Tuk Caveboy, Whizzer TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc. Pogo TM and © Okefenokee Glee & Perloo Inc. Skyman TM and © Ron Frantz Dick Tracy TM and © Tribune Content Agency. Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig TM and © Warner Bros. Lady Luck, Mr. Mystic, The Spirit TM and © Will Eisner Studios Inc. Airboy, Amazing-Man, Black Cat, Black Owl, Black Terror, Blue Bolt, Boy Heroes, Bulldog Denny, Candy O’Connor, Camilla Queen of the Jungle, Captain Battle, Captain Battle Jr., Captain Fight, Captain Midnight, Captain Wings, Cat-Man, The Claw, Crimebuster, Daredevil, Fantomah, The Face, Fighting Yank, The Flame, Flame Girl, Flash Lightning, Girl Commandos, Green Lama, Hack O’Hara, The Heap, The Kitten, Lash Lightning, Lightning Girl, Magno the Magnetic Man, Miss Fury, Miss Liberty, The Owl, Owl Girl, Pyroman, Raja the Arabian Knight, Rangers of Freedom, Red Blazer, Red Panther, Samson, Señorita Rio, Shock Gibson, Sky Girl, Skyman, Sub-Zero, Supermouse, Tiger Girl, V-Man, Valkyrie, Volton, Wambi-Jungle Boy, Yank and Doodle TM and © respective copyright owners.
Table of Contents Introductory Note about the Chronological Structure of American Comic Book Chronicles.................. 4 Note on Comic Book Sales and Circulation Data ......................................... 5 Introduction & Acknowledgements.............. 6 Chapter One: 1940 Rise of the Supermen.......................................... 8 Chapter Two: 1941 Countdown to Cataclysm................................62
Chapter Three: 1942 Comic Books Go To War................................ 122 Chapter Four: 1943 Relax: Read the Comics................................. 176 Chapter Five: 1944 The Paper Chase.............................................. 230 Works Cited....................................................... 285 Index .................................................................. 286
1940
Rise of the Supermen
America on January 1, 1940, was a nation on edge. Still suffering the aftershocks of the Great Depression despite Franklin D. Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal nostrums—unemployment stood at 17% for 1939—Americans eyed the expanding wars in Europe and Asia nervously. Some tried to dismiss Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as comic opera buffoons, decrying the hostilities as a “phony war” because not much had happened since the blitzkrieg dismemberment of Poland the previous September. These naysayers did not see it for what it was: the calm before the storm. Before the first year of the new decade was out, Nazi Germany seized Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and ultimately France, while attempting to bomb the United Kingdom into subjection. The British held out defiantly, and Hitler reluctantly abandoned his plans to invade England. That small victory brought no cheer to the conquered nations, where Der Führer’s relentless oppression of Jews and other scapegoated minorities was in full force. Il Duce, too, continued his aggression, as Fascist Italy invaded Egypt and Greece. The Soviet Union, the MarxistLeninist people’s paradise that replaced the brutalities of Tsarist Russia with mass starvation and bloody political purges, was no better. Soviet strongman Josef Stalin— named Time’s Man of the Year in its first 1940 issue— signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in August ‘39, then helped himself to a piece of Poland and completed his de facto takeover of Finland. The Japanese Empire’s seemingly insatiable appetite for territory was also cause for alarm. Its brutal occupation of vast swaths of China was in its third year with no end in sight. Once Paris fell, Japan marched into French Indochina. That the warlords had their collective eye on the United States’ Pacific possessions was an open secret.
CHAPTER ONE
At home, Republican congressmen and a majority of Democratic legislators remained publicly isolationist, claiming with some justification that they were obeying their constituents’ wishes, all while enacting laws expanding the Navy and imposing the nation’s first peacetime draft. FDR, elected to an unprecedented third term later in the year, pledged he would not “send American boys into any foreign wars.” The public believed him or pretended to: polls suggested the man or woman on the street expected the country to be pulled into the slaughter sooner or later. The American Communist Party, with approximately 75,000 members at the start of the decade, also stood firm for isolationism despite internal unrest over Stalin’s pact with Hitler. Fascism and anti-Semitism had their homegrown 8
apologists and sympathizers—including prominent and influential citizens like industrialist Henry Ford, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, and radio orator Father Charles Coughlin—but overt Nazism failed to find a foothold. The German-American Bund, despite a rally at Madison Square Garden the previous February that attracted some 20,000 participants, effectively fell apart as a national movement later in ‘39 when its leader, Fritz Kuhn, was convicted of embezzling its funds. That kind of venality wasn’t limited to would-be dictators. Corrupt political machines ruled many big cities, though New York’s popular mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had finally put an end to the dominance of infamous Tammany Hall. What the bosses didn’t control, the mob did. Prohibition was long over, but the crime organizations it spawned remained. The national syndicate organized by Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, now headed by the “prime minister of the underworld” Frank Costello, had its fingers in more than the usual no-nos (drugs, gambling, loansharking, prostitution). It had worked its way into many legitimate enterprises like construction, sanitation, labor unions, and magazine distribution, using bribery, intimidation, extortion, and violence to gain every possible advantage.
By 1940, the major movie studios were coming to see the value in licensing their films for adaptation to comic books. TM and © respective copyright owner.
by the studios. Among the films they saw that year were The Grapes of Wrath, Rebecca, Fantasia, His Girl Friday, The Sea Hawk, Kitty Foyle, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Pinocchio, the anti-Nazi The Mortal Storm, and a slew of westerns featuring Roy Rogers, Bob Steele, Tex Ritter, Johnny Mack Brown, and their fellow Hollywood cowboys. Feature films were only the tip of the iceberg. Theaters had a complete evening’s program in those days, including newsreels, travelogues, short films equivalent to modern music videos, even the occasional live appearance by a movie star. Serials, comedy shorts starring Our Gang or The Three Stooges, and animated cartoons made the Saturday matinee a rite of passage for kids of the 1940s. Walt Disney was the undisputed king of American cartoons—Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were recognized around the globe—but other studios were girding their loins to challenge him. Fleischer Studios had released its own feature, Gulliver’s Travels, at Christmas ‘39. Less ambitious producers like Leon Schlesinger, Walter Lantz, and Fred Quimby contented themselves with improving and expanding their own cartoon brands. In addition to new installments of proven favorites Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Barney Bear, Andy Panda, and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, 1940 saw the screen debuts of Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Woody Woodpecker, The Fox and The Crow, George Pal’s Puppetoons, and a cat-and-mouse duo not yet named Tom and Jerry. Whether your tastes ran to prestigious literary adaptations, high-gloss melodrama, singing cowboys, or wascally wabbits, the movies had something for everyone.
Small wonder, then, that Mr. and Mrs. Average American and all the little Americans sought comfort and escape in entertainment, turning to three art forms born at the turn of the century—the motion picture, the pulp magazine, the comic strip—and their younger sibling, radio, to provide it.
Media Nation Movie factories like MGM, Warner Brothers, 20th CenturyFox, Paramount, Universal, RKO, and Columbia were happy to supply all the entertainment the public could handle. Americans spent $735,000,000 ($12.5 billion in 2018 terms) on movie tickets in 1940, often at theaters owned
A new medium called television would threaten film’s supremacy within pop culture by the end of the decade but for now it remained a novelty accessible to few. Not so with
Bugs Bunny made his screen debut in the 1940 short A Wild Hare. Animated cartoons would provide a rich vein of material for comics of the 1940s to mine. Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd TM and © Warner Bros.
9
TIMELINE: 1940 A compilation of the year’s notable comic book history events alongside some of the year’s most significant popular culture and historical events. (On sale dates are approximations.) January 8 – The first installment of the daily Blue Beetle comic strip—written and drawn by Jack Kirby as “Charles Nicholas”— appears in the Boston Evening Transcript. No other newspaper is known to have carried the strip which is cancelled in November.
JANUARY
June 2: Denny Colt, a.k.a. “The Spirit,” debuts as the main feature of a 16-page comic insert for Sunday newspapers. Created, written, and drawn by Will Eisner, the masked crimefighter will become one of the most legendary characters in comic book history.
April 25: The first issue of DC’s Batman quarterly introduces two of the Caped Crusader’s most famous villains: the Joker and Catwoman (originally named “the Cat”). Both stories are written by Bill Finger and drawn by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson.
February 7: Walt Disney’s second full-length animated film, Pinocchio, makes its debut in a New York City movie theater before being distributed nationwide two weeks later. March 2: Warner Bros. cartoon character Elmer Fudd debuts in the Merrie Melodies animated short Elmer’s Candid Camera.
FEBRUARY
MARCH
May 10: As Germany prepares to invade France, Neville Chamberlain resigns as prime minister of the United Kingdom. He is replaced by Winston Churchill.
APRIL
March 5: Detective Comics #38 introduces Batman’s sidekick, Robin, the Boy Wonder, in a story written by Bill Finger and drawn by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson.
M AY May 21: All-American Comics #16 introduces the Green Lantern in a story written by Bill Finger and drawn by Mart Nodell. May 17: Marvel Mystery Comics #9 features the first battle between the title’s two star characters, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, in a 22 page story written and drawn by Carl Burgos and Bill Everett.
February 22: Action Comics #23 introduces Luthor, soon to become Superman’s most famous arch-enemy, in a story produced by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster. February 12: The Adventures of Superman, starring Bud Collyer and Joan Alexander as the voices of Superman/Clark Kent and Lois Lane, debuts on New York City’s WOR before going national six months later. The syndicated radio serial will remain on the air until 1951.
May 15: Two brothers, Richard and Maurice McDonald, open their first McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, California.
Batman, Robin and Superman TM and © DC Comics. Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd TM and © Warner Bros.
June 22: Six weeks after being invaded and suffering over 92,000 military casualties, France surrenders to Germany.
JUNE
June 4: Great Britain completes “Operation Dynamo,” an evacuation of over 330,000 Allied soldiers from Dunkirk, France, back across the English Channel via a hodgepodge fleet of over 800 military and civilian vessels. Winston Churchill describes the operation as “a miracle.”
don during the Blitz brought the war radio. By the end of the 1930s there The War of the Worlds had created into American living rooms with an were radios in 28,700,000 homes pockets of panic up and down the immediacy motion pictures could not offering a daily smorgasbord of news, Eastern Seaboard, a testament to the provide. Orson Welles and the Merinformation, and entertainment. Like power—and potential abuse—of the cury Theater of the Air’s October 30, film, radio was a national medium. airwaves. 1938, dramatization of H. G. Wells’ The Lone Ranger, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Despite the revenue lost The Green Hornet, Baby to movies and radio, Snooks, Fibber Magee print was by no means and Molly, Ma Perkins, dead. There were over Captain Midnight, 1,800 daily newspapers Henry Aldrich, and in the United States, other characters born most of which included on radio became cula page of black-andtural touchstones, their white comics on weekcatchphrases and theme days and an entire color music recognized from section devoted to them coast to coast. Radio on Sundays. The comic made stars out of Bob strip had been an AmerHope, Jack Benny, Bud ican obsession since its Abbott and Lou Costello, birth during the “yelFred Allen, Edgar Berlow journalism” circulagen and Charlie McCartion wars of the 1890s. thy, Kate Smith, Gene Papers might occasionAutry, and newsman ally commission a local Edward R. Murrow, cartoonist to create a Comic books added visuals to radio-born characters readers previously whose live broadcasts strip for them, but by knew only as disembodied voices. Green Hornet TM and © The Green Hornet, Inc. from the rooftops of Lon10
July 3: The World’s Fair in New York City hosts “Superman Day” to promote DC Comics’ 98-page New York World’s Fair Comics.
November 5: Franklin D. Roosevelt wins his third consecutive Presidential election by defeating Republican challenger Wendell Willkie by a wide margin. Roosevelt becomes the nation’s first—and only—third-term president.
September 16: President Roosevelt signs the Selective Training and Service Act. The first peacetime draft in U.S. history requires all men between the ages of 21 and 35 to register for military service.
November 22: All-Star Comics #3 introduces the Justice Society of America in a story written by Gardner Fox. The first super-hero team joins All-American Comics’ The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom with Detective Comics’ Spectre, Dr. Fate, Sandman, and Hour-Man.
July 10: The Battle of Britain begins as the Royal Air Force defends the United Kingdom against assaults from the German Luftwaffe.
J U LY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
December 29: In a “fireside chat” radio broadcast President Roosevelt insists the United States must become “the great arsenal of democracy,” effectively ending the nation’s policy of wartime neutrality. December 20: Timely’s Captain America Comics #1 introduces not only Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s famed Sentinel of Liberty but also his nemesis, the Red Skull.
DECEMBER December 8: In the National Football League championship game, the Chicago Bears defeat the Washington Redskins 73-0.
October 21: Scribner’s publishes Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, about an American serving in a guerilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. The novel is considered one of Hemingway’s greatest works and is adapted into a 1943 motion picture starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.
July 27: Warner Bros. cartoon character Bugs Bunny debuts in the Oscar-nominated Merrie Melodies animated short A Wild Hare.
1940 most subscribed to their comics through syndication services. William Randolph Hearst’s King Features Syndicate offered some of the most popular series, including Blondie, Thimble Theatre (starring Popeye), The Katzenjammer Kids, Henry, Barney Google (featuring Snuffy Smith), The Little King, Bringing Up Father (with Maggie and Jiggs), Skippy, Krazy Kat, and comic strip incarnations of Disney’s mouse and duck. Joseph Patterson and his Chicago Tribune and Register Syndicate, Hearst’s bitterest rival, featured The Gumps, Smokey Stover, Gasoline Alley, Harold Teen, Moon Mullins, Smitty, and Winnie Winkle. The United Feature Syndicate’s roster included Li’l Abner, Nancy, Joe Jinks, Abbie an’ Slats, Ella Cinders, and the other Katzenjammers strip, The Captain and the Kids. There were also the Associated Press (Dickie Dare, The Gay Thirties, The Adventures of Patsy), the Bell Syndicate (Mutt & Jeff, The Nebbs), the Newspaper Enterprise Association
(Boots and Her Buddies, Our Boarding House with Major Hoople, Freckles and His Friends), the McNaught Syndicate (Dixie Dugan, Toonerville Folks), and a host of smaller services. Since the simultaneous 1929 premieres of Philip Nowlan and Richard Calkins’ Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, based on Nowlan’s pulp novel Armageddon 2419 A.D. published the previous year, and Tarzan of the Apes, an adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic illustrated by Harold “Hal” Foster, adventure strips featuring continuing storylines had proliferated. Whether following the exploits of Harold Gray’s peripatetic Little Orphan Annie, V. T. Hamlin’s time-traveling caveman Alley Oop, Frank Martinek and Leon Beroth’s maritime detective Don Winslow of the Navy, Hammond “Ham” Fisher’s dimwitted but goodhearted prizefighter Joe Palooka, Fred Harman’s rugged cowpoke Red Ryder, or Chester Gould’s square-jawed cop Dick 11
December 17: At a press conference President Roosevelt outlines his “Lend-Lease” plan to send military equipment and supplies to Great Britain. Despite opposition from isolationist Republicans, the bill passes both branches of Congress and is signed into law in March 1941.
Tracy and his rogues gallery of gangland grotesqueries, readers waited on tenterhooks for each episode, their addiction reinforcing their loyalty to the newspapers featuring them. However serious their storylines might get, many of these strips were still drawn in a variety of “cartoony” styles. Others took a more illustrative approach. Roy Crane, creator of Wash Tubbs and his two-fisted “podnah” Captain Easy, combined simple but expressive figure work with atmospheric backgrounds rendered in duotone, a pattern pre-printed on art boards brought up by the application of a developing fluid, to give his panels depth and mood. Lee Falk, born Leon Gross, created and scripted a pair of prototype super-heroes for King Features. Mandrake the Magician, a professional prestidigitator with real magical powers (later toned down to hypnotic trickery), and The Phantom, an allegedly immortal protector of the African jungles clad in purple tights, were both drawn in a
Until comic books began reprinting them in the mid-1930s, fans of syndicated comic strips like Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, and Li’l Abner had to clip episodes out of their local newspapers if they wanted to enjoy them again. Prince Valiant TM and © King Features Syndicate, Inc. Dick Tracy TM and © Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Li’l Abner TM and © Capp Enterprises Inc.
ing their blood-and-thunder sensibility and lack of literary pretense. As Lee Server notes in Danger is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines: “Thriving on unrestrained creativity, held accountable to few standards of logic, believability, or ‘good taste,’ the pulps were literary dream machines, offering regular entry to intense worlds of excitement, danger, glory, romance… [T]he imagination was loosed and roamed nearly out of control. When the pulps exhausted the possibilities in extant character types and popular fiction categories, they invented new ones—science fiction, sword and sorcery, hard-boiled detectives, occult detectives, erotic cowboy stories, tales of ‘Weird Menace,’ gangsters, flying spies, superheroes, masked avengers. In the creative boom years of the 1920s and 1930s, new pulps flared in all directions, offering a manic diversity of titles[, s]omething for every reader’s taste, no matter how narrow or obscure, and quite a few things left over with no known appeal at all.” (9-10)
“straight” style by Philip “Phil” Davis and Raymond S. “Ray” Moore, respectively. Hal Foster gave up Tarzan to focus on Prince Valiant, a Sunday-only Arthurian fantasy rich in period detail. One of his successors on the ape-man’s adventures, Burne Hogarth nee Spinoza Ginsburg, demonstrated a flair for dense, rococo settings and a mastery of human anatomy. The superb draftsmanship and lush linework of Alexander “Alex” Raymond made his strips—Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim, both scripted by Don Moore—aesthetic delights, as they had for Secret Agent X-9 (briefly written by Dashiel Hammett, later by Leslie Charteris, Moore, and others), now drawn in 1940 by Austin Briggs. Noel Sickles, former artist of the aviation series Scorchy Smith who left comics for advertising in 1936, had gone in another direction, adopting an impressionistic style that combined quick, sure brushstrokes with extensive use of chiaroscuro, the delineation of form through the dramatic juxtaposition of shadow and light. This technique reached its apogee in the work of Sickles’ former studio mate, Milton Caniff. His Terry and the Pirates, an adventure strip set in China, was and remains a masterpiece of visual storytelling. These creators, at the top of their form in 1940, inspired and influenced an entire generation of disciples.
Denigrated in their day as disposable, sensationalistic fodder for the lowest common denominator, the pulps nonetheless showcased such now-familiar authors as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, H. P. Lovecraft, Zane Grey, Max Brand, Harold Robbins, Erle Stanley Gardner, Robert E. Howard, Raymond Chandler, Rafael Sabatini, James M. Cain, Sax Rohmer, Louis L’Amour, and Ray Bradbury, and contributed Tarzan, Zorro, Conan the Barbarian, Perry Mason, Captain Blood, The Shadow, Dr. Kildare, Nick and Nora Charles, Buck Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Fu Manchu, Cthulhu, Doc Savage, and private eyes Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe to the American zeitgeist.
Americans were, of course, reading far more than the funny pages. For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Ox-Bow Incident, Native Son, Darkness at Noon, Why England Slept, You Can’t Go Home Again, Horton Hatches the Egg, and Farewell, My Lovely competed for attention on bookstore shelves in 1940 with new offerings from perennial favorites Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rex Stout, and James Thurber. Slick magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Colliers, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Liberty, and The New Yorker were the aristocracy of the newsstands. For the less sophisticated reader, there were the pulps.
These four potent means of storytelling—movies, radio, comic strips, pulps—did not function in isolation. Popular properties in one medium quickly spread to the rest. Zorro, Dr. Kildare, Tarzan, and the detectives were repeatedly translated to film. The Shadow starred in his own pulp and on radio, each version influencing the other. Dick Tracy, Buck Rogers, Don Winslow, and Orphan Annie had radio shows. Serials devoted to Buck, Tracy, and Flash Gordon, every one a crowd-pleaser, were joined in 1940
Pulp magazines derived their name from the cheap brown paper, often flecked with wood chips, on which they were printed. They were the successors to the dime novels, shar12
Fantastic Comics was Fox’s newest monthly title, the first issue bearing a December 1939 cover date. Its star was “Samson,” a modern day incarnation of the longhaired biblical strongman, a character the publisher knew the authors of the Old Testament wouldn’t be litigating over. Alexander “Alex” Blum, a serious painter paying bills with comics and the father of Eisner-Iger staffer Toni, was the initial artist behind the Alex Boon signature, with Sam Cooper and Albert “Al” Carreno contributing later art jobs. Pitting his superhuman strength against whole armies, Samson’s feats outdid the contemporary Superman but he was far more ruthless, killing his foes barehanded without batting an eye. He mellowed once he acquired a sling-wielding boy sidekick named David in issue #10 (September). Samson, too, was awarded a solo title, the first issue cover-dated Autumn 1940. Like the Blue Beetle, Flame, and Green Mask titles, each issue combined a new lead story with reprints of various series from the three monthlies. A standout among Fantastic’s other features was “Sub Saunders,” a series about a 30th-century oceanographer’s encounters with an ancient aquatic race, illustrated by Henry C. Kiefer, a World War I veteran and classically trained illustrator with a distinctive style. Kiefer was gone after Fantastic #8 (July), and none of the anonymous artists that followed him possessed his drawing chops. Also of note were two series by the era’s most eccentric creator, Fletcher Hanks. “Stardust,” in which an alien lawman came to Earth to wipe out its criminals, and “Space Smith,” a surreal space opera, both highlighted Hanks’ straightfaced absurdity and distinctively ugly dramatis personae. In style and attitude, Hanks anticipated the underground comics of the 1960s and early ‘70s. Fox added two more monthly titles in 1940. Science Comics ran for just eight issues (February – September), its four most popular strips continuing in the eighth issue (November) of its sister title, Weird Comics. Both series spotlighted costumed heroes. Weird’s “Thor, God of Thunder” starred Grant Ferrell, a despondent playboy chosen by the Norse god to serve as his superhuman avatar on Earth. The character underwent a series of metamorphoses, winding up as “Dynamite Thor,” a mystery-man with a different secret identity, different powers, and a different origin… but the same girlfriend. He and a handful of minor features were cancelled to make room for the Science refugees. “The Eagle,” who flew with the aid of an “antigravitation fluid,” and “Electro” (renamed “Dynamo” as of Science #2, probably to avoid legal hassles over Timely’s earlier character of the same name), who possessed electrical powers, were among the survivors, a pair of super-heroes hardy enough to withstand a redesign in Science #7 (August), cancellation, and continuation in a different title. Another emigre was “Marga the Panther Woman,” about a nurse adventuring in Edgar Rice Burroughs-style lost worlds after being genetically modified with panther blood by a dime-store Dr. Moreau. “The Bird Man” was a flying hero based on Native American mythology who winged his way through four issues of Weird Comics before yielding his slot to “The Dart,” a legendary lawman of ancient Rome who woke up from an enchanted sleep in 1940, donned a costume, partnered up with Ace the Amazing Boy, and
“Samson” was Fox’s answer to Superman, frequently topping him this year in the scope and lethality of his super-feats. Samson TM and © respective copyright owner.
Berold, was the star of the Eisner-Iger staff. Sidelined by polio in early childhood, a student of the great magazine illustrators, Fine brought a sophisticated approach to the comic book page that influenced not only his studiomates—including Jack Kirby—but virtually every super-hero artist of the 1940s: “Fine was one of the first comic book artists to understand that breaking up page design by panel composition added to the dramatic pace of the stories. His figures in motion created sweeping visual arcs for the eye to follow. His decorative use of line added the necessary contextual cues for this effect. Fine varied the sizes and shapes of his panels, rejecting the previous notion of uniform rows and columns, creating a harmonic symphony between figures and page layout.” (Amash 10) Fine’s work for Fox was a bit quieter than that but still stood head and shoulders above most of the art then appearing in that publisher’s titles. Wonderworld’s other superhuman star was “Yarko the Great,” a turban-wearing Mandrake knockoff created by Eisner and artist S. R. “Bob” Powell, born Stanley Pawlowski. 32
Second-string Timely titles Daring Mystery Comics and Mystic Comics saw a long procession of minor super-heroes pass through their pages, never looking better than in the cover art of Alex Schomburg. TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
due to the thematic contrast of its two lead features. The title’s star from Day One was “The Human Torch.” Despite his name, the Torch was an android created by eccentric Professor Horton capable of bursting into flame and controlling fire in all its forms. After angrily parting ways with his creator, who wanted to exploit his powers for personal gain, the “synthetic man” adopted the human guise of Jim Hammond (spelled “Hamond” throughout 1940) and joined the New York City police force. Created by Carl Burgos, The Human Torch is one of the most arresting visuals to ever appear in comics, his aesthetic and conceptual strength overcoming Burgos’ weaknesses as a draftsman and scripter. Neither was an issue for Bill Everett, whose “Sub-Mariner” was comics’ first great anti-hero. The hybrid son of a human seaman and a noblewoman of the undersea empire of Aquaria, the pointy-eared Prince Namor possessed superhuman strength, the ability to breathe in both air and water, small wings growing from his ankles that gave him the power of flight, and a colossal case of anger management issues that led him to declare a one-man war on the human race. A fascinating study in adolescent angst, the Sub-Mariner was capable of destroying the Holland Tunnel one moment, then rescuing an innocent baby from the resulting flood the next. Under the influence of policewoman Betty Dean and others, Namor eventually turned his wrath from America to the Axis nations, but not before he clashed with the one being capable of stopping his rampage: The Human Torch!
the Flaming Fury was ordered to bring the Sub-Mariner to justice. Their battle spanned 22 pages of the following issue, as Burgos and Everett pulled out all the stops, their creations wreaking havoc across the length and breadth of the Five Boroughs. If the conclusion in issue #10 was a bit of a wet firecracker (Betty Dean persuaded them to shake hands and walk away), it didn’t detract from the epic excitement—or the spike in sales—their struggle generated. Future battles were inevitable. The elemental clash of fire and water may have been the key to Marvel Mystery Comics’ cachet, but it didn’t hurt that the book had a strong lineup of secondary features. “KaZar” had been the eponymous star of a 1936 Goodman pulp written by Bob Byrd. As adapted by Ben Thompson, it was better than the average Tarzan knock-off, with clean art lovingly swiped from Hal Foster. The episode for the September issue (#11) included what may be the first two-page panel in comic books. Paul Gustavson’s “The Angel” began as a run-of-the-mill crimefighting mystery-man but by mid-year he was tangling with ghouls and giants. “Electro, Marvel of the Age” was a brightly colored super-robot in the service of altruistic Professor Zog, its adventures rendered by creator Steve Dahlman in an Art Deco-flavored style. The title’s few weak spots— Al Anders’ “The Masked Raider,” a lifeless Lone Ranger imitation, and “The Ferret,” a homely detective with a pet weasel—were easily overlooked and were gone by year’s end. Another key to the success of Marvel Mystery and its sister titles debuting in 1940 was the cover art of Alex Schomburg.
Comics’ first super-hero crossover story began at the conclusion of Marvel Mystery #8’s “Human Torch” episode, as 43
Beck’s clean, open style illustrated them with a diagrammatic clarity understandable to even the youngest reader. With a poor but virtuous boy protagonist straight out of Horatio Alger cast in the Lucky Hans role in a modern-day fairy tale, combined with the simplicity of a memorable magic word that in essence allowed Billy to serve as his own genie, the strip had an entirely different look and feel from the sci fi origin and pulpish ambience of Superman. That didn’t stop Detective Comics’ lawyers from filing suit on the familiar charge of copyright infringement. The legal battle would continue for over a decade.
Even the youngest reader could follow C.C. Beck’s storytelling, as in this first confrontation between Captain Marvel and his arch-enemy, Sivana. TM and © DC Comics.
Billy into the mighty Marvel (or Marvel to Billy should the Captain be the one to shout “Shazam!”). His role in the spoiling of a criminal genius’ scheme to blackmail the nation with his “radio-silencer” won Billy a job as a radio reporter for WHIZ. The station’s president, Sterling Morris, made up the entire supporting cast throughout 1940, giving little hint of
the roster of unforgettable characters the strip featured in its 13-year run. From the very first episode, Captain Marvel stood apart from his superheroic brethren. Parker’s scripts were a breath of fresh air, providing plenty of excitement and action without taking themselves or the genre altogether seriously, while
Much of the good captain’s time in his first year was spent thwarting the plans of his arch-foe, an ugly little mad scientist in a pharmacist’s jacket named Sivana, and his ally, the toothsome Beautia, Empress of Venus. Other foes faced in 1940 included the Fagin-like Master Mind, modern day pirates Captain Death and Professor Skull, a tribe of superhuman cavemen frozen in the Arctic since the Pleistoscene Era, and Dr. Allirog, a gorilla with human-level intelligence. Allirog was featured in Special Edition Comics, a one-shot issued in the summer as a test balloon for a solo title starring the hero Sivana soon nicknamed “The Big Red Cheese.”
Fawcett experimented with alternate formats in 1940, as with the bi-weekly 36-page Nickel Comics and the oversized Master Comics. TM and © respective copyright
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owners.
Countdown to
Cataclysm It is an image familiar to comics aficionados: a powerfully built man clad in red, white and blue chain mail, protected from gunfire by a metal shield, bursts into the war room of the German High Command and delivers a crushing right jab to the jaw of a terrified Führer, a redundant caption exclaiming “Smashing through, Captain America came face to face with Hitler!” There is nothing subtle about the image, nothing restrained or polite. It is an unapologetic exemplar of the “cheap political propaganda” Sterling North sneered at in his indictment of the comic book industry. Captain America Comics #1 (cover dated March 1941) hit the newsstands late in ‘40. It sold nearly a million copies, instantly becoming Timely Publications’ best-selling title, and made stars out of co-creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. “The time demanded it,” Kirby explained in a 1970 interview. “The country was almost at war; we needed a super-patriot” (Steranko 53). Their flag-draped super-soldier served as both herald and epitome of the industry’s embrace of patriotic themes. If war was coming, comic books were ready. So, increasingly, were the American people, though clinging to the hope the United States could avoid direct involvement in the fighting overseas. Polls showed 80% of the populace supporting the Lend-Lease program and other initiatives to shore up Britain as she suffered through relentless bombing and U-boat predation. Nevertheless, isolationism remained a significant factor in the public dialogue. The America First Committee had begun life as an anti-war movement at Yale University that quickly spread to other campuses, but by 1941 it had fallen under the influence of the same reactionary industrialists, financiers, and media moguls who had bitterly opposed Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal from the beginning. Anti-British sentiment ran high in this group, leading America First to oppose aiding the UK with money or materiel, resources they contended should be devoted to the nation’s own defenses. Heading the aid-for-England forces was the Century Club, a New York-based private organization of “movers and shakers in the East Coast’s top journalistic, legal, financial, and intellectual circles” (Olson 139), many of them combat veterans of the earlier World War, all proBritish and fervently anti-fascist. Internal dissension over priorities and tactics led to the club’s disbanding early in
CHAPTER TWO 62
‘41. It was replaced in April by Fight for Freedom, a more militant movement that advocated direct military action, criticized Roosevelt and Congress for their caution, and labeled America First a Nazi front. Historian Lynne Olson, author of Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, observes that “most of [America First’s] leadership and members were … decent, honest, sincere citizens who passionately believed that foreign entanglements were bad for the United States” (235), but FDR didn’t see it that way: “In his May 26[, 1941] fireside chat, Roosevelt contended that attacks on the government’s … foreign and military policies were not part of ‘a wholesome political debate of honest and free men,’ as [Charles] Lindbergh and other isolationists maintained. Instead, those assaults were connected to the ‘clever schemes of foreign agents’ … To preserve the country’s unity and safety, he said, Americans must combat this new Fifth Column with all their might.” (105) America First was the loudest section of the isolationist chorus, but it was by no means soloing. A number of militant mothers’ groups staged angry protests in the halls of Congress and on the streets of Washington, where they hanged interventionist Senator Claude Pepper in effigy. Passions on both sides rode high. Protests and counter protests at each other’s rallies frequently erupted into violence. The controversy raged throughout the year until the question became moot in the early morning hours of December 7.
Joe and Jack vs. the Axis Captain America was not the first costumed hero to dress himself in the nation’s colors—M.L.J.’s Shield and Quality’s Uncle Sam preceded him—but he was the one whose adventures captured the imagination of American kids, the one whose sales guaranteed a horde of patriotic copycats. Some forty such characters had appeared by year’s end. A handful—Better’s The Fighting Yank, Fawcett’s Minute-Man, and DC’s The Star-Spangled Kid among them—proved viable characters in their own right. Many—Dynamic’s Yankee Doodle Jones, Fiction House’s Captain Fight, Helnit’s The Flag Man, Harvey’s Captain Freedom, and Timely’s own The Defender, to name but five—were shameless imitations, unimaginatively aping the new hero’s name, costume, setting, origin, villains, or all of them at once. What they couldn’t duplicate was the one element that made “Captain America” click with readers: the storytelling magic of Simon and Kirby.
Many heroes to follow would steal elements from Captain America’s origin story, but none would match, let alone surpass, the Simon & Kirby prototype. TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
them a terror to spies and saboteurs!” No sooner had this serum transformed the scrawny young patriot into a tall, muscular Adonis than a Nazi mole within the project assassinated its creator, grandfatherly Professor Reinstein. Alas, Reinstein had not committed the formula to paper. There would be no army of super-soldiers. After intensive training under the military’s best instructors, Rogers was given the rank, name, costume, and shield of Captain America. His true identity known only to the top brass, “Cap” hid in plain sight as a bumbling buck private, the bane of hardbitten Sgt. Duffy’s existence. When orphaned Camp Lehigh mascot Bucky Barnes stumbled on Steve’s secret, the boy inexplicably won the right to don his own costume and go into action with him. With the addition of gutsy FBI agent Betty Ross to the cast later in the first issue, the stage was set for a series that redefined how action was depicted in comic books.
As a wave of sabotage and other acts of subversion swept across the United States, a pure-hearted but frail 4F named Steve Rogers volunteered as a test subject for a secret government-sponsored experiment. He was injected with a chemical formula capable of “rapidly building his body and brain tissues, until his stature and intelligence increase to an amazing degree,” making him “the first of a corps of super-agents whose mental and physical ability will make
The initial idea was apparently Joe Simon’s—he reportedly designed the lead characters before coming to Timely— but it was the unleashed imagination, breakneck pacing, and electrifying action scenes of partner Jack Kirby that 63
TIMELINE: 1941
May 1: Citizen Kane—written, directed, and starring Orson Welles—premieres at a movie theater in New York City before gaining wider release later in the year. The film will garner nine Academy Award nominations, winning the award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay.
A compilation of the year’s notable comic book history events alongside some of the year’s most significant popular culture and historical events. (On sale dates are approximations.)
March 28: The first chapter of the Adventures of Captain Marvel is released to movie theaters. Distributed by Republic Pictures, the twelve-chapter film serial stars cowboy actor Tom Tyler as Captain Marvel and Frank Coghlan Jr. as Billy Batson.
January 17: The first issue of Fawcett’s new quarterly, Captain Marvel Adventures, arrives at newsstands. It includes a Captain Marvel story written by Joe Simon and drawn by Jack Kirby and Dick Briefer.
April 15: Lev Gleason publishes Daredevil Battles Hitler, written and drawn primarily by Charles Biro and Bob Wood in which several Lev Gleason heroes help Daredevil dismantle Hitler’s armed forces.
March 17: Timely’s Captain America Comics #3 arrives at newsstands. It includes the first professional work of Stan Lee in the form of a two-page Captain America text story.
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
May 2: Quality’s Military Comics #1 features a story written by Will Eisner and drawn by Chuck Cuidera that introduces a team of international fighter pilots called Blackhawk, soon to become one of Quality Comics’ most popular series.
MARCH
APRIL
June 22: Germany launches Operation Barbarossa by invading the Soviet Union. Despite initial decisive victories, the operation will ultimately fail and contribute to Germany’s defeat in World War II.
M AY May 14: Quality’s Police Comics #1 introduces several new characters including S.M. Iger and Reed Crandall’s Firebrand, Arthur Peddy’s Phantom Lady, Paul Gustavson’s The Human Bomb, and most notably, Jack Cole’s Plastic Man.
January 23: Testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, aviator Charles Lindbergh proposes the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Germany. His views are criticized by President Roosevelt.
May 1: General Mills introduces CheeriOats, soon to become one of the country’s most popular breakfast cereals, especially once its name is changed to Cheerios in 1945.
Captain Marvel, Dr. Fate, Firebrand, the Human Bomb, Phantom Lady, Plastic Man and Superman TM and © DC Comics.
fanned that spark into a wildfire. In his 2011 memoirs, Simon recalled: “I turned Kirby loose on the artwork, and [the result] was something different. The layout was different, the whole format was different from anything that was being published. After Captain America, the whole business was copying the flexibility and power of a Kirby drawing.” (89) Execution was everything. Joe and Jack’s plots were not always original (neither creator was adverse to cribbing elements of Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, classic Warner Brothers gangster movies, or even the previous year’s “Batman” stories) but the end result was. Kirby’s figures had an innate power that could not be contained within the panel borders, exploding off the page in a cacophony of mayhem. Cap and Bucky seemed to defy gravity as they leapt, dove, and charged headlong into battle, foes buckling left and right beneath a furious onslaught of fists, feet, and shield that made Batman and Robin look like Abbott and Costello. Knowing they had a winner on their hands, Simon and Kirby negotiated a deal with Timely publisher Martin Goodman, who knew it too, giving them 25% of the title’s net profits. Despite its military milieu, the “Captain America” series was a horror strip in super-hero drag, its panels chockful
Jack Kirby’s dynamic fight scenes changed how action was depicted in comic books. TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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JUNE
July 1: After the Federal Communications Commission authorizes commercial television, both NBC and CBS begin broadcasting in New York City.
September 25: DC’s More Fun Comics #73 introduces three new heroes, all created by editor Mort Weisinger: Aquaman (drawn by Paul Norris), Green Arrow (drawn by George Papp), and Johnny Quick (drawn by Ed Moore and Chad Grothkopf). September 26: Produced by Fleischer Studios, the first Superman cartoon is released to movie theaters. It will earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Subject: Cartoons.
J U LY
AUGUST
July 17: For the first time after 56 consecutive games, New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio fails to get a hit. His hitting streak, which has earned national interest, sets a major league baseball record.
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
September 28: Boston Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams ends the baseball season with a batting average of .406. It will become the last time any major league baseball player will hit over .400 for a season.
October 15: M.L.J.’s Pep Comics #22 includes a story written by Victor Bloom and drawn by Bob Montana that introduces a redheaded teenager that will soon become one of the most famous characters in comic book history: Archie Andrews. October 31: Walt Disney’s fourth full-length animated film, Dumbo, debuts in a New York City theater before gaining wider release a week later. The story of a ridiculed circus elephant whose enormous ears allow him to fly grosses $1.6 million at the box office, making it the most financially successful Disney film of the decade.
of sadism, monsters, torture, mass murder, war crimes, and wholesale destruction. Whether Axis agents, homegrown fascists, costumed serial killers, or mad scientists and their creations, the gruesome outer appearances of Kirby’s villains reflected their inner malevolence, none more so than the ne plus ultra of Nazi menace, The Red Skull. The title’s only recurring bad guy, allegedly inspired by the maraschino cherry atop a hot fudge sundae (though there had earlier been a Doc Savage pulp novel with that title), the Skull killed without remorse or mercy anyone who interfered with his unspeakable plans, embodying in a single horrific avatar the lust for power and naked hatred at the heart of Nazism. Surprisingly, given the dictator’s prominence on the first two covers, Hitler himself appeared only once in the 1941 issues. Cap beat him up, of course, while Bucky whaled on Hermann Göring. The Red Skull had no Japanese counterpart. In fact, only two stories dur-
October 25: DC’s All-Star Comics #8 includes a nine-page insert that previews a new heroine created by Dr. William Moulton Marston: Wonder Woman. Her story continues two weeks later as the lead feature of Sensation Comics #1.
November 28: Fawcett’s Whiz Comics #25 includes a story written by Ed Herron and drawn by C.C. Beck and Mac Raboy that introduces Freddy Freeman, a boy crippled by the villainous Captain Nazi but subsequently transformed by the wizard Shazam into Captain Marvel Jr.
NOVEMBER
December 11: Germany and Italy declare war on the United States, which responds in kind.
DECEMBER
December 7: Japan launches a surprise attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The U.S. fleet is crippled and over 2,400 American servicemen die as a result of the attack. The United States declares war on Japan with President Roosevelt proclaiming December 7 as “a day that will live in infamy.”
December 17: Leading Comics #1 groups together seven DC Comics’ heroes—the Crimson Avenger, Green Arrow and Speedy, the Shining Knight, Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy, and the Vigilante—as the Seven Soldiers of Victory in a story written by Mort Weisinger, Jerry Siegel, and Jack Lehti, and drawn by Lehti, Mort Meskin, George Papp, Hal Sherman, and Creig Flessel.
ing Simon and Kirby’s run dealt with the Pacific War at all, most of their ire being reserved for the Third Reich. That ire was returned. Joe Simon recounted the harrowing backlash in his book The Comic Book Makers: “[W]e were inundated with a torrent of raging hate mail and vicious obscene phone calls. The theme was ‘death to the Jews’ … Finally we reported the threats to the police department. The result was a police guard on regular shifts patrolling the halls and offices.” (92) If he or Jack Kirby were intimidated, it didn’t show. “Captain America” continued to call attention to the Nazi threat.
The Red Skull was not only one of the most memorable comic book villains of the 1940s but one of the most imitated. TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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A fan club, the Sentinels of Liberty, offered a membership card and tin badge (now treasured collectibles) for a dime and a pledge to “fight spies and
Everett could handle alone. Other artists and scripters began pitching in, including a Funnies, Inc. staff writer with a big future named Frank Morrison “Mickey” Spillane. The Human Torch title, which issued two #5s this year to correct the numbering anomaly caused by its beginnings as Red Raven Comics, found Carl Burgos in similar straits. Harry Sahle stepped in to help pencil the fourth and first fifth issues, and Spillane contributed a script to issue #6 (Winter). The high point for the year was the full-length story in the second fifth issue (Fall) that teamed the Torch and Toro with Sub-Mariner, The Angel, Ka-Zar, and The Patriot in an adventure that took the fiery pair around the world. Everett and Burgos’ production woes were compounded by the introduction of All Winners Comics, a quarterly showcase title spotlighting all three Timely titans, backed by Marvel Mystery’s Angel, Mystic’s Black Marvel and Destroyer, and U.S.A.’s Whizzer. Another new title, Young Allies, shoved boy sidekicks Bucky and Toro to the forefront, teaming
Timely had better success with new titles starring its most popular characters. TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
them with the first of Simon and Kirby’s takes on the kid gang genre. Costarring alongside the costumed duo were a quartet of Sentinels of Liberty: Jefferson “Jeff” Sandervilt was the brainy kid, Percival Aloysius “Knuckles” O’Toole the tough kid, Henry “Tubby” Tinkle the fat kid, and (alas) Whitewash Jones the harmonica-playing, watermelon-loving, racist-caricature kid. This improbable sextet proved surprisingly effective, defeating no less than The Red Skull in their debut outing (albeit with some last-minute assistance from Cap and the Torch). Stan Lee assumed the scripting with issue #2 and set Toro and Bucky to arguing over who was the team’s leader. Sharpening this shtick, Lee also turned out prose stories for All Winners and U.S.A. that teamed up each title’s heroes—all of whom, of course, bickered. These assignments were, if nothing else, a chance for the young writer to familiarize himself with the company’s many super-characters. It was knowledge he would need before the year was out.
Led by boy sidekicks Bucky and Toro, “The Young Allies” was one of comic books’ first kid gangs. Though other hands produced the stories, the team was created by Simon & Kirby, soon to prove themselves the masters of that genre. TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
Maurice Coyne, the ‘M’ in M.L.J., was also the accountant for Martin Goodman’s publishing line. It was he 69
who set in motion the events that turned the Timely editorial offices upside down. Troubled by what he saw in the company books, Coyne went to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (by now credited as the line’s art director), and exposed their boss’ financial duplicity: “‘I’m sorry about those royalties,’ [Coyne] told me, ‘You’re getting 25%, but only after they deduct all the fees and salaries for the whole company.’ Martin Goodman was charging all his expense to one title—Captain America. So by the time the ‘profits’ were accounted for, they had been eaten up by the cost of running Timely Comics.” (Simon 112)
The bookkeeping shenanigans of Timely publisher Martin Goodman eventually cost the company the services of the red-hot Simon & Kirby.
DC Comics’ Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz had been courting Simon and Kirby for some time. Stung by Goodman’s underhanded treatment, Joe and Jack became receptive, working on their own time on proposals for new DC features. Word got back to Goodman, who promptly fired them. Jack Kirby did not work for the company again for eighteen years. Joe Simon never did.
in a 2001 interview for Alter Ego, Fleischer animator and future Timely editor Vincenze “Vince” Fago reminisced that “Whoever worked on it felt they were doing something beyond the call of duty” (Amash 9). It showed. The seventeen “Superman” theatrical cartoons are an astonishing accomplishment even by modern standards. Siegel and Shuster themselves were busier than ever. Aside from Jack Burnley’s three issues of Action Comics (#32-34) and Superman’s cameo in All-Star Comics #7 (OctoberNovember), all of the art for the Man of Tomorrow’s 1941 comic book stories, plus the daily newspaper strip, was produced by the Shuster shop. Wayne Boring and Paul Cassidy handled the art on the daily strip and much of the first half of the year’s comic book work, with Cassidy penciling the entirety of Superman #9 (March-April). When Joe Shuster decided that fall to relocate family and shop to New York City, Cassidy stayed behind, bowing out of comics to pursue other career paths. Much of his DC workload was assumed by Leo Nowak, who drew all of Superman #11, three-fourths of the following two issues, and a majority of the stories in Action from the July issue (#38) on. The balance went to John Sikela. Both artists interpreted the Shuster style similarly, filling their panels with solid, broad-shouldered figures with inexpressive faces depicted in thick, confident brushstrokes, Sikela’s approach a degree subtler and warmer than Nowak’s.
As 1941 gave way to 1942, the future of Timely Comics was in the hands of its new 18-year-old editor, the suddenly promoted Stanley Lieber. Whether it, and he, could bounce back from the loss of the medium’s most dynamic storytellers remained to be seen.
The House That Superman Built Donenfeld and Liebowitz wanted Simon and Kirby, but they didn’t necessarily need them. Detective Comics and its sister company, All-American Comics, were doing just fine, continuing to dominate the marketplace—the two lines combined represented 11% of all comic books released in 1941—on the proven appeal of Superman, Batman, The Flash, and the rest of their costumed heavy hitters. Already a star of comic books, syndicated strips, and radio, Superman headlined a series of prestigious animated cartoons produced by the Fleischer Studios that brought him even further into America’s collective consciousness. The first cartoon, simply titled Superman, was released to theaters on September 26, 1941. A near-perfect distillation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s extraterrestrial vigilante, it was a huge hit with audiences and critics alike, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Subject. In the second cartoon, The Mechanical Monsters, Clark Kent steps into a phone booth to change into his caped alter ego, an image that will come to define the Man of Steel in the eyes of the public despite the near-total absence of such scenes in the comics. Given the biggest budget per episode for an animated series up to that time, the studio lavished it on production values. Looking back on the shorts
The artists had little time for anything other than “Superman,” but Jerry Siegel, insecure about money as so many children of the Great Depression were, wrote not only the daily strip and all the comic book episodes (All-Star #7 excepted) but continued to script other series. His focus in these side jobs shifted in 1941 away from his older creations. By the end of the year, Siegel’s byline was missing from Detective Comics’ “Slam Bradley” and “Spy,” Adventure’s “Federal Men,” More Fun’s “Radio Squad,” and AllAmerican’s “Red, White and Blue.” Even “The Spectre” was handed off to Gardner Fox. Siegel launched a new superhero strip in DC’s latest anthology book, Star Spangled Comics. “The Star-Spangled Kid” was a clever twist on the man-boy team with a genius teenager as the lead and an adult, a brawny Irishman with the dopey codename Stripesy, as the sidekick. The characters debuted in a special two-page preview in Action #40 (September). It was into this new venture and the Superman syndicated strip that Jerry Siegel seemed to pour most of his creativity. The newspaper comic featured a series of skirmishes between the Man of Tomorrow and The Scientists of Sudden Death, a cabal of renegade eggheads vying for a million-dollar bounty put on the hero’s head by gangland. The storyline ran from March through November, culminating in a showdown with The Blonde Huntress, a beautiful big game hunter convinced Superman killed her father. The comic books, by contrast, found Siegel offering up the same old stories of corrupt politicians, crooked businessmen, and mob bosses, repeating himself to the point of using the same plot—a spoiled heiress learns a hard lesson about responsibility—twice within two months. At least one new element was introduced: in Superman #11, Lois Lane began to suspect that cowardly Clark Kent and her caped McDreamy might be one and the same. Politics
A series of brilliant animated cartoons from Fleischer Studios brought “Superman” to life on movie screens around the world, vastly increasing the character’s fan base. TM and © DC Comics.
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Fawcett continued to experiment with other formats. The 96-page America’s Greatest Comics and the 324-page Xmas Comics were hits; the odd-sized, black & white reprint title Captain Marvel Thrill Book was not. TM and © DC Comics.
Tragedy, Redemption, and America’s Typical Teen
‘41. Dr. Wang, a villain from the previous year, made two return appearances as well. Strangely enough considering Innovative as Fawcett was, it was M.L.J. Magazines that his patriotic trappings, The Shield didn’t begin tackling took the boldest step in 1941. The unthinkable happened Axis-related menaces until issue #21 (November). Shorten in Pep Comics #17 (July): the death of a super-hero, as a and Novick produced all twelve Pep episodes plus an addibullet-riddled John Dickering, alias The Comet, died in the tional dozen stories for Shield-Wizard Comics, making “The arms of his younger brother Bob, who adopted the cosShield” the longest-running M.L.J. series still in the hands of tumed identity of “The Hangman” to wreak vengeance its creators. “The Comet,” now by the team of Joe Blair and on the killers. Another milestone was the premiere in Blue Lin Streeter, plodded along, much of the character’s energy Ribbon Comics #13 (May) of the first super-hero strip to having departed with creator Jack Cole. Thus, Comet’s death feature a reformed villain. And yet, these dramatic breakcould be seen as a mercy killing. throughs were not the publishers’ What inspired guest scripter Harry most significant contribution to Shorten to make this drastic move the medium this year. That honor is open to speculation, but it proved belonged instead to the debut in a sound decision. Although lacking Pep #22 of a seemingly innocuous his brother’s superhuman powers, teenager who would nonetheless The Hangman was a more exciting become one of the most iconic character. Aided by his egregiously characters in the history of comic stereotyped valet Anthracite and books. Comet’s gal pal Thelma, Bob Dickering played mind games with his That debut came at the end of foes before swooping in for the figthe year, however. M.L.J’s year urative kill, stalking them, terrorizstarted with the introduction of a ing them, assuring them that their different adolescent in the Janufate, as foretold by the projected ary issue of Pep Comics (#11), as image of a gallows, was inevitable. writer Harry Shorten and artist The first four installments were Irv Novick’s “The Shield” took a drawn by George Storm in a wild, youngster orphaned by criminals loose, cartoony style full of rubberunder his wing, making him his limbed figures and exaggerated new crimefighting partner as the violence. Harry Lucey handled the masked Dusty the Boy Detective. balance of the year’s episodes, makThe same story introduced The ing an interesting attempt to comVulture, a vampire-like cloaked bine Storm’s fluidity with his own grotesquerie with huge pointed solid if unspectacular illustrative ears and, as of his second appearstyle. Hangman proved popular ance, green skin. The murderous enough to merit cover star status mastermind faced off against A comic book first: the death of The Comet. in Special Comics #1 (Winter), a test Shield and Dusty four times in TM and © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.
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flight for a quarterly solo title, backed by “Roy and Dusty, Boy Buddies,” a team-up of Shield and Wizard’s sidekicks illoed by Paul Reinman. While “Sergeant Boyle,” “Kayo Ward,” and “Bentley of Scotland Yard” retained their places in the back pages, many of Pep’s original slate of features were replaced over the course of the year by new super-hero and fantasy strips. Two debuted in issue #12 (February). Shorten and Streeter’s “Danny in Wonderland” starred a farm boy and his dog swept to a storybook kingdom by a tornado à la The Wizard of Oz, where they befriended Kupkake, an accident-prone dwarf whose good-intentioned blundering often drove the plot. These were old-school fairy tales with a modern touch, the series’ heroes cheerfully stuffing witches into gas ovens or dousing giants with kerosene and setting them Change was afoot in the pages of Pep Comics this year, as “The Shield” acquired a kid sidekick and “The Hangalight. That wouldn’t have set well with man,” brother of The Comet, took his murdered sibling’s spot in the comic. TM and © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. “The Fireball,” M.L.J.’s answer to The Human glowing donkey, who personified the collective goodness Torch. Firefighter Ted Tyler gained the power to absorb and of mankind. control flame after exposure to burning chemicals. A superhero who specialized in capturing arsonists, Fireball wore The overtly sensual nature of Madame Satan’s crimes and bright blue tights and a cowl but didn’t maintain a secret the ease with which she entranced her prey, as well as the identity, working openly for the fire department in and out strip’s many scenes of mayhem and murder, epitomized of costume. One series, “Lee Sampson, Midshipman,” came the general rise of sexual titillation and brutal violence in to a natural conclusion in the June issue (#16), with the title M.L.J. comic books throughout the year. Deaths by decapicadet graduating from Annapolis and entering naval sertation, by fire, by slow torture, by zombie and vampire, by vice as a freshly minted ensign. Debuting the same issue acid and poison, by knife and axe and sword, or by a bulwas “Madam Satan,” outgoing editor Abner Sundell’s varilet fired point-blank into the eye were depicted in every ation on Timely’s “Black Widow.” After a homicidal goldsuper-hero series, and many of the back-up series to boot. digger named Tyra died This darkening tone in a struggle with an cannot simply be attribenraged mark, her soul uted to a difference in was cast down into editorial philosophies Hell. Satan, taking a likbetween Abner Suning to the warped murdell and Harry Shorten, deress, sent her back to as the change was well the mortal plane with underway by the time the new identity of Iola, Sundell left to helm Fox where she was to use Publications’ comics her seductive wiles to line in June. It was as if lure men into sin so he executives Louis Silberkcould claim their preleit, Maurice Coyne, and viously innocent souls. John Goldwater decided As portrayed by Sunto answer Sterling North dell’s scripting succesby doubling down on the sor Joe Blair, Madam very story elements he Satan wasn’t very good found objectionable. at her job, her plans The February issue of to give her victims a Blue Ribbon Comics (#9) “death kiss”—during reflected this new editowhich her face changed rial reality as the title into a ghastly green launched a new cover skull just like Fiction feature. Created by Joe House’s Fantomah— Blair and Sam Cooper continually thwarted using plot points borby Brother Sunbeam, Though her creators probably didn’t consciously design her that way, the diabolically rowed from the 1935 a glowing monk atop a seductive “Madame Satan” was bound to set critics of the medium howling. movie The Ghost Goes TM and © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. 83
tator resorted to monstrous allies like The Green Ghoul, a three-eyed demon it took Mr. Justice three issues to defeat, and the sinister Evil Eye. Cooper’s clean, Alex Raymondinspired art proved surprisingly effective when the story called for monsters or demons, and he was not averse to experimenting with layout, as his spectacular double-page spread in issue #13 attests. His cover art featuring Mr. Justice is some of the era’s most eye-catching. While its other main feature, “Rang-a-Tang the Wonder Dog,” retained the services of Ed Smalle throughout the 1941 issues, many of Blue Ribbon Comics’ back-up series were affected by the departures of their original artists for greener pastures. “The Fox”’s Irwin Hasen went to AllAmerican, “Ty-Gor”’s Mort Meskin to Detective, and Charles Biro (“Corporal Collins”) to Lev Gleason’s comics line, their strips reassigned to Warren King, George Storm, and Carl Hubbell, respectively. Others were replaced by new series, including two spotlighting super-heroes. “Inferno the Fire Breather” began his career in comics as a bad guy in the “Steel Sterling” story in Zip Comics #10 (January). The reformed crook intended to serve out his prison sentence but was forced to participate in a jailbreak. His innocence known only to the governor and his sympathetic daughter, Inferno donned a costume of red-and-yellow and did his good deeds while trying to stay one step ahead of the law. “Captain Flag” was M.L.J.’s Captain America, a hard-drinking wastrel named Tommy Townsend who donned the colors of Old Glory after months of training himself in the wilderness to avenge his father’s murder. One of several characters with bird sidekicks introduced this year, Flag’s bald eagle pal, Yank, was gone after the second episode. Despite there being nothing special about this derivative Joe Blair/Lin Streeter series, Mr. Justice was forced to share the covers with Captain Flag beginning with the September issue (#16).
Joe Blair and Sam Cooper’s ghostly “Mr. Justice” haunted the pages of Blue Ribbon Comics beginning with the January 1941 issue. TM and © Archie Comic Publications, Inc.
West, “Mr. Justice” was an heir to the English throne, bloodily murdered by a rival claimant 200 years before (though Cooper depicts these 18th-century characters in medieval garb), his spirit bound to the castle where he was slain. The British government ordered the castle disassembled and transported to America for safekeeping, but a U-boat sent the transport ship to the bottom of the ocean, liberating the ethereal Prince James. Making his way to New York, the ghost decided to use his supernatural attributes for good after helping free a kidnapped heiress. In both powers and appearance, the white-faced Mr. Justice owed a debt to Jerry Siegel and Bernard Baily’s “The Spectre,” but adopted a lighter tone in both art and writing. Blair’s villains committed heinous crimes, but the Royal Wraith captured them alive, turning them over to the law or even, in one case, helping a vampire recover his humanity. Able to assume mortal form, Mr. J went to work as a troubleshooter for Mayor Clark and struck up a tentative romance with his daughter Pat, a much happier fate than Spectre’s alter ego was allowed. The series took a darker turn with a six-episode story in issues #13-18 (June-November) pitting Mr. Justice against the otherwise anonymous dictator of “Mitteleuropa,” a thinly disguised Hitler analog who was actually a certain satanic “epitome of all things evil.” In an impassioned burst of wish-fulfillment fantasy, Justice wreaked a bloody vengeance on the Nazi hierarchy: Himmler bayoneted, Von Ribbentrop blown up, Göbbels riddled with bullets, Göring blasted to bits during a Luftwaffe air raid. With his henchmen dead, the desperate dic-
“The Black Hood” and “The Wizard” remained the headliners of Top Notch Comics, sharing its covers (albeit with the Hood’s figure and logo predominant). The title was almost entirely written by Harry Shorten, who scripted not only the two lead features but also “Bob Phantom,” “The Firefly,” “Kardak,” “Keith Kornell, West Pointer,” and “The St. Louis Kid,” a pointless regurgitation of prizefighter clichés that began in the February issue (#12), with Joe Blair stepping in on occasion to give Shorten M.L.J. was so keen on “The Black Hood” that the a breather on one mystery-man was given his own short-lived pulp magazine. TM and © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. strip or another. 84
Comic Books Go To
War
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. … [T]he distance from Hawaii to Japan makes it obvious the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. … [A] lways will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” With those words, spoken to Congress in emergency session and, by radio, to the nation, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the assembled legislators to declare war on the Japanese Empire. The outrage and defiance in the president’s voice that Monday morning echoed the reaction of the nation’s citizenry. Isolationism was off the table now, rendered irrelevant by Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declarations of war on America by Hitler and Mussolini. On January 1, 1942, the United States stood with Great Britain, China, the Soviet Union (now an ally since the Third Reich’s attack on its erstwhile treaty partner the previous summer), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, three Caribbean nations, five Central American countries, and the governments-in-exile of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Greece in issuing the Declaration By United Nations, each signatory pledging “to employ its full resources, military and economic, against … the Tripartite Pact [i.e., the Axis powers]” and “not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.” Even as the Allies concentrated their individual and collective war efforts, Nazi Germany was implementing the “Final Solution,” the systematic extermination of Jews and other peoples Der Führer deemed “inferior.” The names of the concentration camps in which they died— Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and too many more— survive down to the present day as synonyms for genocide. Seven decades of accumulated hindsight have made the outcome of the Second World War seem inevitable, but 122
victory was by no means certain. The attack on Hawaii was only the first strike in Japan’s all-out bid for military supremacy in the Pacific. By New Year’s Day, 1942, the Japanese had seized Guam, Wake Island, and Hong Kong and soon launched invasions of Burma and the Philippines. In the latter, a joint force of American and Filipino troops held off Tokyo’s troops until April, the surviving defenders afterward forced to endure the living hell of the Bataan Death March. The war was going badly for the United Nations on other fronts as well. Over the previous six months, the Germans had penetrated hundreds of miles into Soviet territory and, despite a counteroffensive by the Russians and their fabled ally “General Winter,” now threatened Moscow and Stalingrad, simultaneously striking at the Crimean peninsula. In Libya, Rommel’s Afrika Korps retook all the ground lost the previous winter and continued its relentless advance on Egypt and the strategically critical Suez Canal. Could America harness its resources in time to save her allies? The nation had 2.2 million men and women already in uniform at the time of Pearl Harbor. Over the next four years, they were joined by 6.3 million volunteers and 11.5 million draftees. To keep them armed with the guns, ships, tanks, and airplanes they would need, American industry converted to war production, creating an enormous demand for factory workers. This push for mobilization had unexpected consequences, changing the societal status quo. Women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, taking on jobs previously deemed too strenuous for “the weaker sex” - a myth they quickly debunked, at least for those who had eyes to see. The final wave of an African-American emigration from the agrarian South that began in the 1920s filled industrial jobs in the Rust Belt and on the West Coast. Even the nation’s disabled citizens did their part, with the deaf manning unbearably loud machinery and little people laboring in spaces too tight for a fullsize worker. The unemployment rate plunged, the burgeoning defense effort raising the lingering fog left by the Great Depression, though hardship was by no means at an end.
The Roosevelt administration made it clear from the start that Americans would have to make sacrifices if victory was to be assured. Production of automobiles, radios, household appliances, and similar consumer goods was suspended for the duration. A national speed limit of 35 mph was imposed. To ensure that our fighting forces had everything they needed to win, the government encouraged citizens to recycle—a term coined in the ‘20s but not yet in vogue—their used metal, rubber, lard, and paper, and ordered strict rationing of coal, firewood, tires, gasoline, sugar, coffee, meat, butter, prepackaged (canned, bottled, frozen) food, and other items whose availability had come to be taken for granted. Most citizens complied, but a black market in rationed goods sprang up practically overnight, an underground economy that endured until the postwar lifting of restrictions. The mass media, which had been beating the war drums steadily if guardedly prior to Pearl Harbor, was now encouraged to go all out. Movie theaters offered up patriotic pictures like Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver, Across the Pacific, Flying Tigers, Saboteur, the oddball gangsters-vs.-Nazis thriller All Through the Night, and Prelude to War, first of the “Why We Fight” documentaries directed by Academy Award-winner Frank Capra with animated sequences provided by the Walt Disney Studios. War-themed songs like “American Patrol,” “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones,” “I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen,” and Spike Jones’ mocking “Der Fuehrer’s Face” ruled the airwaves. The syndication services vied to see which could get more of its comic strip characters into uniform. Among those serving were Terry and the Pirates’ Terry Lee and Pat Ryan, Scorchy Smith, Smilin’ Jack, Captain Easy, Joe Palooka, Mickey Finn, Flash Gordon, Little Orphan Annie’s Government-issued propaganda posters were everywhere in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, urging men to enlist in the military, women to join the workforce, and all Americans to do their part by buying war bonds and stamps.
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TIMELINE: 1942
March 18: President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9102, which creates the War Relocation Authority, responsible for the relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. By 1944, 120,000 Japanese-Americans will have been placed in internment camps.
A compilation of the year’s notable comic book history events alongside some of the year’s most significant popular culture and historical events. (On sale dates are approximations.) January 1: In Washington D.C. representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China sign the Declaration by United Nations which formalizes their military alliance. The next day 22 other nations—including Australia and Canada—join them.
April 18: Led by Lieutenant Colonel James “Jimmy” Doolittle, sixteen U.S. bombers conduct an air raid on Tokyo, the first strike on Japan since the Pearl Harbor attack.
March 12: With Japanese forces approaching, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, under orders from President Roosevelt, leaves the Philippines. Eight days later, after being flown to Australia, MacArthur declares, “I shall return.”
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
May 29: Yankee Doodle Dandy—a musical starring James Cagney as Broadway star George M. Cohan—premieres at a New York City theater before gaining wider release a week later. The film will earn nine Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Actor, Best Musical Score, and Best Sound Recording.
April 4: The first chapter of Spy Smasher—a twelve-part film serial produced by Republic Pictures and starring Kane Richmond as Fawcett Comics’ caped vigilante—is released to movie theaters.
MARCH
June 7: Considered one of the turning points of World War II, U.S. naval forces win the Battle of Midway, severely damaging the Japanese fleet and halting their advance in the Pacific.
APRIL
March 6: Comic book publisher Victor Fox declares bankruptcy. To settle part of his printing bill debts, Fox relinquishes publishing rights to the Blue Beetle to the Holyoke Publishing Company. January 20: At a meeting of Nazi officials in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, Germany, “The Final Solution to the Jewish problem” is implemented. It calls for all European Jews to be deported to camps in Poland where they will be exterminated.
May 13: Edward Hopper’s oil on canvas painting Nighthawks— which portrays late-night patrons at a city diner—is sold to the Art Institute of Chicago for $3000. It will become one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art.
January 30: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s first work for DC Comics appears in Adventure Comics #72 as they take over and revamp the “Sandman” feature, providing the masked crimefighter with a new setting and modus operandi.
M AY
April 29: With its 22nd issue, Lev Gleason’s Silver Streak Comics is retitled Crime Does Not Pay. Created by Charles Biro and Bob Wood, the “True Crime” series will soon become one of the industry’s bestselling (and most notorious) comic books.
JUNE
June 24: The lead story in Detective Comics #66—produced by Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson and George Roussos—introduces Batman’s latest villain, Two-Face.
April 9: After 76,000 American and Filipino soldiers surrender to Japanese forces at the conclusion of the Battle of Bataan, a brutal 60 mile “Death March” begins, resulting in the deaths of over 20,000 prisoners of war.
Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, Starman, Two-Face TM and © DC Comics, Bambi TM and © Disney Enterprises Inc., Pogo TM and © Okefenokee Glee & Perloo Inc.
Daddy Warbucks, Gasoline Alley’s Skeezix Wallet, Tailspin Tommy, Harold Teen, Barney Google, Snuffy Smith, and Tillie the Toiler, who joined the new Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. The pulps, too, put their best foot forward despite an alarming downturn in sales. Paperback books, which offered recent bestsellers and classic literature in editions the working class could afford, had been eating away at the pulps’ core audience since Simon & Schuster introduced its Pocket Books line in 1939. Ironically, many of the most popular paperback titles reprinted the work of pulp authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Zane Grey.
where servicemen could enjoy free food, entertainment, and a dance with their favorite film ingénue. If the war seemed to bring out the best in the American people, it sometimes triggered the worst as well. The armed forces remained strictly segregated, with AfricanAmericans relegated to supporting roles and subjected to discrimination, verbal abuse, and the occasional act of brutal violence in the towns near their bases. Riots broke out in Detroit in February when an angry white mob attacked black industrial workers and their families attempting to move in to the new Sojourner Truth housing development. A long-simmering hostility towards Japanese-Americans had blossomed into open displays of bigotry even before President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102, ordering more than 125,000 people, over half of them U.S. citizens, removed from their homes and businesses on the West Coast and relocated to internment camps in the interior, where they were kept behind barbed wire under armed guard despite little or no credible evidence of espionage or subversion. This action remains an indelible blemish on FDR’s progressive legacy.
For some entertainers, onscreen heroics were not enough. Movie stars Clark Gable, James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Gene Autry volunteered for military duty, several later distinguishing themselves in combat. Those who could not serve threw themselves into volunteerism or participated in war bond drives that took them around the nation, offering a brush with Tinseltown glamor in exchange for Americans’ dollars. Bob Hope launched the first of his legendary USO tours, bringing live comedy, music, and a bevy of screen beauties to homesick soldiers and sailors, at times performing near the frontlines. Back home, actors Bette Davis and John Garfield (classified 4-F due to a congenital heart defect) organized the Hollywood Canteen, a nightclub
Rallying Round the Flag The comic book industry, which more than any other branch of pop culture had been agitating for a showdown with the Axis, reflected this dual nature of America in 124
August 8: Six German saboteurs are executed two days after a military tribunal finds them guilty of conspiring to attack various targets throughout the United States. Two other Germans are spared the death penalty for their help in exposing “Operation Pastorius.” (They are released from prison in 1948.)
November 11: DC Comics debuts Boy Commandos, a series created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby about a group of orphaned boys who are trained to fight in World War II. The first issue sells over a million copies, the bestselling DC comic book of the year.
August 14: After treating the Timely Comics and Funnies, Inc. staffs to a screening of Bambi, Timely publisher Martin Goodman announces he is ending his business relationship with the Funnies, Inc. packaging service. September 8: Dell’s Animal Comics #1 opens with a fivepage story written and drawn by Walt Kelly that introduces a group of anthropomorphic swamp creatures that will become featured in Pogo, Kelly’s syndicated comic strip that will run from 1948 to 1975.
November 13: Written by Otto Binder and drawn by Marc Swayze, the lead story of Captain Marvel Adventures #18 introduces Billy Batson’s long-lost twin sister, Mary Bromfield, who upon saying the magic word of “Shazam” turns into the super-powered Mary Marvel.
August 7: The first major American offensive, the Battle of Guadalcanal, begins as Allied amphibious forces land on the strategic island of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific.
J U LY
AUGUST
December 2: As part of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, physicist Enrico Fermi and his team initiate the world’s first self-sustaining chain nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago.
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER
October 30: After boarding the German submarine U-559 as it sinks in the Mediterranean Sea, British sailors retrieve an Enigma machine and codebooks which help the Allies decipher German radio transmissions.
November 26: Casablanca—a romantic drama starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman—premieres at a New York City theater before gaining wider release in early 1943. Considered one of the greatest films in cinematic history, Casablanca will earn eight Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, Screenplay.
August 13: Walt Disney’s fifth full-length animated film, Bambi, premieres at a New York City theater before gaining wider release later in the month. The movie will earn three Academy Award nominations, including Best Sound, Best Song, and Best Original Music Score.
wartime. On the one hand, it reminded its young readers of the country’s history and values, encouraged them to aid the war effort whenever and however they could, and reassured them that victory and peace were possible if everyone did his or her share. On the other, it demonized the enemy. In his study Comic Art Propaganda, Fredrik Strömberg observes:
November 28: A fire breaks out at the packed Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston, Massachusetts, killing 492 people, the deadliest nightclub fire in history.
shared by all Germans and Italians. No such distinction was made for the Japanese, depicted in and out of uniform as treacherous, degenerate subhumans. Captions and word balloons teemed with references to “slant-eyed dogs,” “yellow monkeys,” and similarly derogatory terms emphasizing their otherness. A few lone voices insisted there were also “good Japs,” at least in America, and even questioned the justice of Executive Order 9102, but they were drowned out in the howl of the mob.
“Looking through the covers of superhero comics from the war years, it is evident how much they resemble official propaganda posters from the era. The same rhetorical techniques and strategies were used in order to attract readers. The ideas represented in [these] comics were simple, often supporting the myth of American superiority and the enemy’s inferiority, and depicting imminent victory. The official doctrine of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was that the makers of popular culture should contribute with a form of propaganda that informed rather than inflamed. But comics writers were soon responding to the angry mood of the American people, and comic books became more hate-filled, depicting the representatives of the Axis as stereotypical villains.” (42)
There were surprisingly few 1942-dated comics devoted to overt propaganda, most publishers preferring to insinuate it into their existing titles and features (if and when they indulged in it at all). One of the first was Remember Pearl Harbor, a one-shot from Street & Smith released in February and thus prepared in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Its 45-page lead story by writer Otto Binder and artist Jack Binder recounted the raid and the double-dealing diplomacy leading up to it in vitriolic detail, backed by shorter pieces from Jack Farr and Winsor McKay, Jr. There was also War Victory Comics, sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department and edited by Lt. Alfred Harvey (U.S. Army). A collection of one-pagers extolling the virtues of recycling, it starred Superman, Dick Tracy, Blondie, Li’l Abner, Joe Palooka, The Green Hornet, and other characters from public-spirited comics publishers and syndication services, some reprinted from other comics. Buyers could
This animus was not distributed equitably. Nazis might be portrayed as crude thugs and Fascists as inept cowards, but there was little suggestion that these attributes were 125
Parents’ Magazine Press partnered with the Department of War Information to produce How Boys and Girls Can Help Win the War, while its other titles continued the reverential treatment of America and her fighting men that marked its pre-war output. TM and © respective copyright holder.
congratulate themselves on their patriotic sacrifice in paying 15¢ for a 32-page comic. Fittingly, few copies survived the scrap paper drives that claimed so many comic books of the 1940s.
ambitious new series, “The Story of America,” scripted by historian and “advisory editor” David S. Muzzey. So consistent were the contents of these titles that there was little sign of the editorial turnover behind the scenes. William L. Allen, who had replaced original editor David Marke the previous autumn, was gone following the April issues. His duties fell on G.G. Telfer, who substituted a letters column for Hecht’s editorials. This was undone as of the October issues, by which time the editor’s chair was occupied by Elliot Caplin, scripter of the King Features strip Dr. Bobbs and younger brother of Li’l Abner cartoonist Al Capp. Funnies, Inc., continued to package the contents, though studio owner Lloyd Jacquet was no longer co-credited with Ralph Ellsworth as Art Director in the masthead once Telfer took the reins.
How Boys and Girls Can Help Win the War was a 52-page one-shot published by Parents’ Magazine Press at the behest of the Department of War Information. The government could not have picked a better partner for the project, as not even the orneriest cynic could question the Parents’ Institute’s respectability or doubt where publisher George Hecht and his editorial staff stood. Most issues of the nowmonthly True Comics and the bi-monthly Real Heroes led off with a respectful, even worshipful biography of a major player in the American military hierarchy, including Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, WAAC director Oveta Culp Hobby, Jimmy Doolittle (“He Bombed Tokyo!”), Flying Tigers commander Claire Chennault, and the top dogs of the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. Readers were reminded of the sacrifices made by warriors and civilians alike in the name of freedom through stories culled from history (including a multi-issue account of George Washington during the French and Indian War) or torn from the headlines (“Three Men on a Raft,” “Breaking the Caribbean Spy Ring,” “1 Yank Against 18 Japs”). Sports stars in uniform like boxer Gene Tunney and baseball pitcher Bob Feller were spotlighted, as were medical pioneers (Louis Pasteur, Sister Elizabeth Kenny), aviators (test pilot Alma Heflin, airline pioneer Jack Knight), scientists (Thomas Edison, Sir Humphrey Davy), and entertainers past and present (Sabu, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Houdini, vaudevillian Eddie Foy). Pages were regularly set aside for coverage of the history and contemporary political leadership of Canada, Mexico, and other neighbors. As the war progressed, the line became more international in scope, adding biographies of Allied heroes like Chinese resistance fighter Ma Ma Mosquito, Yugoslav guerilla leader Draja Mihailovich, and a martyred Soviet partisan known only as Tanya. The November issue of True (#18) premiered an
Sister title Calling All Girls displayed a similar consistency. Still edited by Frances Ullman, fewer pages were set aside for comics than in earlier issues in favor of longer articles, more photo features, and a serialized mystery credited to “Nancy Drew” author Carolyn Keene (actually a house name used by many writers over the decades). What comics remained were typical Funnies, Inc., offerings. Biographies of heroines like French journalist Eve Curie (daughter of Nobel medalists Marie and Pierre) and Red Army sharpshooter Lt. Liudmila Pavlichenko appeared alongside regular features “Judy Wing,” about an air hostess earning her pilot’s license, and “The Youngtown Younger Set,” starring a squeaky-clean band of civic-minded teens. Parents’ was not above reusing material to enhance its bottom line. The first post-Pearl Harbor issue of Real Heroes, for example, featured bios of FDR, Churchill, Chiang KaiShek, George C. Marshall, and others reprinted from earlier issues of True Comics. The publisher also released Comics Digest and True Aviation Comics Digest, both one-shots collecting stories from the standard format titles. The 16-page Extra, a giveaway issued late in the year, spotlighted the wartime contributions of corporate giants such as 126
nobody would notice the absence of Jack and Joe. Action-packed though these stories were, they inevitably fell short of the promise of the epic cover art of Alex Schomburg, on which Timely’s triumvirate of super-stars, enlarged to gargantuan proportions, waded through detailed scenes of combat, German and Japanese troops swarming around their ankles like so many ants to be stepped on. The symbolism was inescapable. Captain America Comics, Goodman’s top-selling title, began the year with a final bow from Simon and Kirby. With the February issue (#12), the scripting
chores were divvied up among editor Lee and freelancers Otto Binder, Ed Herron, and Manly Wade Wellman, with Al Avison handling the art. Joe and Jack had established a firm yet flexible formula for the strip that their replacements could readily imitate, often quite successfully. The star-spangled sentinel and kid sidekick Bucky faced a steady stream of bizarre villains like The Hooded Horror, The Crocodile, The Vampire, The Eraser, The Yellow Claw, The Mad Mikado, The Vulture, Dr. Crime, and arch-foe The Red Skull. Two stories in Captain America #19 (October)
Inspiring stories like that of aeronautical engineer Elsie McGill were what Parents Magazine’s comics did best. TM and © respective copyright holder.
Bethlehem Steel, RCA, and Westinghouse, stories running concurrently in early 1943-dated issues of True. For all their patriotic fervor, the Parents’ line avoided outright jingoism. There was little of the sensationalism or racial hostility other publishing houses were indulging in. If their presentation of history and current affairs remained simplistic and parochial, George Hecht’s comics had sincerity on their side. At their best, they presented inspirational portraits of people overcoming extraordinary challenges, people like polio-stricken aeronautical engineer Elsie McGill and Morris Frank, the first American to use a seeing-eye dog. But sincerity and good intentions did not necessarily translate into sales. Parents’ Magazine Press remained a minor player within the industry.
Martin Goodman Cuts the Cord It was sometimes difficult in the first days of the war to tell the difference between patriotism and opportunism. Timely Publications owner Martin Goodman, never one to shy away from milking a trend, straddled that line. His decision to fire editor Joe Simon and art director Jack Kirby rather than pay them the royalties they were promised cost his line the industry’s hottest creators. The publisher and Simon’s teenage successor Stan Lee filled their pages with violent fantasies of Captain America, Sub-Mariner, The Human Torch, and their other super-heroes besting hordes of Axis opponents in the hope
The cover art Alex Schomburg created for Martin Goodman’s comics bore a deliberate resemblance to the government’s propaganda posters. TM and © Marvel Characters Inc.
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Exciting action scenes like this double-page spread by Al Avison helped “Captain America” fans get over the loss of Simon & Kirby.
TM and © Marvel Characters Inc.
tryouts, the third slot was filled by alternating episodes of “The Human Torch” and “Sub-Mariner.”
stood out from the pack. The first, “Your Life Depends on It,” was four pages of Cap lecturing reader surrogate Bucky that “it is the duty of every American to buy war stamps and bonds” if they were to end “the menace of hate and oppression, of tyranny and evil which is sweeping over the world!” In the second, “On to Berlin!,” the flag-draped duo led a combined force of British commandos and American Rangers behind enemy lines to rescue a captive general, one of the rare times this year Cap entered the war zone and easily the most exciting. This was the capstone of Avison’s run. Shortly after completing the issue, he was drafted. Stepping in was the title’s longtime inker Sydney “Syd” Shores, who drew a handful of episodes before he too received his orders. It was neither the first nor last time the military laid claim to Timely’s creative talent.
The fire- and water-themed stars of Marvel Mystery Comics and its quarterly spin-offs Human Torch and Sub-Mariner Comics also faced the loss of their creators, as Subby’s Bill Everett and the Torch’s Carl Burgos, both now working directly for Goodman following a falling out with Lloyd Jacquet, were called up by the Navy and Army, respectively. Everett’s last story ran in Marvel Mystery #31 (May), Burgos’ in #34 (August). Don Dixon and the Hidden Empire artist Carl Pfuefer took over the art on “Sub-Mariner,” with scripts by Mickey Spillane and Jacquet himself, writing as “Elvy Jay.” Colorful foes like The Ghost, The Fox, and The Flying Dutchman were deemphasized after Everett’s
The back pages of Captain America Comics saw more radical changes, as “Hurricane,” “Father Time,” and “Headline Hunter” were all discontinued in the early spring. Their places were filled by “The Secret Stamp,” a strip commissioned by the Treasury Department about a teenage paper carrier who donned cape and identity-concealing helmet to oppose black marketeers while nattering endlessly about purchasing war stamps, and “The Imp,” starring a cute little genie who lived in his master’s left ear until summoned. Created and drawn by Chad Grothkopf and told entirely in greeting card-style doggerel by Stan Lee, the adventures of the adorably antennaed magicmaker were clearly aimed at younger readers. Following a handful of unsuccessful
For his final “Human Torch” story before entering the Navy, creator Carl Burgos wrote himself, Martin Goodman, and other Timely staffers into the strip. TM and © Marvel Characters Inc.
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Visualized was a 48-page giveaway printed on glossy paper. The first issue (#1051, renumbered 2051 for its second printing) covered the life of Jesus from the Annunciation to the Calling of the Twelve, the second his ministry, the third the entry into Jerusalem through the Ascension. The artwork was stunning, each panel beautifully composed and executed, the watercolor coloring reproduced with all its subtleties intact. Like Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, the unknown creators avoided the use of word balloons and sound effects, preferring to embed the typeset text—all either directly quoting or paraphrasing the Gospels—into the panels. Distributed to Sunday schools and available through mail order, Life of Christ must have proven popular, as Standard would periodically publish similar comics over the next five years.
A Winning Combination of Winning Combinations Uptown at Detective Comics, AA co-owner Jack Leibowitz and partner Harry Donenfeld were celebrating the arrival of the red-hot team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Freed of the editorial responsibilities they bore under Martin Goodman, the duo’s already-stellar work got even better. The strips they turned out for DC featured tighter plotting, better scripting, livelier characterization, and more humor and charm than their Timely and Novelty Press material while retaining the elements that made them superstars of the medium: lightning-fast pacing, grotesque villains, exciting fight scenes, and Kirby’s dynamic figure work. Their first assignment at Detective was to take over two Adventure Comics series, beginning with “The Sandman” in issue #72 (March). Jack and Joe tweaked the new costume recently given Wesley Dodd’s masked alter ego, gave him a sleek roadster inevitably dubbed The Sandmobile, reset the series in fictional York City, and built their stories on the twin themes of sleep and dreams. Sandman no longer used sleeping gas or sprinkled sand as a calling card. Now he left a poem: “There is no land beyond the law Where tyrants rule with unshakeable power, It’s a dream from which the Evil wake To face their fate… their terrifying hour” The earlier gas-masked Sandman had fought mostly banal gangster types and an occasional masked mastermind. Simon and Kirby opted to have the Master of Dreams and his teenaged ward Sandy square off against colorful antagonists such as Professor Hiram Gaunt, a.k.a. The Human Calculator, who found a way to unlock the untapped potential of the human brain; Thor, actually a rogue metallurgist named Fairy-Tales Fenton armed with a “magic hammer” that was a marvel of electronic engineering; Mr. Noah, a doomsday prophet with his own ark and a crew of talking animals; and the green-skinned Nightshade, whose forest of monstrous plants nearly meant the end of the goldencostumed crimebusters. While comics fans since the 1970s have preferred the original pulp-flavored version, audiences of the ‘40s went nuts over Simon and Kirby’s reboot. By Adventure #74 (May), this new Sandman had reclaimed the cover spotlight from “Starman” and earned a regular berth in World’s Finest
When Simon & Kirby took on the recently redesigned “Sandman,” they gave his adventures the same breathless pacing that took “Captain America” to the height of popularity. Their rethink of “Manhunter” was less successful. TM and © DC Comics.
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super-hero series “Lightning” in Jumbo #42 (August). Bob Hebbard illustrated the exploits of private investigator Drew Murdoch, who specialized in hauntings, werewolves, and other supernatural phenomena. Two long-running characters in Jungle Comics received makeovers at the hands of new artists. “Fantomah” went from “Mystery Woman of the Jungle” to “Daughter of the Pharaohs” when George Appel took over the feature’s art in issue #27 (March). Her superpowers long forgotten, the blonde in the Despite paper rationing, Fiction House tattered one-piece became a added two quarterlies to its schedule redhead dressed in the garb of in 1942, giving “Sheena, Queen of the Egyptian royalty after discover- Jungle” and “Wambi, Jungle Boy” their own solo titles. Sheena TM and © Galaxy ing she was the rightful queen Publishing and Valdoro Entertainment. of the lost city of Khefre. The of the Lost Empire” changes to “Tabu, Wizard of the Junwent through mulgle” when artist Saul Rosen took over tiple changes at the for George Carl Wilhelms were only drawing table before slightly less drastic: the white savage Nick Viscardi picked with the short blonde hair now had up the assignment long black hair tied with a red headwith the September band, his cape was gone, and his wizissue (#33), giving the lost world strip ardry reduced to an ill-defined “sixth the best art of its run. The cancellasense.” Cover star “Kaänga” was safe tions of “The Red Panther” and “Roy from such tinkering, his Tarzanesque Lance” following Jungle #26 (Februadventures still illustrated by Dan ary) meant more pages for Kaänga, Zolnerowich, occasionally spelled by Tabu, and “Wambi, Jungle Boy.” The various Iger staffers. “Camilla, Queen Henry Kiefer-drawn feature, consistently the highlight of the book, was awarded its own title late in the year after sales on a Spring-dated Wambi Comics one-shot proved there was an audience to support it.
a cowardly desk jockey by his men despite fighting alongside them as the no-longer-masked Wings. “Jane Martin” gave up nursing in Wings #27 (November) after being recruited by British intelligence, dropping the “War Nurse” part of the series’ title. “The Parachute Patrol” and “The Phantom Falcons” were replaced by a pair of strips drawn by Pagsilang Isip, “Calhoun of the Air Cadets” and the non-fiction “Yank Aces of World War II.”
The third Fiction House monthly, Wings Comics, continued to suffer from the same incessant artistic turnover that had plagued it the previous year, though the built-in appeal of a war title in wartime kept readers coming back regardless. Only Joe Doolin’s “Suicide Smith,” Arthur Peddy’s “Skull Squad,” and Al Walker’s “Greasemonkey Griffin” were immune to the syndrome. With mystery-men out of fashion, “Captain Wings” got a new backstory in the July issue (#23). Now he was Capt. Adam Boggs, an RAF ace grounded after a bout of altitude sickness. Put in command of the HellDiver Squadron, he was considered
Planet Comics, too, seemed unable to keep artists on the same strips for more than three or four months at a stretch, with “Flint Baker,” “Reef Ryan,” and “Gale Allen and the Girl Squadron” the chief victims. The scifi jungle series “Auro, Lord of Jupiter” changed hands as of the July issue (#19), Rafael Astarita replacing Sy Reit, while George Appel settled in on “Star Pirate” two issues earlier. Only Al Walker, artist of “Norge Benson,” stuck out all six 1942-dated issues. The January Planet (#16) premiered a new series. “Mars, God of War” was set in the future, where the titular deity tried to foment war between Earth
A new feature in Planet Comics, “Mars, God of War” combined classical mythology with space opera. TM and © respective copyright holder.
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Relax: Read the Comics! The question of when the war would end could not yet be answered, but by the summer of 1943 it was becoming evident to all but the most dedicated pessimist which side was going to win. Costly but critical Allied victories on three fronts shattered the myth of Axis invincibility. The Japanese Empire, which claimed nearly a tenth of the planet’s surface, had banked on the United States’ commitment to the Allies’ “Europe first” strategy to delay the Yanks long enough to make its stranglehold on East Asia and the Western Pacific irreversible. Had Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and his fellow militarists known that American cryptographers had cracked the Empire’s top secret Purple Code, they would have realized the futility of that hope. A costly-for-Japan stalemate at the Battle of the Coral Sea the previous May and the Battle of Midway a month later, which cost the Imperial Navy four aircraft carriers and the 248 planes aboard them, forced the warlords to dig in their heels, switch strategies, and contest control of their conquests island by island. The Allies’ six-monthlong effort to clear the island of Guadalcanal made it clear that Japanese troops, indoctrinated to consider surrender dishonorable, would resist their advance to the last man. The folks back home got a measure of revenge on April 18 when the airplane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned and oversaw the raid on Pearl Harbor, was shot down, his whereabouts betrayed by intercepted code messages. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Casablanca, Morocco, in January to discuss their next move following the reclamation of French Africa from its Nazi and Fascist overlords. Despite an unsettling rout at February’s Battle of Kasserine Pass, armored infantry commanded by Gen. George S. Patton teamed with British forces led by Lt. Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery four months later to trap Rommel and his Afrika Korps between them, costing Germany and Italy over a quarter million troops dead or captured. Another 300,000 German casualties fell during the five-month siege of Stalingrad, as much victims of Adolf Hitler’s delusions of grandeur—Der Führer refused to heed the warnings of his military staff—as of the Russians severing their supply lines. The Soviets desperately wanted the Allies to open a second front on Germany’s western flank, but had to settle for the strategy Churchill and Roosevelt agreed on at the Casablanca summit: a drive through the Third Reich’s underbelly by way of Italy. Meanwhile, the once-feared 176
The Paper Chase D-Day.
IF
It is now as much the stuff of legend as of history. On June 6, 1944, over 156,000 American, British, Canadian, and ANZAC troops participated in the largest amphibious assault of all time, storming the beaches of Normandy. After months of planning and preparation, the Allies had finally begun their invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europa. Just two days before, American forces under Gen. Mark Clark captured Rome. This was welcome news in the hardpressed Soviet Union, where the two-year siege of Leningrad had at last been lifted and the Red Army was busy recapturing the Crimean Peninsula from the Germans. In the Pacific, the Empire of Japan continued to lose ground, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps taking the Marshall and Admiralty Islands, laying waste to the enemy’s warships, and establishing an airbase in the Aleutians from which to launch bombing raids on the Japanese homeland. None of were easyTHIS victories, each claiming the lives thouYOUthese ENJOYED PREVIEW, CLICK THEofLINK sands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, but victories they BELOW TO ORDER THIS BOOK! were nevertheless. The war was far from over but its end was no longer a distant dream.
AMERICAN COMIC BOOK CHRONICLES: 1940-1944
As the United Nations continued to hammer at the edges of Axis territory, the availability of certain resources became of critical importance to the war effort. This included pulp paper and two key ingredients in its manufacture, chlorine and sulphur. Comic book publishing houses found their newsprint quotas lowered once again, this time to 75% of their 1942 levels. This triggered a new round of cancellations, reduced The American Comic Book Chroniclesfrequencies, continues its am- and cut page counts. A new bitious series of FULL-COLOR standard ofHARDCOVERS, 52 pages where for aTwodime swept across the indusMorrows’ toptry, authors document decade of comic with onlyevery a fraction still offering 60 pages when their book history from the 1940s to today! KURT F. MITCHELL issues arrived at newsstands. Despite this and consultantDecember-dated ROY THOMAS composed this volume (and, paradoxically, because of it), the industry was still about the “Golden Age” of the comic book industry, a five-year period that presentedEvery the earliest adventures booming. comic book publisher in business at the of such iconic super-heroes as Batman, Captain Marvel, end of 1943 was still in business a year later. Detective/AllSuperman, and Wonder Woman. It was a time when America’s entry into World War II was presaged American, Dell, Fawcett, Eastern Color, and by the arrival of such patriotic do-gooders as Will Eisner’s Uncle Sam, HarryNovelty Shorten andPress, Irv Novick’s The Shield, and Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Press, Captain America. It was whenofteenage culture found Parents’ Magazine as divisions larger publishing expression in aempires fumbling red-haired high school named Archie Andrews. But distributors, most of all, the or affiliates ofstudent major printers and/or first five years of the 1940s was the age of the “packagers” when studios headed by men like Harry A were assured of a reliable supply of paper. Several compaChesler, Will Eisner, and Jerry Iger churned out material for a plethora of new comic book companies followed leadanimal in diverting paper tojungle their comthat publishednies the entire gamut of Timely’s genres, from funny stories to crime tales to sagas to science-fictionics adventures. These arepulp just a few of theas events chronicled this exhaustive,to full-color from their lines, pulp sales incontinued slump hardcover. Taken together, American Comic Book Chronicles forms a cohesive, linear overview of the in the face of competition from paperback books. For most entire landscape of comics history, sure to be an invaluable resource for ANY comic book enthusiast! players in the industry, it was a year$ of stability. Fawcett, FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) 45.95 Fiction(288-page House, Parents’, Eastern Color, Family, Crestwood, ISBN: 978-1-60549-089-2 • (Digital Edition) $15.95 • Diamond Order Code: FEB192024 and Novelty Press neither cancelled nor launched a title in http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=95_94&products_id=1404 1944. Minor lines like Hillman, Et-Es-Go, and Ace were able to juggle their quotas judiciously enough to add new books to their schedules. 230