To our recently departed comic book historian colleagues: Bob Beerbohm, Roger Hill, Bill Schelly, Jim Vadeboncouer, and Mike Voiles.
Editors:
Contributing Writers:
Logo Design:
Layout/Design:
Proofreading:
Cover Design:
Publisher:
Keith Dallas and John Wells
Kurt Mitchell and Richard Arndt
(from an outline provided by Bill Schelly)
Bill Walko
David Paul Greenawalt
Kevin Sharp
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.
World War Two, the most destructive conflict in human history, was finally winding down. The once-mighty coalition of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and fascist Italy was fragmenting, as the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and other members of the alliance known as the United Nations continued their assault on Axis territory. A desperate attempt to turn back the Allied invasion forces at the month-long Battle of the Bulge ended with the ignominious retreat of German troops from France in late January, while to the east the Red Army wrested Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania from Nazi control. In the Pacific theater, the Japanese were being slowly forced out of the occupied territories, sacrificing tens of thousands of fighting men in the Battles of Manila, Corregidor, and Iwo Jima. Allied air forces now ruled the skies, inflicting terrible destruction on military and civilian targets alike. The firebombing of Dresden in February claimed 25,000 lives. A similar attack on Tokyo a month later killed 100,000 and left over a million homeless. If the folks on the Home Front had any qualms about the severity of these raids, they put them aside as word began to leak out of the atrocities uncovered during the liberation of the concentration camps where the Nazis had come uncomfortably close to achieving their genocidal “Final Solution.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin met in Yalta on the Crimean peninsula in February to discuss the future, issuing a Declaration of Liberated Europe that promised “the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people.” Of critical importance to Roosevelt was a pledge obtained from Stalin that the USSR would enter the war against Japan as soon as Germany surrendered, a pledge conservative second-guessers later claimed Stalin used to manipulate the exhausted, fragile president into inadvertently greenlighting the Soviets’ postwar stranglehold on Eastern Europe.
When the Allied leaders conferred at Yalta in February, they could not have known it was their last meeting. By the Potsdam conference in July, Anthony Eden had defeated Winston Churchill at the polls and Harry Truman had succeeded the deceased Franklin Roosevelt. Only Josef Stalin remained of the “Big Three.”
One by one, the Axis dictators fell. On April 28, Benito Mussolini was summarily executed by Italian partisans as he tried to escape with his mistress to Switzerland. Il Duce’s corpse was hung upside down from a lamppost, his former subjects standing in line for a chance to jeer at and spit on the once-feared Fascist leader. Two days later, with Russian troops on the outskirts of Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the underground bunker where the mad Führer had been hiding for weeks (though rumors of his survival and escape persisted for decades afterward). But Americans took little joy in the deaths of Mussolini and Hitler, for they were preoccupied with a catastrophic loss of their own.
On April 12, while vacationing at Warm Springs, Georgia, FDR suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He died that evening. Though his doctors had long feared something like this would happen, it was a shock to the nation that had elected Roosevelt to an unprecedented fourth term just six months before. America had lost more than its head of state, more than its commander-in-chief. FDR redefined the relationship between the governing and the governed, ushering in a new era of federal paternalism through such radical innovations as Social Security and unemployment insurance. To many Americans, it was inconceivable that this political titan, the only president an entire generation had ever known, was gone, that they would never again hear his voice over their radios, that he would not see the country through to final victory. And no one was more shocked and dismayed at this turn of events than his successor, Harry S. Truman. Summoned to the White House without explanation, the new vice-president—Roosevelt’s third— had no idea of what awaited him:
“[T]he long black car turned off Pennsylvania [Avenue], through the northwest gate, and swept up the drive, stopping under the North Portico. The time was 5:25. Two ushers were waiting at the door. They took his hat and escorted him to a small, oak-paneled elevator... that ascended now very slowly to
the second floor. In the private quarters, ... in her dressing room, Mrs. Roosevelt was waiting. [She] stepped forward and gently put her arm on Truman’s shoulder. ‘Harry, the President is dead.’ Truman was unable to speak. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he said at last. ‘Is there anything we can do for you,’ she said. ‘For you are the one in trouble now’” (McCullough 342).
The new president was nothing like the charismatic, patrician Roosevelt. The son of middle-class farm folk, a captain of artillery during the First World War, Truman had risen through the ranks of one of the most corrupt political machines in the U.S without being personally tainted by the association. As the junior senator from Missouri, he had quickly distinguished himself through hard work and uncompromising integrity. But nobody in the Democratic Party had expected him to actually become president, and few believed he was up to the task. Nonetheless, it was Truman who presided over the celebration of V-E Day in May, Truman who went toe-to-toe with Stalin and new British Prime Minister Anthony Eden at the final Allied conference in Potsdam two months later, and Truman who made the fateful decision to use a new weapon, the end product of the top-secret Manhattan Project, that would not only bring the war to an abrupt and dramatic end but make America the first global superpower. The war officially ended on September 2, 1945 (following the Japanese Empire’s surrender on August 14), but you’d never know it from America’s
comic books. The time lag between production and publication meant that comics cover-dated December went on sale in October and featured content created in July or August. Thus, few comics bearing a 1945 date acknowledged the war’s end. Indeed, many of these comics didn’t acknowledge Germany’s surrender on May 8 either and Nazi villains continued to prowl some lines’ pages for months afterward. It would be well into 1946 before WWII was finally in the comic book industry’s rear-view mirror.
The Best Years of Their Lives
The industry as of January 1, 1945 consisted of eight major publishing houses (those releasing 50 or more issues a year), 15 minor lines (12 to 49 issues), and a score of small companies, with 32 additional publishers joining them by year’s end. More than a thousand comic books were released this year, the raison d’etre of a complex skein of business, personal, and familial relationships among publishers, printers, distributors, and commercial art studios. Looking back from the 21st century, where comic books are a niche product available primarily in specialty stores, it can be difficult to fathom how popular— and profitable—they once were. By ’45, one out of every three periodicals sold in the U.S. was a comic book. Small wonder that so many newcomers were clamoring to jump onboard this gravy train.
As it had been from its birth in the mid-’30s, the industry was located primarily in the New York metropolitan area, with outliers in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, and elsewhere. This reality was obscured at times by publishers whose legal business
TIMELINE: 1945
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.)
April
Pacific Theater of World War II.
April 12: President Roosevelt dies at the age of 63 of a cerebral hemorrhage while posing for a portrait at a resort in Warm Springs, Georgia. He is succeeded by the vice president, Harry S. Truman.
March 31: Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie opens on Broadway after premiering in Chicago the previous year. The drama about a dysfunctional Southern family will win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play of the year.
May 8: Victory in Europe Day (or V-E Day) is commemorated as the Allies officially accept Germany’s unconditional surrender. In a radio address President Truman announces that the war in Europe has ended.
July 20: Comic book creator Jack Kirby is honorably discharged from the U.S. Army, having earned a Bronze Star and Combat Infantryman Badge for his service during World War II. He reunites with his longtime creative partner, Joe Simon, once the latter is discharged from the United States Coast Guard.
June 7: A backup story written and drawn by Bill Woggon in Archie Comics’ Wilbur Comics #5 introduces Katy Keene, “the Pin-Up Queen.” The object of affection of countless boys, Katy Keene will soon become Archie Comics’ second-most popular property. JANUARY
February 23: Four days after landing on the Japanese-occupied island of Iwo Jima, the U.S. Marines capture Mount Suribachi. A photograph of six Marines raising the U.S. flag on top of the mountain becomes one of the most iconic images of World War II.
address was actually that of their out-of-state printer, a ploy designed to bypass New York City’s stringent tax code. MLJ, Family, Creston, Continental, Orbit, and Four Star, for example, all used 420 DeSoto Avenue in St. Louis, the home of World Color Press, as their legal address, though their executive and editorial offices were all in Manhattan. Another common practice was using different corporate identities for the comics in a publisher’s line to minimize taxes and ensure that the failure of one title couldn’t bring down the rest. Publisher Martin Goodman released 36 titles in 1945 under 31 different names (including one that wouldn’t become the company’s legal name until 1973: Marvel Comics). To compound the confusion, some players in the industry had their fingers in multiple pies, as in the case of Ben Sangor, who not only owned half-interest in Creston and his son-in-law Ned Pines’ Better/Standard/Nedor group but also owned the studio that pack-
aged their contents. Making sense of it all is not for the faint of heart.
The larger publishing houses—Quality, DC, Timely, All-American, Dell— either maintained an “in-house” creative staff or dealt directly with freelance artists and writers. Others contracted with packaging services like Sangor’s to provide part or all of their content. Such art studios created features, fillers, covers, whatever a client needed, the quality of the work frequently dependent on what page rate the client was willing to pay. Sometimes it worked the other way around, with the studio selling small publishing firms on the idea of starting a line of comics. This practice reached its peak in 1945, as services like Funnies, Inc., the Bernard Baily and L.B. Cole studios, and newcomer Jason Comic Art lent their talents to some 30-odd first-time comics publishers, many of them managing to eke out only a single issue before
April 30: As Soviet troops surround Berlin, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler commits suicide by shooting himself in the head in his subterranean bunker. The previous day he had married his longtime companion Eva Braun who also kills herself by ingesting a cyanide capsule.
April 28: One day after being captured, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is executed by Communist partisans.
to stay in business despite wartime restrictions, some shops were less than particular about who they did business with. It is hard to say if they knew the comics they were creating were printed on black market newsprint but they apparently had plausible deniability. When the federal government began cracking down on the shadiest publishers in February, those responsible for the content on display within those illicit pages escaped any legal consequences.
The temptation to violate the federal government’s Limitation Order L-244, which held existing publishers to 75% of their 1942 usage and denied paper altogether to any publisher not in business in ’42, was considerable. The demand for comic books outweighed the limited supply. As comics historian Will Murray notes in his seminal study “Black Market Comics of the Golden Age”:
“During World War II, comic books sold like never before or
going under. In their desperation
January 27: The Soviet army liberates the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Between 1940 and 1945, over a million prisoners, mostly Jews, died in the camp, either via gas chambers, starvation, disease or executions.
February 4: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Union Premier Josef Stalin meet in Yalta, Ukraine to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe.
March 3: Courtesy of the Mutual Broadcasting System, Superman meets Batman and Robin for the first time… over the radio waves at least.
1: Allied forces launch “Operation Iceberg” as over 150,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines invade the Japanese island of Okinawa. It is the largest amphibious assault in the
August 2: U.S. President Harry Truman, Soviet Union Premier Josef Stalin and British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee conclude their two week meeting in Potsdam, Germany to establish Europe’s postwar order. Among other things, the leaders agree to separate Germany into four occupied zones.
July 30: On its way back to the Philippines after delivering components of the first uranium bomb, the naval cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis is
by a Japanese submarine. Of the 900 crewmen who jump into the shark-infested sea, only 317 survive after being adrift for four days. In the history of the U.S. Navy, it is the greatest loss of life at sea from a single ship.
August 6: The Enola Gay, a U.S. Air Force bomber, drops a uranium bomb (named “Little Boy”) over Hiroshima, Japan. The nuclear detonation destroys the city, killing approximately 140,000 soldiers and civilians.
August 9: Bockscar, a U.S. Air Force bomber, drops a plutonium bomb (named “Fat Man”) over Nagasaki, Japan. The nuclear detonation destroys most of the city, killing approximately 74,000 people, mostly civilians.
August 14: Victory over Japan Day (or V-J Day) is commemorated as President Truman announces that Japan has surrendered unconditionally.
August 17: George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm is published in England. The political allegory satirizes the Soviet Union through a group of farm animals who rebel against their owner to create a free and equal society that turns out to be anything but.
September 2: World War II officially ends.
August 10: The creation of cartoonist Ruth Atkinson, aspiring model
series will become Marvel Comics’ longest-running humor title, lasting until 1973.
since. Kids loved them. Adults read them. Soldiers in battlefields from Europe to the Pacific devoured them. Both Superman and Batman peaked at over 1,600,000 copies [per issue] sold, with Captain Marvel not far behind at 1,300,000 per issue. It was a true Golden Age, for profit-hungry publishers as well as for readers. There was only one problem: Paper” (28).
The availability of newsprint meant the difference between success and ruin for a comics line. The major players, and many of the minor ones, were either divisions of larger publishing houses or had ties to printing or distribution firms, assuring them a steady, albeit reduced, supply of newsprint. Other companies diverted paper meant for their pulp magazines—the popularity of paperback books had bled off a significant portion of the pulp audience— to their better-selling comics. Some turned to proxy publishers, who traded their name and excess paper for a cut of the proceeds. Still, accommodations had to be made. At the beginning of the decade, the standard comic book had been 68 pages (including covers) for a dime. By 1945, only one newsstand comic—Holyoke’s Sparkling Stars—
November: Students of Saints Peter and Paul School in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin perform a comic-book burning after a school-sponsored collection drive amassed over 1500 copies.
November 21: In a story written by Otto Binder and drawn by C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza, the first issue of Fawcett Comics’ The Marvel Family introduces Black Adam, an ancient Egyptian who was corrupted by the powers Shazam bestowed upon him.
December 21: General George Patton, who commanded the U.S. Third Army after the Allied invasion of Normandy, dies at the age of 60 in Heidelberg, Germany, of injuries from an automobile accident.
remained that size. Quality maintained its line at 60 pages, but most of the other houses had settled on 52 pages as the new industry standard. Timely’s monthlies were this standard size, but its quarterlies were a slim 36 pages. The Fawcett and Fox lines offered nothing but 36-pagers.
Precious as those pages were, many publishers willingly sacrificed them to make up some of the revenue lost to restricted print runs. While advertising had been common on the inside and back covers at the start of the decade, interior pages were entirely devoted to creative content
Millie Collins is introduced in the first issue of Millie the Model Comics. The
save for the occasional “house ad” touting the publisher’s other titles. Now, not only were ads becoming routine, many of them took the form of a comic strip. Joining “Captain Tootsie,” produced by the Beck-Costanza Studio for Tootsie Roll, on the newstands this year were “Volto from Mars” (Grape-Nuts cereal), “Adventures of ‘R.C.’ and Quickie” (Royal Crown Cola), and “Thom McAn” (Thom McAn shoes). More followed over the next few years. Promotional comic books like Western Printing’s Omar Book of Comics, a subscription-only premium for a chain of midwestern bakeries, were also becoming increasingly common, and would become more so once restrictions were lifted. Unfortunately, many of these esoteric titles have been casualties of paper drives and the passage of time so that, in some cases, not a single copy has survived down to the present day. Coverage of such ephemera in these pages must, of necessity, be incomplete.
As the war dragged on into the spring, restrictions were tightened once again. Dell, Fiction House, Eastern Color, United Feature, McKay, Ace, Family, and Chesler had no choice but to reduce their comics to 36 pages, while DC, Magazine House, Parents’ Magazine, All-American, Street & Smith, Novelty Press, MLJ, Rural Home, Hillman, and
Crestwood maintained their lines at 52. There was talk around the industry that some publishers were getting preferential treatment. Still, it was hard to complain when entire print runs were selling out regardless of content or quality.
O, Pioneers!
In the beginning was Famous Funnies.
The first modern format comic book distributed through newsstands and other retail outlets, Famous Funnies was by 1945 the longest running title in America. Originally a “one-shot” jointly published in 1934 by Dell Publishing and the Eastern Color Printing Company of Waterbury, Connecticut, the subsequent ongoing series was produced without Dell’s participation. As it had from the beginning, Famous Funnies featured reprints of syndicated strips, notably Philip Nowlan and Richard Calkins’ space opera “Buck Rogers,” the aviation strip “Scorchy Smith,” Russell Stamm’s pseudo-superheroine “Invisible Scarlett O’Neil,” Coulton Waugh’s boys’ adventure series “Dickie Dare,” and a half-dozen others. When the title dropped from 52 to 36 pages with its July issue (#132), several lesser strips were dropped and remained gone when it returned to 52 pages at the end of the year.
In addition to the monthly Famous Funnies, Eastern Color published two bi-monthlies nominally edited by Harold J. Moore but actually assembled under the supervision of art director Stephen A. Douglas. The elder of these titles was Heroic Comics. Originally divided almost equally between newspaper strip reprints and original material, Heroic was now down to only one reprinted strip, Russell Keaton’s “Flying Jenny.” It was dropped following issue #31 (July), a victim of the mandated reduction in pages. Also taking his last bow in that same issue was “Hydroman,” a mysteryman able to transform himself into various forms of water, who dated back to the book’s earliest days. Preceding him into comics limbo were the title’s other costumed crusaders, “Man o’ Metal” and “The Music Master.” They were replaced by two new strips that survived the switch to 36 pages. Charles A. “Chuck” Winter’s “Vitaman, the Boy with the B1 Complex” was a mildly funny farce about a dimwitted, vitamin-gulping, would-be superhero. The boxing strip “The Kid from Brooklyn” starred young artist Hal Every, who reluctantly took up prizefighting to pay for his ailing mother’s medical bills. It was the work of Woodrow “Woody” Gelman, a former animator who would go on to become a major player in the fields of advertising—he created the Popsicle Pete and Bazooka Joe characters—and, in the 1960s, publishing as the guiding spirit behind Nostalgia Press. In addition to such true war stories as “I Seen My Duty and Done It,” “Auf Weidersehn in Berlin,” “The Story of the Japanese G.I.,” and “504 Nazis at One Clip,” every issue of Heroic Comics included a featurette by Charles Bange called “What Do You Know About...?” covering such topics as parachutes, maps, weather forecasting, and the new jet airplanes.
Alternating with Heroic on newsstands, Jingle Jangle Comics was its antithesis in tone and style. Offering a variety of humor and fantasy strips aimed at young children and the adults who read to them, the book’s
title, Patches, was unusual in being devoted to a single character from cover to cover. Patches was the teenage scion of a poor but illustrious family who spent his time rescuing old women from house fires, leading his basketball team to the district championship, and struggling to choose between his hometown girlfriend and a glamorous teen starlet. Maurice Whitman and Ezra Jackson drew this wholesome paragon’s virtuous feats from a script by the pseudonymous B. Kerman.
This quartet of comics was the entirety of Cole’s work for Rural Home, but two of its titles wound up continuing under other publishers. Gail Hillson published a second, undated issue of Eagle Comics, adding a few fictional flyers to the book’s menu of aviation-themed features. Rudy Palais wielded the pen and brush for “Lucky Aces,” the saga of four World War I fighter pilots reuniting to take on the Axis. “Barnstorming Barnes and Jenny” were a heand-she team of stunt flyers, their adventures illustrated by Tony Di Preta. Patches also got a new lease on life as the first comic published by Rae Hermann under the corporate identity of Ray R. Herman. The title feature, now drawn by
the team of George Harrison and Theresa “Terry” Woik, had morphed into a teen humor strip with no connection to its Rural Home incarnation. Patches would run for a total of ten issues under Herman, but Eagle was grounded after its single Hillson-published issue.
Another client of questionable legitimacy was Narrative Publishers, a Chicago-based outfit for whom the studio produced four undated issues of Power Comics The first two issues offered the same kind of bland, generic material that characterized the contents of Mask Comics #1. The following two made the connection clearer, as “The Black Raider” and “Merlin the Boy Magician” returned to the newsstands, joined by “Dr. Mephisto” and “Miss Espionage,” Mata Hari’s daughter who, trained to serve the Third Reich, shifted her allegiance to the democracies, one of the few strips published in 1945 that reflected the new mood of postwar uncertainty.
Two additional Chicago area publishers with experience in black market comics solicited an issue apiece from the Cole shop this year. The Spotlight released Gem Comics #1 with an April cover date. Its highlights included Manny Stallman’s “Mr. and Mrs. Lane,” husband-and-wife sleuths in the Thin Man vein; Jack Warren’s “Little Mohee,” a young white girl adopted by Indians who could speak to animals; and “Steve Strong,” two-fisted investigator for the International Geographic Society. Less typical of the studio’s output was Toytown Comics, published by Swapper’s Quarterly and Almanac. Its sole feature was “Mertie Mouse,” the multi-chaptered story of lazy layabout Mertie and his adventures en route to plead with the terrible Storm King for more time to pay his hometown’s delinquent taxes. The most interesting of Mertie’s friends and foes was Bertie Bat, a scary but good-hearted fellow who looked a lot like a funny animal Batman. Partly drawn by Cole himself, with Ellis Chambers pencilling the later chapters, Toytown might have sold well had it not, like Gem Comics and most of the other illicit comics mentioned, been swept up by the government and warehoused until after the war.
What all these comics, legal and otherwise, had in common was the dazzling cover art of L.B. Cole. Whether depicting warplanes in conflict, leering villains, or reluctantly heroic rodents, Cole’s colorful, attention-grabbing cover art jumped out at potential buyers. Nothing else on the newsstands looked like them. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Cole was not influenced by other comics artists but by the vibrant poster art he was exposed to in prewar Europe. Still, his covers were as much the product of his pragmatism as of his aesthetic sense. As he would explain years later:
“Being perfectly practical as a businessman and a publisher, for me there was no other motive than to create a poster oriented to newsstand sales. The covers were mostly designed as posters, and when I speak of the poster effect I mean that they should be seen. If they’re not seen, they’re not picked up, and if they’re not picked up, obviously they’re not bought” (Schelly 15-17).
but its other contents shared Day’s outlook. No punches were pulled. Editor Gerald Richardson saw to that. The Challenger was unapologetically progressive in its racial and social politics, just like its parent publication Protestant Digest. Stoner supplied the art for the cover feature. Other credits, including the scripter of “The Challenger,” are unknown. The 68-page quarterly, which was distributed through churches and parochial schools in addition to the usual retail outlets, lasted four issues.
Another religion-themed comic book series was more conservative in its outlook, carefully avoiding any and all controversies. Timeless Topix was a 16-page monthly published by the Catechetical Guild Educational Society of St. Paul, Minnesota, and available only through Roman Catholic private schools (and thus not published in the summer months). As in past years, 1945’s issues (#23-32) presented wholesome stories of faith and heroism, lives of the saints (minus the graphic violence implicit in their martyrdoms), and similarly irreproachable content.
The Ferstadt studio first became associated with Blue Beetle when the rights to the title were owned by Holyoke Publishing of Springfield, Massachusetts, the printing division of a string of New England newspapers owned by Sherman Bowles. Holyoke first entered the field when it temporarily published Frank Temerson’s Cat-Man Comics and Captain Aero Comics. Its sole remaining title, launched after Holyoke had to return its three books to their original owners, was Sparkling Stars. Only two issues, numbers 8 and 9 (January-February) were released this year, though whether the year-long hiatus that followed was precipitated by the newsprint shortage or mismanagement is unclear. Covers and a quartet of the interior features—the humor strips ”Petey and Pop,” “Riley and the Sergeant,” “Private Plop,” and the prizefighting drama “Boxie Weaver”—were the work of Ferstadt mainstay Morris “Mo” Weiss. Harry Lazarus wrote and drew the title’s lead feature “Ali Baba,” a farcical take on the classic 1,001 Arabian Nights tale told entirely in doggerel, while 20-year-old Carmine Infantino illustrated the war series “Hell’s Angels.” A new series, the so-so sci-fi saga “Pack Pearson, Space Adventurer,” debuted in issue #8 but was replaced the following month by “Bret Barton,” an even more dismal space opera. Despite being the only 68-page comic remaining on the newsstands, Sparkling Stars’ overall lack of quality kept buyers away.
The short-lived Witty Comics was also a product of Ferstadt’s studio. The first issue, nominally published by Irwin W. Rubin but possibly linked to Holyoke, featured reprints from early issues of Fiction House’s line and a handful of original material by Mo Weiss and others. The second was released through Fox’s proxy, Chicago Nite Life News. It offered an array of all-new genre strips, including “Pioneer,” a costumed “defender of the people” with no origin, alter ego, or powers; “Steve Hagen,” a self-described “world-famous antiquarian [and] dabbler in social and political reform”; Captain Easy wannabe “Michael Morgan”; and “Weeny and Pop,” a truly awful humor strip starring a pair of Abbott and Costello knock-offs. Neither issue of Witty Comics was particularly worthwhile, nor did they live up to their title. In short, Witty wasn’t.
Harry “A” Chesler was, like Victor Fox, known for cranking out comic books with little regard for quality, though quality sometimes found its way into his books regardless. Born Aaron Czesler in Lithuania, his had been the first commercial art studio to produce original content for the nascent industry. Not content to generate money for others, Chesler had twice ventured into publishing and twice been forced to either sign his titles over to other houses or close down that side of his business. His second attempt did, however, entitle him to a supply of newsprint so he had tried again in 1944, offering a line of comics consisting primarily of reprints from his previous lines, thereby maximizing his profits by avoiding the expense of paying creators. He had also, again like Fox, turned to proxies to expand his presence in the marketplace. Both strategies were revisited this year.
Now published under the corporate identity of Flying Cadet Publishing Co., Inc., Chesler’s indisputably legal titles, Dynamic Comics and Punch Comics, began the year as 52-page bi-monthlies and ended as 36-page quarterlies. After relying almost entirely on reprints for its January issue (#13), Dynamic began featuring new episodes of its roster of supermen with the following issue, a development that included a noticeable improvement in the art. Puerto Rican artist Ruben Moreira manned the drawing board for “Dynamic Man,” George Tuska took over “Mr. E,” and the illustration duties for “The Echo” were split between Rafael Astarita and Paul Gattuso. Other strips came and went in the back pages, including private eye
With the war over, the average American wanted the country to go “back to normal.” But the war changed America so profoundly that “normal” had to be redefined. “Going back” to what life was like prior to World War II was no longer possible.
No one learned this better than America’s comic book publishers. Their expectation after the end of the war was that they could turn the calendar back to 1942, before the government had regulated paper allotments. With more paper at their disposal, comic book publishers envisioned a future of unlimited expansion, given the high demand for comics (combined with few returns).
When paper controls were relaxed in August 1945, publishers immediately made plans to ramp up production. But by the time paper allocation officially ended, in March 1946, it was clear that things weren’t quite working out the way the publishers had anticipated. That month, a columnist for the Writer’s Digest reported:
“The end of paper control enormously increased the troubles of magazine publishers. Practically every office I visited in the past weeks has had a sad tale to tell. […] Several of the titan publishers had been bidding for paper mills and paper jobbing houses. Whereby, smaller companies have lost out on sources of paper believed secure [due to the loss of government-sanctioned allocations]. […] As a consequence, many publishers who had announced plans for stepping up frequency of production on many magazines, have beat a hasty retreat” (Bradfield 16).
What happened was simply this: publishers mistakenly thought that unregulated access to paper would allow them to expand quite easily. But getting the paper proved more difficult than anticipated because existing paper mills could only produce so much paper. And what about press time? There was only so much capacity that the printing presses in America could handle. Similarly, there was only so much new material that could be handled by distributors, while newsstands would have to be reconfigured to display an increase in the number of comic books. It was an untenable situation as comics historian Will Murray described it: “Between the scramble for paper, the struggle over presstime, and the flood of new product, disaster loomed. This was a pivotal time for comics. The first magazine glut in U.S. history was brewing” (52).
Because newsstands lacked sufficient space to display all the new material, wholesalers often sent bundles of new comics back, unopened, causing sellthrough rates to plummet. Publishers’ Weekly reported in its June 8, 1946 issue that “comic magazines have been piling up 40 to 60 percent return totals, as against perhaps five percent during the war.” As always, the larger publishers were more able to cope with the flood, whereas the smaller publishers drowned.
The context to this dilemma was the fact that the demand for comics among America’s youth remained enormous. According to comic book historian Mike Benton, “By 1946, comic-book reading was an established habit— some might say addiction—among almost all children of the time. Nine out of every ten children between the ages of eight and 15 read comic books regularly” (Benton 41). They were mostly reading the products of the 10 leading publishers, who accounted for 60 percent of all comic books sold during the year. In order of popularity, they were National Comics, Fawcett Publications, Timely Comics, Dell Publishing, Quality Comics, Pines, Fiction House, Parents’ Magazine, Street & Smith, and Novelty Press.
The first comic books created after the Japanese surrender—reflecting a postwar consciousness by their publishers and creators—didn’t generally turn up on newsstands until January 1946 with March cover dates. Hence, comics with January and February 1946 cover dates were the last comic books actually created during World War II. Sparks’ Atoman (first issue cover dated Feb. 1946) is a prime example of a comic jumping on current events, as it attempted to capitalize on the public’s interest in the newly revealed existence of the atomic bomb.
The Bomb Changes Everything
And how did the existence of such a weapon of mass destruction change how people viewed the world and
its future? Prior to the publication of journalist John Hersey’s harrowing account of the attack on Hiroshima in the August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker and its subsequence reprinting as a book on November 1, 1946, the American public had little actual knowledge of just how devasting the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been. And to tell the truth, that public didn’t really care. From August of 1945 to the late summer of 1946 all they knew—or wanted to know—was that the war was over, thanks to good old American know-how (even if refugee scientists fleeing from the fascist dictatorships had been instrumental in achieving that victory), that rationing would end soon, and that good times lay ahead.
America’s comic books published immediately after advent of the A-bomb reflected the public’s initial enthusiasm for the new weapon that ended the war. Indeed, the opening story of Ace Magazines’ Science Comics #1 (Jan. 1946) is titled “The Bomb That Won the War.” (Its cover features an atomic mushroom cloud.) Other comic books considered the prospect of nuclear energy implicit in the bomb’s development. Consider this passage from Parents’ Magazine’s True Comics #47 (March 1946):
“The destructive force of the atomic bomb has been proved. Now scientists are working to channel atomic energy to peacetime uses. They predict that the energy in the atoms of a railway ticket may run a train several times around theworld, the energy in the atoms of a snowball may heat an apartment house fora year, atomic energy may be used to cure cancer and other diseases and finally, that atomic energy, rightfully used, may bring about a new era of enlightenment and progress.”
A similarly optimistic feature appearing in the same month’s issue of Ned Pines’ Real Life Comics had Uncle Sam himself ask:
“What of the future? Shall it be used as a weapon—or shall atomic energy be a boon to the Earth, ushering in a new age of power and plenty in which autos run on fistsized engines and liners ply the Atlantic on the energy of a cup of water? It’s up to us, to the American way—which is peace and the brotherhood of man.”
most significant popular culture and historical events. (On sale dates are approximations.)
January 10: The first General Assembly of the United Nations— comprised of 51 nations—convenes in London, England.
January 13: In Chester Gould’s comic strip, Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio makes it first appearance. It will become one of the most recognizable icons of the character.
March 4: Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby debuts as the fastestselling comic strip in King Features history to this date.
April 1: Two massive earthquakes that originated just south of Alaska trigger tsunamis throughout the Pacific Ocean, resulting in the deaths of 170 people and over $26 million in property damage.
March 5: As President Truman’s guest at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivers his “Sinews of Peace” speech in which he describes the Soviet Union’s influence over Eastern Europe as an “iron curtain.”
For most comics publishers, however, the bomb and the postwar harnessing of nuclear energy were simply new and exciting story elements to be exploited. A-bombs figured in the adventures of Captain Midnight, Mighty Mouse, Archie O’Toole, the Fighting Yank, the Phantom Eagle, and Sky Wolf, to name just a few, while the schemes of spies to get their hands on its secrets were foiled by those heroes, as well as various detectives, aviators, and intelligence agents. The quest to master atomic energy was also featured in several strips, sometimes for dramatic purposes (Skyman or Hell’s Angels) and sometimes for comic effect (Frankenstein, Plastic Man), and in one instance—Doc Wackey’s invention of atomic dice in one of Quality’s Midnight tales—both things happened at once. Simply using the word “atomic” was enough for some publishers: Green Publishing released four issues of Atomic Comics while Jay Burtis produced one issue of Atomic Bomb that, titles notwithstanding, had nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear energy in peace or war.
Inevitably, the superhero genre drew on the headlines to power up costumed crusaders old and new. National Comics’ non-super-powered Atom, who’d been confined to adventures alongside the Justice Society of America since his last solo outing in All-American Comics #61 (Oct. 1944), saw his series revived in All-American #70 (Jan.-Feb. 1946) on the cultural cachet of his name alone. Quality’s the
June 10: The first episode of “Clan of the Fiery Cross” airs on the Adventures of Superman radio program. Written by Ben Peter Freeman—and inspired by the work of civil rights activist Stetson Kennedy—the 16-part serial pits Superman against a thinly veiled version of the Ku Klux Klan. The storyline concludes on July 1.
June 3: In Morgan v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court strikes down a Virginia law that requires racial segregation on commercial interstate buses.
May 2: “The Battle of Alcatraz” begins as inmates of the Alcatraz federal penitentiary in San Francisco Bay attempt to escape by taking nine prison guards hostage. The conflict ends two days later, but not before two of the guards and three of the prisoners are killed.
Human Bomb now found his explosive punches described as “super-atomic,” and Crestwood/Prize’s Atomic Man got a complete redesign in an (unsuccessful) attempt to make him more visually appealing. These characters were joined by a sextet of newcomers, each hoping to cash in on the public’s fascination with the subject.
Spark Publications’ Atoman, created by longtime Batman ghost artist Jerry Robinson as the very first atomic-powered superhero, had been launched super-fast with a Feb. 1946 cover date, and featured atomic energy researcher Barry Dale who, after years of exposure to radiation, found himself endowed with superhuman strength, flight, and other nuclear powers. As Atoman himself explained in his first issue, “My body is so geared as a result of working on radium and uranium that it can explode atoms and give me atomic strength.” Like Spark’s other superheroes, Atoman was a cut above the competition in quality but had only two issues of the comic book bearing his name to make his mark, before, like Spark’s other titles, it vanished from the newsstands.
Debuting the same month, The Atomic Thunderbolt was the eponymous star of the one-and-only comic released by the otherwise unknown Regor Company. Self-described “wharf rat” William Burns, a former merchant mariner, volunteered for the potentially lethal experiment that
A compilation of the year’s notable comic book history events alongside some of the year’s
July 1: As part of “Operation Crossroads,” the United States military detonates an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in order to investigate the effect of nuclear weapons on warships. A second detonation occurs underwater on July 25. A third detonation is canceled when the target warships from the second test couldn’t be decontaminated.
July 25: At Club 500 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, entertainers
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis appear on stage as a comedy team for the first time.
August 31: The latest issue of The New Yorker magazine is entirely devoted to journalist John Hersey’s account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, and its impact on six survivors. Despite horrifying readers, the issue sells out at the newsstand within hours. In November, Hershey’s article is published as a book.
September 30: In Nuremberg, Germany, an international military tribunal finds 22 Nazi leaders guilty of war crimes. Several of the leaders are sentenced to death, including Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring. On the morning of his execution, though, Göring commits suicide.
November 1: In the first game of the newly formed Basketball Association of America—a precursor of the National Basketball Association—the New York Knickerbockers defeat the Toronto Huskies.
November 21: The Best Years of Our Lives, a drama about World War II veterans readjusting to civilian life, is released to movie theaters. The film will win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (for William Wyler), Best Actor (for Fredric March), and Best Supporting Actor (for Harold Russell, an actual war veteran who lost both hands during his service).
December 19: In Indochina, Viet Minh troops, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, assault French occupying forces. The Indochina war will last until 1954.
July 26: President Truman issues Executive Order 9981, which abolishes racial and religious discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces. The U.S. military has been desegregated.
October 9: Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh premieres on Broadway. The drama— featuring a group of Greenwich Village bar patrons with washed up dreams—becomes a hit, earning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play of the year.
September 30: National Allied Publications, Inc. and Detective Comics, Inc. merge to become National Comics Publications, Inc.
transformed him into the “invincible and indestructible” Thunderbolt. Exactly how powerful co-creators Robert Peterson and Mort Lawrence intended him to be remains unexplored territory as, despite a good premise with an interesting, PTSD-stricken hero, the strip never got the chance to build a fanbase.
Introduced in Magazine Enterprises’ Tick Tock Tales #4 (April 1946) was the insect-sized “Mighty Atom,” who was really Pete Pixie who transformed into his caped alter ego when he said the phrase “Pick a peck o’ pixies!” Credits are unknown for this cute, and often quite funny, melding of the fairy tale and superhero genres aimed at the preschool set. Also aimed at the same audience was “Atomictot”. Whipped up by Ernie Hart for Quality’s All Humor Comics #2 (Summer 1946), this wildly playful character was a little newsboy “through [whose] veins atomic energy flows.” Atomictot was young but Orbit’s “Upan Atom”, who debuted in Toytown Comics #4 (Oct. 1946), was even younger, an infant who became the costume-less crimefighter whenever he chowed down on his supply of irradiated baby food. But the oddest character to come out of the fad for all things atomic was unquestionably “John Quincy, the Atom,” who debuted in Key Comics #4 (May 1946). His adventures were a broad sci-fi send-up by Marv Levy in which the top-secret Brooklyn Project accidently
December 20: The Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life, starring James Stewart and Donna Reed, premieres in New York City before gaining wider release the next day. The Christmas-themed drama will garner five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.
December 29: Milton Caniff’s final installment of Terry and the
created a living, sentient atom! Alas, this most bizarre of all heroes went down with the ship when publisher Consolidated Magazines went out of business with issue #5 (Aug. 1946) of the title.
By the end of 1946, only the Atom, the Mighty Atom, Atomictot, and Upan Atom were still standing. Simply evoking atomic energy in one’s mystery-man codename was not enough by itself to retain the attention of a fickle public. Or perhaps the industry’s creative community was entertaining second thoughts about its enthusiastic embrace of the atom bomb. That was certainly the case for writer Otto Binder and artist C.C. Beck. In Captain Marvel Adventures #66 (Oct. 1946), they presented a nightmarish prediction of nuclear Armageddon in “The Atomic War!” The story featured a devastation so complete that only the mighty Captain Marvel himself survived. It all turned out to be a TV special concocted by the captain’s alter ego Billy Batson, but the point was made. The story concluded with a young viewer’s solemn observation that “I guess we’d all better learn to live and get along together… one nation with all other nations and one person with all other persons… so that the terrible atomic war will never occur.” It was a sobering reminder from an unlikely source of what would be at stake when, not if, America’s monopoly on nuclear weaponry came to an end.
Pirates appears in newspapers. His successor, George Wunder, will continue the comic strip through February 25, 1973.
July 5: Named after the July 1 atomic bomb test, the bikini bathing suit makes its debut at a fashion show in Paris, France. The skimpy two-piece outfit quickly becomes a target of debate, fascination, and prudish scorn.
Micheline Bernardini wearing the first bikini, 1946.
Old Trends for New
The war was over, but the comic book industry seemed reluctant to let it go. Stories set during the conflict, often under the “now it can be told” rubric, continued to appear throughout many companies’ lines. Some of this resulted from the necessity of running stories that had been held in inventory which had been created before the A-bomb compelled Japan’s quick and unconditional surrender, but it was occasionally deliberate, a stalling tactic to allow the creators to dream up a new direction for their characters and scripts.
Among the series that continued to fight the war well into 1946 were such titles as The Boy Commandos, Blackhawk, Miss America, Blue Bolt, The Fighting Yank, The Black Terror, Red Dragon Comics, Don Winslow of the Navy, and such characters as Pyroman, Sky Girl, Captain Future, Shock Gibson, The Target, Hell’s Angels, Captain Wings, Spy Smasher, The Face, Phantom Eagle, Liberty Belle, Doc Strange, Spirit of ’76, Commando Yank and Hop Harrigan. Every 1946-dated issue of the monthly Captain Midnight included at least one such wartime tale. Many strips opted to prolong the hostilities by sending their leads after fugitive war criminals, neo-fascist organizations or Japanese soldiers refusing to acknowledge their homeland’s surrender (a trope that would pop up throughout the mass media for decades to come, at least in part because of reports that such people actually existed). Other strips returned to the pre-war usage of fictitious hostile countries like Urania and Balkania as antagonists. No one this year depicted the Soviet Union as a threat.
This perpetuation of the war meant that the Japanese continued to be pictured in American comics as lemonskinned, buck-toothed sadists, but some progress could be discerned on other fronts. While grossly racist caricatures like Young Allies’ Whitewash, New Funnies’ Li’l Eightball, or The Spirit’s Ebony White persisted, African Americans began to be depicted more respectfully and sympathetically, and not just within Interfaith’s consciously progressive The Challenger. When Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to play in Major League Baseball, thus breaking the color barrier into a previously all-white sports, the decision was lauded in the pages of Detective Comics’ (a.k.a. DC Comics’) Real Fact Comics #2 (May-June 1946). Parents Magazines’ True Comics #48 (April 1946) included a bio of actor and activist Paul Robeson, while their Calling All Boys ran a similarly stereotype-free portrayal of Olympic
champion Jesse Owens. Non-Japanese Asians didn’t fare quite as well, with characters like Blackhawk’s Chop-Chop, who was never given a real name during the 1940s (the one he had means “hurry up” in anglicized Chinese), Quality’s Wun Cloo and Street & Smith’s Wing Woo Woo perpetuating antiquated stereotypes. However, one new series trod a different path: Timely’s All Select Comics #11 (Fall 1946) featured “The Mysterious Mr. Wu,” an amateur sleuth (much like Boris Karloff’s film role “Mr. Wong,” who appeared in five low-budget films for Monogram from 1938-1940) who bypasses all the usual clichés by dressing in a top hat and tuxedo and speaking in upper-crust English. Baby steps, perhaps, but they were a start.
A significant number of features, particularly those starring military personnel or with premises centered around the war, wound up discontinued this year. The casualties included “Captain Commando and the Boy Soldiers,” “Red, White and Blue,” “The Death Patrol,” “U.S. Rangers,” “Spin Shaw,” “Mike Gibbs, Guerrilla,” “The Flying Dutchman,” “Clipper Kirk,” “Jap-Buster Johnson,” “Destroyer 171,” “Drafty,” “Johnny Doughboy,” “Sergeant Bill King,” “PT Boat,” “Roger Wilco,” “Rip Carson ‘chute Trooper,” “The Girl Commandos,” and “Sky Wolf.” This morbid tally does not include those strips that simply disappeared because their publishers folded.
as plainclothes adventurers. Superheroes were not yet an endangered species—they remained the specialty of such powerhouse companies as Detective Comics/All-American, Timely, Quality, Fawcett, and the Pines group—but their presence in a comic book was no longer a guarantor of robust sales.
Fawcett’s Postwar Position
Other war-centric series shifted gears, either depicting the challenges faced by peacetime military or returning their characters to civilian life: combat pilots went to work for airlines, spies became private detectives, even The Boy Commandos were recruited by an unspecified “international police force” to stay together and preserve the hard-won peace.
Another noticeable trend in 1946 was a decrease in the number of pages devoted to superheroes and masked mystery-men. Over three dozen of such went into involuntary retirement, including the Sandman and Sandy, Catman and the Kitten, The Green Mask, El Kuraan, Dynamic Man and Dynamic Boy, The Human Bomb, Miss Victory, Will o’ the Wisp, The American Eagle and Eaglet, Yankee Boy, The Green Lama, Yellowjacket, The Black Dwarf, The Triple Terror, The Patriot, Captain Valiant, Starman, The Red Cross, The Ghost, Golden Lad, The Destroyer, Rocketman and Rocketgirl, The Oracle, Spark Man, The Key, The Blue Circle, Captain Wizard, The Black Pirate, Atomic Man, The Zebra, Lash Lightning and Lightning Girl, The Whistler, Diana the Huntress, Airmale and Stampy, The Prankster, Swiftarrow, and The Gay Desperado. About half of these losses were due to the collapse of the comics lines that published them, while most of the rest were simply too tired or simply outdated by time and world events, yielding their slots to ascendant genres such as teen humor or funny animals. A few, like Spy Smasher and The Face, survived by abandoning their costumed identities and carrying on
In 1944, the industry’s bestselling title was published by Fawcett. Captain Marvel Adventures sold approximately 14 million copies, or an average of 1.280 million copies for each of the 11 issues that came out that year. In 1945, paper restrictions limited Fawcett to publishing only nine issues of Captain Marvel Adventures. During that year, the title sold a total of 11.5 million copies, a drop of 2.5 million copies, but the per issue sales average was 1.283 million copies, about the same as in 1944. In 1946, though, sales of Captain Marvel Adventures dropped by another 1.5 million copies. This was due in part to Fawcett’s postwar expansion of the title. With paper restrictions lifted, Fawcett’s circulation manager Roscoe Fawcett decreed that Captain Marvel Adventures would be published bi-weekly in 1946. Unfortunately for Fawcett, that move only resulted in smaller circulations for each issue. Sales dropped to an average of 554,000 copies per issue. Fawcett learned a valuable lesson: demand just wasn’t strong enough to support a bi-weekly release schedule. By June, the title returned to its monthly publication frequency.
Fawcett didn’t have the problem that many other publishers had of access to printing presses. While its main offices were in Greenwich, Connecticut and New York City, Fawcett also maintained smaller offices in Hollywood (for its relationships with the movie studios and advertising), Chicago (midwest sales office), and Louisville, Kentucky, the location of its wholly owned subsidiary, the C.T. Dearing Printing Co., the printer of all Fawcett magazines and comics.
The statement was no lie as FBI agents had shown up at the company offices after an April 1945 Superman newspaper story began featuring a cyclotron. Questioning Whitney Ellsworth and Jack Schiff, the agents insisted the cyclotron be removed from the story. The Luthor comic book story was put on hold at the same time. “We really should have suspected what was happening,” Schiff later recalled. “This was a possible leak” (Schiff A-65).
Later in the year, Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye’s eye-catching cover for Action Comics #101 (Oct. 1946) shows Superman filming an atomic bomb blast with a blurb that reads, “In this issue! Superman Covers Atom Bomb Test!” The story, “Crime Paradise!,” drawn by Win Mortimer, is actually a sort of precursor to the Red Kryptonite stories of later years. In this instance, the Man of Steel begins to act irrationally. It turns out he has been given an ancient drug that causes him to refuse to save a drowning man, turn a skyscraper upside down, et al. Confused, Superman flies over the Pacific Ocean and runs into a U.S. Navy atomic bomb test. (On July 1, about six weeks before the publication of Action Comics #101, the U.S. had conducted a nuclear bomb test near Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.) The force of the huge blast clears his head. He then returns to Metropolis and sets all things right. But unlike Captain Marvel’s horrific atomic war story in CMA #66, this Superman story’s atomic “theme”—likely also timed for the one-year anniversary of the HiroshimaNagasaki bombings (both comic books were cover-dated October 1946)—was genuinely tangential to the story.
Superman Battles the Ku Klux Klan
Like comics, the radio program The Adventures of Superman was at a creative crossroads with the end of the war. It could no longer depend on Superman facing the German or Japanese villains of the war years to fuel storylines. In fact, the radio program was in much more imminent trouble in that regard because, unlike comics, which came out monthly at best and could be excused to some extent for having some books and storylines still set during the war, the radio show aired daily, and its producers and writers had to keep up with the changing times.
At this point The Adventures of Superman was drawing four million listeners over 200 radio stations. In those days, most programs were backed by one major commercial sponsor, who had a great deal of control over the creative direction of that program. In the case of The Adventures of Superman, that sponsor was the Michigan-based Kellogg’s, the cereal company, whose advertising agency was Kenyon and Eckhardt. K&E’s vice president, William B. Lewis, thought that instead of battling leftover Nazis, Superman should take on contemporary social issues, including fascism and anti-Semitism, while endorsing good citizenship and the beneficial uses of tolerance, fair play and acceptance of different religions and races. As he put it, “We’re not in the business of education…We’re selling corn flakes. But we’d like to do both. We sure would like to do both” (Bowers 116).
The sponsor and the radio program’s writing staff turned to Josette Frank, a well-known researcher for the Child Study Association of America, for advice and as a contact person for various organizations that would be receptive to the show’s intention and help promote the idea of a radio show combining action and adventure with social commentary. The risk, of course, of this approach was that the entertainment/ action aspect of the Superman radio show might be overwhelmed by the social message or, vice versa, the seriousness of the social message might be muted by Superman’s heroics. Something else that had to be considered was the likelihood of portions of the audience, perhaps major portions in some parts of the country, supporting what the program was opposing, and therefore tuning out in protest. It would take a special kind of script writer to juggle both concerns so that The Adventures of Superman would be balanced, not between social commentary and fascist beliefs, but between the show’s entertainment and educational needs. They found such a writer in Ben Peter Freeman.
The first hint of this new push for social relevance came on February 5, 1946, when the opening narration for the show was rewritten as “Yes, it’s Superman. Strange visitor from another planet, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, defender of law and order, champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice!”
Comics #110 (April 1945) saw the Boy Commandos fly to the United States following the end of the war… minus one member. Jan Haasan decided to return to his native Holland to join his grandfather.
Although honorably discharged from the Army in 1943, Alan Scott, a.k.a. the Green Lantern, had since drifted around as a jack of all trades in the radio business. In Alfred Bester and Martin Nodell’s GL #20 (June-July 1946), a false accusation got him fired before Green Lantern caught the true villains…and wrecked the WXYZ studio. Alan arrived, repaired the equipment, wrote copy for a news program, and worked in the sound booth and as emcee on a new variety show. The station manager not only rehired Alan but declared him “too valuable to lose. From now on, you can hold every job in the place if you want to! You can do anything you want around here-because you can do anything! Hear that? Any job you want!” And that’s how Alan Scott became general manager of the radio station, a position he held well into his Silver and Bronze Age appearances.
As far as the group that Green Lantern was a member of, the Justice Society of America, their most notable adventure of the year occurred in All-Star Comics #30 (Aug.-Sept. 1946), in which Brain Wave (his first appearance since 1943’s All-Star #17) drives the team mad via dreams. The imagination of the story’s writer, Gardner Fox, is on full display as the various heroes confront some vivid nightmares. For instance, in his chapter, the Atom, having been soaked by water, suddenly turns giant and reaches up to pull a light-bulb-style chain that dangles from a dark cloud: “I’ll turn on the sunlight and that’ll absorb the water in me.” In an earlier chapter, Dr. MidNite kills his tormentor germs merely by his accidental touch. His tale ends with him sobbing, “A disease! That’s what I am—not a man—not a human being—nothing but a living sickness!”
Fox’s long tenure on All-Star Comics was coming to an end, but as 1947 would show, he would produce some of his best Justice Society stories before he left.
Dell’s Rising Stars
While lesser comic book publishers struggled during the comics glut of 1946, Dell Publishing sailed through with seemingly few problems. It didn’t have to worry about securing press time since it owned (courtesy of its partnership with Western Printing & Lithographing) a giant printing plant in Poughkeepsie, New York. Even Western’s closest competitor, National Comics, didn’t have its own printing plant. Dell also had an enviable relationship with American News Corporation, the 800-pound gorilla of distributors, which guaranteed space for Dell’s titles on the best newsstands across the country.
Now with paper restrictions lifted, Dell boosted its output from 112 issues published in 1945 to 133 in 1946. Included in this increased production were two new titles. “Raggedy Ann and Andy” graduated from their slot in New Funnies to earn their own eponymous monthly title (first issue cover dated June 1946). The living dolls’ new adventures were illustrated by George Kerr and (possibly) writ-
ten by Gaylord Dubois. Among Raggedy Ann and Andy’s regular back-up features were Dan Noonan’s “Egbert Elephant,” Walt Kelly’s “Animal Mother Goose” tales, and Frank Thomas’s “Billy and Bonny Bee.”
Dell’s other new title starred the singing cowboy, Gene Autry. The movie star had been featured in seven issues of Four Color from 1944 to 1946, most recently in issue #100 (March 1946), prompting Dell to give Autry his own series again with a new first issue (cover dated MayJune 1946). This would be the second official Gene Autry Comics series, following Fawcett’s ten issue run that started in 1941 and was continued by Dell for a couple of issues in 1943 and 1944. Handling the title’s art chores was the same man who drew three of Autry’s Four Color appearances, Jesse Marsh.
The other features appearing in Four Color in 1946 were the usual array of popular licensed characters, from both newspapers and film: Winnie Winkle, Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates, Tillie the Toiler, Little Orphan Annie, Donald Duck, Captain Easy, Porky Pig, Popeye, Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Bugs Bunny, and Andy Panda. Roy Rogers appeared in four issues of Four Color this year while the Lone Ranger appeared in three.
Her excellent design sense was matched by her well-choreographed action scenes. Equally notable was her fashion sense and ability to design the clothes that her heroines wore. But despite her talent, she often wasn’t treated well by her colleagues. As she recollected in a 2009 interview, the enlightened attitudes of studio packager Jerry Iger, publisher Malcolm Reiss and Fiction House’s managing editor Jack Byrne weren’t always shared by those further down the line, sometimes creating a hostile work environment:
“[I was] totally miserable because the men thought of nothing but sex, and they were always making innuendos [,] which made me very uncomfortable… I got used to it, but in the beginning it was awful… [Later], other things happened, because some [of the artists] didn’t like that I made good money… It wasn’t[sexism. The male artists] didn’t mind that I was there at first, but once you get in competition with someone, the attitudes change” (Amash 8-13).
Those who worked in the Fiction House bullpen didn’t receive a page rate; they were paid a monthly salary, generally starting in the $20 to $25 range, depending on their experience. From there, salaries would gradually go up, potentially including a Christmas bonus.
Even though it utilized its own in-house staff, as well as the occasional freelancer, Fiction House still greatly relied on Ruth Roche and Jerry Iger’s studio for material. Other publishers did as well, including a new client that Iger had a checkered past with: Victor Fox, the owner of Fox Feature Syndicates, Inc. (a.k.a. Fox Comics).
The end of wartime paper restrictions brought some much-needed good news for Fox: he no longer had to connive with other publishers to get his comic books printed. Unfortunately for Fox, the bad news was that he now had to contend with a glut on the newsstands. Nonetheless, Fox managed to publish 41 comics across 15 titles over the course of 1946. Most of these were funny animal books, like Jo-Jo Comics and Zoot Comics, two 32-page funny animal quarterlies. (The latter was expanded to 48 pages for one issue with Zoot Comics #4, Nov.-Dec. 1946.)
Fox clearly believed his funny animal superhero, Cosmo Cat (who debuted in Ribtickler #1 as “Cosmo Catt”), was a hit with readers as Cosmo now starred in the All Top Comics quarterly, his own bi-monthly eponymous title (Cosmo Cat #1 had a July-Aug. 1946 cover date), and Nuttylife which would become Wotalife Comics with issue #3 (Aug.-Sept. 1946). Cosmo even appeared on the cover of Zoot Comics #2 although in a way that bore little resemblance to the Cosmo that appeared in these other titles. (Yet another sign of Victor Fox’s indifference to brand consistency or quality control.)
The other funny animal that Fox invested in was Li’l Pan, a faun who is the son of Pan, the Greek god of music (among other things). Li’l Pan uses his magic horn to produce some “real good jive” and entertain the masses. After appearing as a backup feature in Wotalife Comics, Zoot Comics, and All Top Comics, Li’l Pan received his own series late in the year (taking over the numbering of the canceled Rocket Kelly). In L’il Pan #6 (Dec. 1946), the title character travels the world to find the Pipes of Pan that had been lost by his father. At one point in the story, a good-natured but dullwitted buzzard flies Li’l Pan and his friend Petey from India to the Bikini Atoll and deposits them at ground zero, just in time for the first U.S. nuclear bomb test. The start of Li’l Pan #7 reveals that the detonation has propelled Pan and Petey to Greenland where they resume their search for the pipes. (They ultimately find them in Brooklyn at, of all places, a baseball stadium.) Li’l Pan only lasted one more issue after that, and the title character only made a handful of appearances in other Fox titles in 1947.
That, at least, was more than could be said for The Green Mask. One of Fox’s earliest superheroes, the Green Mask was now an uninspired imitation of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel with teenager Johnny Green angrily shouting “EEEOW!” to transform himself into his superpowered persona. The final two issues of Green Mask (#5 and #6) were published in June and August 1946 and then the title character wasn’t seen again until decades later when he had fallen into public domain.
Providing the covers for the Green Mask’s final two Fox issues was E.C. Stoner. Now in his late forties, the classically trained African American illustrator also contributed to Fox’s Blue Beetle series, drawing covers and stories
lusioned by the habits of people who would take everything away from you, put the copyrights in their own names, and not deliver on the royalties or fudge them up. Alfred [Harvey] was my friend [but] friendship aside, it was a good business opportunity. So Jack and I agreed” (Simon 147).
For Harvey’s Family Comics Inc., Simon and Kirby created a costumed hero title and a kid-gang title, two of their specialties. Their most famous costumed hero, Captain America, fought Nazis but in the aftermath of the Axis defeat, their new hero had to fight villainy of a more mundane sort. Hence, Stuntman is Fred Drake, a circus acrobat who has to solve the murder of his two partners. In doing so, Drake bumps (literally) into Don Daring, “movie star and amateur detective.” Because the two men look identical, Daring enlists Drake to be his movie stunt double (i.e., his “stuntman”). As Daring’s doppelgänger, Drake finds himself in an ideal position to track down would-be thieves and murderers and confront them as Stuntman.
The first page of Stuntman #1 (cover date April-May 1946) declares it a “Special Souvenir Issue,” directing readers to “save this issue of Stuntman comics… it will be a valuable souvenir someday.” Similarly, the cover to the first issue of Boy Explorers Comics (cover date May-June 1946) labels itself as “Simon-Kirby’s new smash-action kid strip! The greatest collection of thrilling features ever jam-packed into one comic magazine.” The title’s lead feature, the Boy Explorers, stars a bluff old sailor named Commodore Sindbad (“the last of the Yankee clipper captains”) out to fool an elderly harpy named Princess Latima who wants him for her husband. Before her arrival, he travels to the Blue Hills Orphanage where the harried superintendent, Prunella Axehandle, is more than happy to let him adopt four rambunctious boys: Gas-House (the laconic joker), Smiley (the handsome one), Gadget (the scientific genius) and Mister Zero (a boy still in diapers). Sindbad’s ruse here was to convince Latima that he’s already a family man. Unfortunately for the Commodore, Princess Latima is not deceived. She’s also not amused as
she threatens to kill Sindbad unless he can accomplish a seemingly impossible feat: “You must duplicate the seven feats of Sindu San… or meet my executioner!” The boys are eager to help the Commodore in this effort, so they join him on the good ship Dauntless to tackle the first of the seven challenges. “Boy Explorers” has a highly humorous, slapstick bent, as did the title’s backup features: “Danny Dixon, Cadet,” “Duke of Broadway,” “Calamity Jane,” and “Soapy Sam.”
Simon considered these two new titles “the best material we had ever produced, with the return of the double-page spreads the likes of which hadn’t been seen since our work on Captain America.” But quality wasn’t going to be enough to survive in a glutted comic book marketplace, and Simon himself knew it: “Even before the first issue of Stuntman reached the printer, we had a feeling that no matter how brilliant it was, we were doomed to failure. Stuntman fell victim to the glut that followed the war. The instinct [of newsstand distributors] was to stick with established hits like Superman or Captain Marvel. So many of the newer titles were returned in unopened bundles, never having seen the light of day” (Simon 150-1). In the end, only two issues of Stuntman and one issue of Boy Explorers Comics were released to the newsstand. Stuntman #3 and Boy Explorers #2 were mailed only to subscribers as black-and-white photostats. Remaining “Boy Explorers” stories went into the back pages of Harvey’s Terry and the Pirates Comics #3 and #4, published in 1947. (Terry and the Pirates
As expected, the international recovery from World War II was arduous and protracted. Nearly two years after the end of the conflict, several countries contended with major economic crises, and the typically prosperous nations (like Great Britain) were too burdened with their own problems to assist. Greece and Turkey were in particularly bad shape, with the former dealing with a civil war that pitted the ruling monarchy against communist insurgents and the latter fending off the Soviet Union’s attempts to control the Turkish Straits. Only one country seemed poised to help: the United States of America. However, a significant portion of American citizens (and politicians) wanted the country to return to its traditional isolationist tendencies. They felt that with the war over, and tyrants like Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini removed from power, America could once again distance itself from the matters outside its borders. In the new world order, however, isolationism was a luxury that the United States could no longer afford. Indeed, America’s self-interests now necessitated its involvement in the world’s problems, with Greece and Turkey becoming perfect cases in point. Left on their own, both countries would likely succumb and become occupied by, if not satellites of, the Soviet Union. From there, the Soviets could reach further into Europe. Even the staunchest isolationist would have found that a disconcerting if not terrifying prospect.
Therefore, on March 12, 1947, President Truman delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress which in part stated, “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Truman went on to declare that America “must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.” Truman then requested—and Congress subsequently provided—$400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey. More importantly, though, Truman’s speech became the foundation of a new foreign policy known as “The Truman Doctrine.” Its subtext was clear: the United States would serve as a check against the Soviet Union’s attempts to expand its influence around the world. With that, a new era dawned. The “Cold War” had begun, cementing the United States’ status as a global superpower, and its days of isolationism permanently in the past.
The Cold War created an ideological shift within America. With the Soviet Union now perceived as America’s main
adversary, “communism” became synonymous with “Un-American.”
On March 21, 1947, President Truman issued Executive Order 9835 which required all federal employees be screened for “loyalty.” The purpose of this “Loyalty Order” was to identify, and weed out, all civil-service workers who were affiliated with, or sympathetic to, any “totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive” organization. Likewise, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities ramped up its investigations into communist infiltrations of American institutions, particularly in the film entertainment industry. On November 24, 1947, ten suspected communist screenwriters and directors appeared before the Committee and were cited for contempt of Congress when they refused to testify as to whether or not they were communist. The very next day, various studio executives, under the aegis of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, fired all ten writers and directors from their studio contracts.
This launched what would become known as the “Witch-Hunt” that raced through the film industry, causing havoc for both real and suspected communists. In short order, hundreds of actors, screenwriters, directors, musicians, and production crew members, accused of communist sympathies by their industry colleagues, were blacklisted by studio production heads even though the vast majority of the accused had committed no crime. The Hollywood Witch-Hunt was shortly followed by “McCarthyism,” which carried the same practice over to universities and the military.
Ironically, this took place as the country was celebrating its liberty with a cross-country tour of the Freedom Train, a locomotive that was a virtual museum of important U.S. documents. Al Capp’s Li’l Abner devoted the first three weeks of September 1947 to the Train, elevating the Constitution’s freedoms while savagely mocking politicians who abused their power. Pittsburgh Press editor Edward Towner Leech believed that the cartoonist was depicting the Senate as “an assortment of boobs and undesirables” and refused to publish
the final week of dailies. “We don’t think it is good editing or sound citizenship to picture the Senate as an assemblage of freaks and crooks,” he declared in a September 17 editorial. “There already are too many efforts to weaken faith in American institutions” (Leech 16).
No doubt, America was undergoing a dramatic and tumultuous transition, affecting every citizen, institution, and business, including the comic book industry.
The G.I. Bill Artists
After the surrender of the Axis powers in 1945, and the massive demobilization of Allied troops in 1945 and 1946, American boys were returned to civilian life in droves. This was singularly dramatized in William Wyler’s Academy Award-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives, released November 21, 1946, and starring Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright and double-amputee Harold Russell, who also won a Best Supporting Actor award for the first of only three films he would ever act in. The Best Years of Our Lives made it clear that readjustment to civilian life would be difficult for most soldiers.
To ease that transition, Congress passed the Serviceman’s Readjust ment Act of 1944, which was most commonly known as the “G.I. Bill.” It provided services for virtually all returning veterans. Among its most popular benefits were the payment of tuition and living expenses to attend high school, college or voca tional schools, the provision of lowcost mortgages and business loans, and a year of unemployment com pensation. Veterans didn’t have to pay any income tax on G.I. benefits, since these benefits weren’t consid ered earned income.
Roughly half a million ex-service men returned to civilian life in New York City alone in 1946, including a flood of young, aspiring artists, many of whom sought a career in comic illustration and needed art education to accomplish this. To fill this need, syndicated Tarzan artist Burne Hogarth and Silas Rhodes co-founded the Car toonists and Illustrators School in 1947 with the support of the
Veterans Administration where Rhodes worked. (The school itself was an expansion of Hogarth’s Manhattan Academy of Newspaper Art.) C&I offered a two-year course to prepare students for a career in cartooning and commercial art and its first instructors were Hogarth, Marvin Stein and Harry Fisk. Some members of the inaugural class of 35 students included Dick Cavalli (Winthrop), Jerry Marcus (Trudy) and Bob Weber (Moose). Another of the early students was a precocious, skinny chain smoker named Wallace Wood.
Seeking New Directions
A comic book with far reaching significance for the comics industry in 1947 was actually released at the end of 1946. Lev Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay #50 (on sale December 30, 1946 but with a March 1947 cover date) hit newsstands with a banner above the title shouting “MORE THAN 5,000,000 READERS!” It was the boldest of claims, but everyone in the comics industry knew it couldn’t be true. In fact, it was common knowledge that only a few comics were selling over one million copies a month. Rather than boasting about the sales of Crime Does Not Pay, the “More Than 5,000,000 Readers”
TIMELINE: 1947
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 13: The first installment of the daily Steve Canyon comic strip appears in newspapers. Written, drawn, and owned by famed Terry and the Pirates creator Milton Caniff, the adventure strip will run until 1988.
January 15: The mutilated remains of 22-year-old aspiring actress Elizabeth Short are found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The body of “Black Dahlia” (as she becomes posthumously known) is drained of blood and severed at the waist. Her murder remains one of the most famous unsolved crimes in American history as well as the basis for numerous films and novels.
March 12: In an address to Congress, President Truman announces his foreign policy (“The Truman Doctrine”) to aid nations threatened by Soviet expansion. The Cold War has begun.
March 21: President Truman issues Executive Order 9835 (a.k.a. the “Loyalty Order”) which sought to root out any federal employee who was affiliated with or sympathetic to any “totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive” organization.
April 6: The first Tony awards— recognizing excellence in Broadway theater—are presented at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.
banner was making a claim to the comic book’s reach. In other words, publisher Gleason was estimating the title’s total readership by figuring that any bought issue would be read by six or more readers besides the buyer. It was certainly true that any comic book sold in 1946 would likely have been read by the purchaser’s friends, traded to other comics fans, or deposited in the waiting rooms of barbers and doctors. Still, the idea that every comic sold would be read by seven people seemed a bit much, and Gleason really had no idea of the actual number of readers of each issue. What Gleason hoped was that casual browsers would take the banner to mean that Crime Does Not Pay was actually selling 5,000,000 copies of each issue, prompting them to “jump on the bandwagon” and buy their own copy. In that regard, Gleason was right. The actual sales figures in 1946 for the bi-monthly Crime Does Not Pay were an average of 811,806 copies an issue, but in 1947 that average climbed to 863,591 copies as the title went monthly starting with issue #51 (May 1947). Sales for Crime Does Not Pay peaked in 1948 with an average of 993,620 copies (Gleason 136). Little wonder, then, that with issue #58 (Dec. 1947), the cover banner above the Crime Does Not Pay title no longer read “Over 5,000,000 Readers Monthly!” It now read “Over 6,000,000 Readers Monthly!”
Gleason’s hyperbolism aside, for an industry looking for new trends that would suit the reading tastes of postwar
June 8, Charles Schulz’s L’il Folks, the precursor to Peanuts, begins running in the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a one-panel joke strip.
April 15: Wearing No. 42 for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American to play in a regular season Major League Baseball game.
Black Canary makes her debut appearance as a supporting character in a Johnny Thunder story in Flash Comics #86.
May 8: The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) convenes in Hollywood to investigate alleged Communist influence in the film industry.
May 2: Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston dies at the age of 53 of cancer.
April 16: In Galveston Bay, Texas, a fire on board a French vessel detonates its cargo of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, killing nearly 600 people and devastating nearby Texas City. Thousands of city residents are left homeless as a result.
June 27: A jury finds the board members of the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, which includes comic book publisher Lev Gleason, guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to provide documents to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Gleason subsequently receives a suspended sentence of three months along with a $500 fine.
America—especially as the war years’ superhero titles continued their sales slide and the humor/funny animal titles that were replacing some of the superhero titles were performing, at best, satisfactorily—the clear success of Crime Does Not Pay made publishers take notice, prompting a few of them to dip their toes into the crime comics waters. Timely published Official True Crime Cases #24 in June (with a Fall 1947 cover date) before changing the book’s title to All-True Crime with issue #26 (Feb. 1948). Ace’s Super-Mystery Comics dropped its long-standing stars, the superpowered crimefighter Magno the Magnetic Man and his kid sidekick Davey, in favor of the detective duo “Bert and Sue” whose stories were illustrated by Ken Battefield and the underrated Warren Kremer. Then there was Vin Sullivan’s Magazine Enterprises, which mainly published funny animal and humor comics like Tick Tock Tales and Koko and Kola, suddenly turning up with the sleazy looking The Killers #1 featuring “Killers Three!” on its L.B. Coleillustrated cover. Sometime in 1947, Plastic Man creator Jack Cole took a job with Magazine Village to edit, write and draw a comic titled True Crime Comics.
It should come as no surprise that the creative duo of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby knew way before 1947 that “crime was in the air” and decided to give it a try. First, they converted Hillman’s Clue Comics (which had been featuring an anti-gun crusader named the Gun Master) into a hard-
June 11: Created by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino, the
July 8: In New Mexico, the Roswell Daily Record reports the Roswell Army Air Field has captured a flying saucer. Although military officials later clarify the debris was merely a high-altitude weather balloon, many people believe a
from another planet has crash-landed in Roswell and that the U.S. military has captured its extra-terrestrial occupants.
“The Roswell Incident” becomes the fodder for UFO conspiracy theories for decades to come.
July: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby ignite a major new trend in
with the release of
October 5: President Truman delivers the first televised White House address, asking Americans to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursday in order to help stockpile grain for starving Europeans.
August 20: E.C. Comics publisher and former founder of All-American Publications, Max Gaines dies at the age of 52 in a boat accident.
September 26: Captain Marvel Adventures #79 introduces Mr. Tawny, a talking tiger who befriends Captain Marvel and will become one of the superhero’s most popular supporting characters for the remainder of his Fawcett run.
August 15: After 200 years of British rule, India gains its independence. The subcontinent formerly ruled by Great Britain has been partitioned into two self-ruling nations: India and Pakistan.
hitting crime comic with the issue cover dated March 1947 (recognized as either issue #13 of volume one or issue #1 of volume two). Their eight page “King of the Bank Robbers” focused on George Leonidas Leslie, an actual leader of a gang of bank robbers who operated in Philadelphia, New York City, and Baltimore in the 1860s and 1870s. Within three issues, Clue Comics became Real Clue Crime Stories (June 1947), and the book would run for over 70 issues as such, finally ending in May 1953.
Then Simon & Kirby launched a second crime series by converting the Crestwood/Prize title Headline Comics from a comic book “for the American boy” to a book billed as “All True Famous Detective Cases.” Headline Comics #23 (March-April 1947) features a cover by the Simon and Kirby team (or by Kirby and members of their studio). The two creators would produce this title for the rest of the decade, adding a substantial body of “true crime” stories to their credit. Unlike the crime stories published by Lev Gleason, many (but not all) of the Simon & Kirby crime tales were factual—a rarity in the crime genre of the 1940s-1950s, as Gleason and others who claimed such factual research in their crime stories were usually not concerned with facts at all.
The two new crime comics by Simon & Kirby did well, so they produced another Crestwood crime series: Justice
October 14: Over Muroc Army Air Field in California, Air Force test pilot Charles “Chuck” Yeager attains airspeed of almost 700 mph while flying the experimental Bell X-1 rocket plane. It is the first time a man breaks the sound barrier.
November 24: In a near unanimous vote, the U.S. House of Representatives cite “The Hollywood Ten” (a group of Hollywood screenwriters and directors which include Ring Lardner Jr. and Dalton Trumbo) for contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate in its investigation of alleged Communist influence in the film industry.
November 29: The United Nations General Assembly passes a resolution that partitions Palestine between Arab and Jewish regions. The State of Israel has been created.
December 3: Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire—starring Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, and Kim Hunter— opens on Broadway. The drama about a beleaguered Southern belle who moves to New Orleans to live with her sister and brother-inlaw will earn the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play of the year as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Traps the Guilty. The cover of its first issue (Oct.-Nov. 1947) features a murderer, sitting in the electric chair, being taunted by the jailors preparing his execution. With that, Simon and Kirby put superheroes behind them as they prospected for gold in new genres that would appeal to the returning G.I.s, and other, older groups of readers who didn’t want the simplistic, colorful heroes any longer.
Since the Comic House/Gleason titles were distributed by Independent News, the true sales figures of Crime Does Not Pay were available to Harry Donenfeld at National Comics Publications (a.k.a. DC Comics), and through him, Jack Liebowitz, and likely the editors working at National, including Mort Weisinger, Julius Schwartz and Editorial Director Whitney Ellsworth, among others. The fact that a comic book about crime could sell almost as well as the industry’s most popular titles may not have come as a great surprise to anyone perusing the growing selection of provocative, pungent, and often sordid paperbacks available in candy shops and drug stores. Ellsworth’s dilemma, though, was figuring out how to exploit the genre in a way that was still within the bounds of good taste that was National’s touchstone.
His solution would be published with a December 1947-January 1948 cover date, signaling the tidal wave of crime comics that would flood the market in 1948.
spacecraft
comic books
Prize’s Young Romance #1.
Cowboys, Criminals, and Lovers
“We are met here today to take a step which we believe will benefit ourselves, our community, and our country. Believing that comic books are mentally, physically, and morally injurious to boys and girls, we propose to burn those in our possession. We also pledge ourselves to try not to read any more.”
A group of students, clearly coached for the occasion, expressed their approval in one voice and watched as eighth-grade spokesman David Mace struck a match to a copy of Superman and tossed it into a huge pile of comic books that was soon a blazing bonfire. A popular, influential child, Mace had been targeted by teacher Mabel Riddel as an ideal subject to lead an anti-comics drive among his fellow students in Spencer, West Virginia. According to a reporter on the scene of the October 26, 1948 stunt, cracks in the other children’s solidarity were evident that day as many wept as their four-color treasures went up in flames (Hajdu 116-117).
There was much to worry about in 1948, from Communist encroachment in China and Czechoslovakia to President Truman’s institution of a new peacetime military draft. For the kids of America, however, the attack on their comic books felt much more personal.
Criticism of comic books as a medium had occurred as early as 1940 but postwar arguments went further than merely scoffing at them as a distraction from worthwhile reading material. Detractors now blamed them for the so-called rise in juvenile delinquency. Time magazine documented “copycat” crimes committed by young readers of these comic books. As comic book historian Mike Benton wrote, “The crime comics supposedly were implicated in several juvenile crimes, including a burglary, a hanging, and a murder by poisoning” (Benton 45). An ABC radio broadcast entitled “What’s Wrong with Comics?” led to formations of comic book watchdog groups across the country. In Cincinnati, a self-important “Committee on the Evaluation of Comics” enlisted 35 volunteers to regularly review recent issues and hold them up to a code devised by members. The November 28, 1948 edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer reported on one such meeting where “only 14 books in the collection of 118 comics were rated as unobjectionable by the critics.”
Unlike other genres, actual crime comics faced another hurdle. Many states, particularly New York where almost the entire comics industry was based, had laws prohibiting exploitive true-fact crime magazines, largely due to fears that such magazines encouraged rather than deterred crime. Unsurprisingly, when reports of children either killing others or committing suicide were linked to comics, authorities attempted to transfer and enforce onto comics the pre-existing laws that dealt with real-life crime magazines, especially since the comics claimed the stories they published were based on real crimes. (In reality, though, that claim was usually wildly inaccurate.) Crime comics then became especially vulnerable to these laws.
The Bad Doctor
One man in particular fanned the flames of this outrage: Dr. Fredric Wertham, the senior psychiatrist for the New York Department of Hospitals. Born March 20, 1895 in Nuremberg, Germany, Wertham immigrated to the United States in the early 1920s and was appointed the senior psychiatrist at New York City’s Bellevue Mental Hygiene Clinic in 1932. As his reputation grew, Wertham wrote a few influential books related to his field, notably Brain as an Organ (1934) and Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (1941). All this was preparation for Wertham opening the Lafargue Clinic, a psychiatric clinic for African Americans, in Harlem, New York, in 1946. Lafargue became the psychiatrist’s base of operations for the next decade, but in 1947, Wertham also opened in New York City the Quaker Emergency Service Readjustment Center for sexually maladjusted individuals.
In a remarkable display of tunnel vision, Dr. Wertham perceived practically the entire medium as “crime comics.” In his mind, the cautionary tale of Machine Gun Kelly was no different than Mickey Mouse’s battles with Pegleg Pete. Whether in Westerns, romance, or funny animals, the presence of a good vs. evil theme signified a comic book as a corrupting influence.
Wertham entered the fray courtesy of writer Judith Crist in a Collier’s article entitled “Horror in the Nursery” (March 27, 1948). She essentially adapted Wertham’s anti-comics views (and so-called research) into an article geared toward parents and decency groups. He could have had no better launch pad to a widespread audience. The Collier’s article disingenuously begins by stating, “There are books of wellknown comics which make life better by making it merrier. There are others which make it clear […] that crime never pays. With such there is no quarrel. The books deplored here are those which attempt to make violence, sadism, and crime attractive, which ignore common morals, which appeal chiefly to the worst in human nature.” This sounded quite reasonable, until one examined the actual extent of Dr. Wertham’s anticomics views.
Wertham was, to all appearances in 1948, a liberal, well respected 53-year-old doctor whose concern for youth— especially inner city, underprivileged youth of color— caused him to crusade against the violence he believed was rampant in “children’s literature” (i.e., comic books) then found on newsstands. Almost every kid read them, while most educated adults did not. With wartime restrictions on paper eliminated, new comic titles were proliferating and crowding the newsstands. In addition, though superhero titles were beginning to lose the consumers’ interest, the crime genre, which Lev Gleason and Charles Biro had pioneered in 1942 with Crime Does Not Pay, was rapidly increasing in popularity. This was partly because the stories themselves were quite exciting and, at times, well done, and partly because their creators, many of them newly returned from the war, found that real life and the more “grown-up” stories available in the crime genre were more interesting to write and draw than the banal silliness which many superhero comics had been mired in during the postwar years.
At this time, Wertham stated that he got into the fight against comics “not as a psychiatrist, but as a voice for the thousands of troubled parents who, like myself, are concerned primarily with their children’s welfare.” Supposedly his research was to find “not what harm comic books do, but objectively what effect they have on children. So far we have determined that the effect is definitely and completely harmful” (Crist 22).
From there, the article moved into what would become a familiar Wertham litany of examples of the “negative influence” of comic books on the children whom he studied, mostly those at-risk youths from the Lafargue Clinic. Decades later, comics scholar Carol Tilley examined Wertham’s sealed research files and determined that his examples were replete with mismatched and even false information which, if known at the time, would have invalidated most of Wertham’s claims. But such were his credentials as the head of a major children’s psychiatric clinic that no one questioned the legitimacy of Wertham’s assertions. After all, it was clear to anyone looking that many of the crime comic books were replete with violence, despicable characters, sexual innuendo, and situations meant to thrill under the “crime never pays” shield.
On March 19, 1948, just before “Horror in the Nursery” was published, Wertham presided over a symposium titled “The Psychopathology of Comic Books.” Likely a promo event tied into the Collier’s article, the symposium was held at the New York Academy of Medicine where Wertham
Dr. Fredric Wertham in a photo by Gordon Parks, circa 1954.
TIMELINE: 1948
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 4: Superman
Kirk
January 30: Mahatma Ghandi, the 78-year-old Indian leader who opposed British imperialism, is assassinated by a fellow Hindu who felt Ghandi had betrayed the Hindu cause. At the time, Ghandi was on a hunger strike to protest bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims. Ghandi’s peaceful means of political resistance will inspire future Civil Rights leaders around the world.
JANUARY FEBRUARY
January 30: The Winter Olympics—the first Olympics since 1936—opens in St. Moritz, Switzerland. As a reflection of post-World War II sentiment, Germany and Japan are not invited to participate.
March 9: After seven years of posturing and legal maneuvering, National Comics’ lawsuit against Fawcett Publications—in which the former claimed that the latter’s Captain Marvel was an infringement of its copyright of its Superman character—finally goes to trial. It ends on March 31, but a decision isn’t made until 1950.
March 31: The U.S. Congress passes the Foreign Assistance Act (a.k.a. “The Marshall Plan”) to help European nations recover from World War II. Over the next four years the U.S. provides over $13 billion to 17 European nations.
May 10: Psychiatrist Nicholas Dallis and artists Marvin Bradley and Frank Edgington launch Rex Morgan, M.D., whose mix of medicine and melodrama makes it one of the post-war era’s most influential newspaper strips.
March 27: In its latest issue, Collier’s magazine includes a Judith Crist-written article titled “Horror in the Nursery” that explains the link between the reading of comic books and juvenile delinquency. A prominent voice in the article is psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham who earlier in the month details his findings at a symposium at the New York Academy of Medicine.
May 14: As British rule in Palestine comes to an end, the independent state of Israel is proclaimed in Tel Aviv with David Ben-Gurion serving as the nation’s first prime minister. Hours after its independence has been announced, Israel is attacked by forces from neighboring Arab nations: Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.
and several other self-appointed experts on the subject revealed the findings of their research, all condemning crime comic books. A transcript and summary of the discussion that followed was subsequently published in the American Journal of Psychotherapy
Several members of the comics industry were present at the symposium, although they were allotted little time to make remarks. One of Martin Goodman’s editors, Harold Straubing, was the only pro-comics attendee who was quoted at any length in the report. He said, “Whether the responsibility for delinquency rests with the comic book influences is doubtful, because we are exposed to so much crime, violence, conflicting ideas and social problems in life and other mediums of expression.” Charles Biro, on the other hand, “stated vigorously that comic books are getting better.” Two other creators in Martin Goodman’s employ, Alden Getz and Harvey Kurtzman “suggested that comic books should be improved and made educational.” Wertham refused to
June 8: One of the first shows to be broadcast on television, the Texaco Star Theater debuts on the NBC network. Hosted by comedian Milton Berle, the comedy-variety show becomes a phenomenal success, lasting until 1956.
June 10: Comic book publisher Lev Gleason debates Dr. Fredric Wertham live on WCBS radio regarding the benefits of comic book reading.
June 26: Two days after Communist forces cut off all land and water routes between West Germany and West Berlin, American, British, and French air forces begin dropping supplies into the beleaguered city. The Berlin Airlift allows two million West Berliners to survive the Soviet blockade.
let the comic book professionals in attendance do more than append a brief comment to the record. In May of 1948, Wertham also presented his anti-comics views in an article for The Saturday Review of Literature.
Soon national attention was directed at the supposed crime comics/juvenile delinquency problem, and for a time, anti-comics hysteria seemed to be building. Parents and teachers, who at one time had encouraged comic book reading, were now denouncing it. In more than 50 different cities, the police got into the act and tried to restrict the sale of “bad” comic books to kids. One month after Wertham’s symposium, the April issue of Time magazine included a story about Detroit Police Commissioner Harry S. Toy, who examined all the comic books available in his community and stated they were “loaded with communist teachings, sex, and racial discrimination.” A grassroots campaign led by religious leaders, newspaper editors, teachers, and children themselves urged school children to go from house to house in their communities,
Detroit Police Commissioner Harry S. Toy’s anti-comics crusade was lightly mocked with April 1948 headlines like “Police Ordered to Read Comic Books.” Photo by Tony Linck.
comes to life on the silver screen when
Alyn portrays the Man of Steel in the first chapter of a Columbia movie serial.
July 29: The Summer Olympics open in London, England. As with the Winter Olympics, Germany and Japan are not invited to participate. The games are dominated by the United States whose athletes win the most medals, including the first gold medal won by an African American woman: Alice Coachman in the high jump.
July 26: President Truman issues Executive Order 9981 which abolishes racial segregation in the U.S. armed forces and civil services.
August 10: Candid Microphone, a practical joke reality show involving hidden cameras and microphones, debuts on the ABC television network. Created, produced, and hosted by Allen Funt, the show changes its name to Candid Camera when it moves to NBC in 1949.
October 4: Walt Kelly’s Pogo makes its debut as a newspaper strip, running exclusively in the New York Star until May 1949 when it earns national syndication.
October 11: Funnyman, a comic strip by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster about a clownish superhero, makes its debut in newspapers but is soon dropped when it fails to find an audience.
August 31: The eager-toplease creature known as the Shmoo emerges in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, quickly becoming a cultural phenomenon.
August 15: The Korean peninsula becomes split at the 38th parallel when the southern half is established as the Republic of Korea. Three weeks later, the northern half of the peninsula is declared the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
July 1: The Association of Comic Magazines Publishers adopts a “Publishers Code” which forbids, among other things, the portrayal of crime that might “throw sympathy against the law” as well as the “ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group.”
September 5: The latest installment of The Spirit newspaper strip features Gerhard Shnobble, a lonely man who jumps off a skyscraper, only to discover he can fly. He drops to the ground dead after being hit by stray gunfire from a rooftop battle between the Spirit and some gangsters. “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble” will become considered one of the best Spirit stories in the strip’s history.
collect all the comics that they could find (crime or otherwise) and incinerate them in public bonfires.
Prominent among comics’ defenders was Al Capp, who delivered a one-two punch with the Sunday editions of his Abbie an’ Slats and Li’l Abner newspaper strips for August 1 and 8, 1948, respectively. In the former (drawn by Raeburn Van Buren), a Wertham parody named Frederick Muttontop returned to his hometown of Crabtree Corners to fire up the locals about the evils of comics. Afterward, he was reminded that “the fine literature [he] read as a child” consisted of lurid dime novels. “It’s worse than anything kids see today,” he sputtered, “but it never did me any harm.”
A week later, Abner—deprived of his favorite “comical strip” Fearless Fosdick—reminded a group of protesting Dogpatch mothers about the violence in classic literature. “Those grand old authors—Poe, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Mother Goose—is all bad fo’chillun,” one woman gasped. “Sometimes I think those psy-cho-logists is jest trying t’make a soft dollar by writin’ articles frightenin’ us.” Late in 1948, this particular strip was reprinted in Harvey’s Li’l Abner #68 and #69 as “Li’l Abner Fights for His Rights.”
The most eloquent defense of comics in 1948 may have come from a 14-year-old boy in Washington, D.C. Infuriated by the anti-comics propaganda of Wertham and fellow
November 2: Despite the Chicago Daily Tribune’s premature headline that announces “Dewey Defeats Truman,” Harry Truman is reelected President of the United States, beating his Republican challenger, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey.
October 28: Action Comics back-up Congo Bill headlines the latest Columbia movie serial.
October 26: Led by an eighth grader who declared comic books are “mentally, physically, and morally injurious to boys and girls,” students in Spencer, West Virginia burn over 2000 comic books that had been collected during a school-sponsored drive. The comic book burning is reported by the Associated Press, spurring other burnings across the nation.
December 30: Based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Kiss Me, Kate opens on Broadway. Written by Bella and Samuel Spewack with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, the musical will win multiple Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Author, and Best Original Score.
zealot John Mason Brown that he read in separate editions of The Saturday Review, teenager David Pace Wigransky wrote a restrained, articulate rebuttal. “The brothers Cain and Abel lived in a world of ideal tranquility,” he wrote, “a world that had never known violence or crime, a world completely devoid of comic books. How then does Dr. Fredric Wertham account for this brutal fratricide told within the pages of the Bible, the only book in the history of man more widely read and more widely attacked than American comic books?” (Wigransky 19).
“Dr. Wertham,” Wigransky furthered stated, “cites some two-dozen gruesome and horrible cases of juvenile delinquency from his files. These crimes were committed recently by weak-minded children and adolescents, who, Dr. Wertham implies, would never have considered crime had not they been comic-book readers. In none of these cases was it proved that reading comic books was the cause of the delinquency. A good many of the delinquents mentioned happened to be readers of comic magazines just as are 69,999,975 perfectly healthy, happy, normal American boys and girls, men and women, who also read the comics. It is just as ridiculous to suppose that the 69,999, 975 people are law-abiding citizens just because they are comic book readers as it is to suppose that twenty-five others are depraved criminals due to the same reading habits” (Wigransky 19).
dated issues, the women were entangled in some type of legal trouble—underage drinking, a vehicular hit-andrun, domestic violence, bank robbery, buying stolen goods, blackmail, etc.—so much so that the title was really more of a crime/romance mash-up.
Fawcett came next with Sweethearts #68 (Oct. 1948), taking over the numbering from the defunct superhero title Captain Midnight. Sweethearts was different in both format and frequency than the previous three titles, as it featured photo covers instead of illustrated ones and debuted as a monthly 52-page comic right out of the starting gate. It enjoyed a healthy life, running monthly until its last two issues and ending with issue #121 (May 1953), at a time when Fawcett was shutting down its comic book division.
Still, the release of these four titles in 1948 only hinted at the explosion of romance titles coming in 1949. The bur-
geoning romance genre also provided ample opportunity for publishers who were cultivating an audience of older males. Well-endowed women, often posed suggestively and underdressed, were a staple on covers from companies like Fox and Fiction House.
Fox’s Phantom Lady #17 (April 1948) is a textbook example. As the Matt Baker-drawn cover makes abundantly clear, Phantom Lady isn’t wearing a bra, and the nipple of her left breast is poking through the material covering it. The cover also suggests bondage as Phantom Lady uncoils a hawser-type rope from around her body as a knife-wielding man approaches.
In his anti-comics manifesto Seduction of the Innocent (1954), Frederic Wertham made a point to include that specific cover as an example of comics “specializing in highly accentuated and protruding breasts in practically every illustration. Adolescent boys call these ‘headlight comics.’” Like much of Wertham’s text, though, there’s no evidence that such a crass expression ever enjoyed any sort of usage in the 1940s. The fact that it’s recalled at all is because of Robert Overstreet’s references to it in his 1970s Comic Book Price Guide that noted issues cited in Seduction of the Innocent. Inevitably, any comic book of the era featuring a wellendowed woman—whether Betty and Veronica or Phantom Lady—was retroactively branded a “headlight comic” in one circle or another.
“I doubt this was actual 1940s slang,” former Comic Reader editor Mike Tiefenbacher told American Comic Book Chronicles, “and that anyone outside the tiny group of cherry-picked examples Wertham claimed to have interviewed was actually using the word. It’s a tacky and weird thing for any kid to have come up with on his own based on car or bicycle lights. If anybody ever used the word, it’s more likely to have been derived from photographs which highlighted the presence of the thick, stiff white cotton bras of the era showing through beneath dark sweaters or tights, which is hardly anything you’d have seen portrayed in comic books. Sure, boys love breasts and will always love breasts, but that didn’t mean every publisher and cartoonist who drew idealized women on covers was attempting to drag it all down to a pornographic level.”
Legendary comics distributor and bookseller Bud Plant added, “Terry Stroud and Dave Alexander, when partners in the American Comic Book Company in the 1970s, coined the term ‘esoteric comics’ to detail this phenom…the wild covers, decapitation stories, sexy stuff, offbeat craziness…much of which is now detailed in the Guide and highly sought after. Before they pointed it out, and raised prices on that stuff, many of us paid little attention to weird titles from minor companies, particularly pre-Code crime and horror, but even teen stuff and most particularly, ‘headlight’ covers. That term was not around when I started collecting in 1965” (Durajlija).
Joseph Maneely was born on February 18, 1926 and raised in Philadelphia. At the age of 16, Maneely enlisted in the U. S. Navy, but when his artistic talent were recognized, his three years of duty was served producing various forms of art and cartooning for the ship newspapers. After the war, he used the G. I. Bill to study art in Philadelphia, and following a stint working for the Philadelphia Bulletin, he entered the comic book field.
His first professional work appeared in 1948 in comics published by Street & Smith. He began by penciling and inking the crime story “The Ragged Stranger” in Top Secrets #4 (Aug. 1948), as well as “Death by the Sword” in Red Dragon #4 (Aug. 1948). From there, he churned out stories for other S&S features: “Butterfingers,” “Nick Carter,” “Public Defender,” and the humorous “Supersnipe,” among others. Maneely was fast, and that energy transferred to the action on the page. It was as if Maneely was a born comic book artist. By the decade’s end, he had formed a studio with artist Peggy Zangerie and a friend named George Ward, who
would become Walt Kelly’s assistant on Pogo. Maneely’s first published story for Martin Goodman’s line was “The Kansas Massacre of 1864” in Western Outlaws and Sheriffs #60 (Dec. 1949). From there, he became a star artist for the Goodman/Atlas comics of the 1950s as well as Stan Lee’s favorite among his freelancers during that decade.
Post World War II, comic book publishers were practically overrun by applicants seeking work, and there was tremendous competition amongst those applicants to secure assignments or even an apartment in New York, where the comics industry was centered. There was open resentment from veterans who felt they were aced out of jobs by someone who hadn’t served in the military. “There was very little housing and the jobs, they were all taken,” Joe Orlando recalled. “Wally Wood and I felt we’d been screwed. Every time we went for a job, some son of a bitch who hadn’t been in the army was there first. Our point of view was the jobs were all taken by 4-Fs. We had an anger against the 4-Fs for staying home and taking our jobs and marrying our women…we were all the same. We were all GI’s. We were all angry. We’d been screwed. Or we thought we had” (Duin 141). Still, talent would out. Some of the best who had their first
work in comic books published in the 1940s after the war included Dick Ayers, John Buscema, Dan DeCarlo, Will Elder, Ramona Fradon, Joe Giella, Stan Goldberg, Joe Orlando, John Severin, Curt Swan, and Doug Wildey.
Crime Comics Come on Strong
As impressive as the growth of Western comics was in 1948, it paled in comparison to the veritable boom of a different genre: crime. In 1947, only a handful of crime comic books were being published. One year later, the genre exploded to its peak when 38 crime comics hit the newsstands, representing 15 percent of all comic book titles published during the year. Truth be told, nearly every publisher was riding on the coattails of Lev Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay, whose covers, starting with issue #58 (Dec. 1947), claimed “Over 6,000,000 Readers Monthly!” That, at least, was the claim. The reality is that Crime Does Not Pay’s paid circulation averaged 993,620 copies per issue in 1948, up from its already impressive average of 863,591 in 1947.
From that success, Crime Does Not Pay’s editors, Charles Biro and Bob Wood, then managed to convince the typically riskaverse Gleason to put a second
crime comic book in his lineup. Crime and Punishment (first issue cover dated April 1948) hit the ground running with a monthly schedule. The 52-page book was virtually identical to its “running mate,” although it had a different Crime Host. “Common Sense” was a ghostly police officer who pointed out the moral lessons of each lead story. As he explains to the reader in the second issue, “Yes, I’m a dead cop, but I’m alive to the menace of the criminal. Whether you call me ghost, spook, or spirit, it doesn’t matter, as long as you believe my stories! […] I know a million cases, and every one proves the futility of jealousy, greed, and hate— the ingredients of crime! I will reveal each terrible story before your astonished eyes! If everyone believes me, perhaps there will be no need for cops to die one day!” Crime and Punishment #1 reveals the origin of Common Sense. In the 17-page “Crimson Story of Vannie Higgins,” rookie cop John O’Shay is killed in the line of duty, but when he arrives at the gates of Heaven, O’Shay forgoes eternal bliss in order to return to Earth as a spectral patrolman, determined to convince the readers that “crime does not pay!” Preceding this story in Crime and Punishment #1 are two text pages. The first shows letters from readers who extol the virtues of Crime Does Not Pay (“Dear Sir—So many children in my school agree that ‘Crime Does Not Pay’ is the best comic there is! It helps keep children on the right track.”). The second text page reproduces letters from remorseful convicted criminals (“I’m serving five years for robbery and assault in the Texas prison. If I had read Crime Does Not Pay sooner, I would not be here today. Please print this if you can—it might keep some other boys out of prison.”). Whether any of the printed letters were genuinely written by readers, law-abiding or not, is a matter of debate. Regardless, Lev Gleason used the letters to counteract the incendiary anti-comics views of Dr. Wertham, Judith Crist, and the like. On June 10, 1948, Lev Gleason even debated Dr. Wertham live on WCBS radio, arguing not only the benefits of comic book reading but also that censorship was “un-American and un-democratic!” (Dakin 93). Soon after this debate, Gleason changed the cover banner of Crime Does Not Pay. Starting with issue #68 (Oct. 1948), the title no longer boasted “Over 6,000,000 Readers Monthly!” It now was “A Force For Good in the Community.” (The same banner appeared on Crime and Punishment, starting with issue #8, and Daredevil Comics, starting with issue #51 (both cover dated Nov. 1948).)
The cover to Daredevil Comics #51 also displays the term “Illustories” as a way to elevate its contents from being merely “comic book stories.” The term soon appeared on every Lev Gleason title, not only Crime Does Not Pay and Crime and Punishment, but Boy Comics and Desperado too. As Biro explained to readers, “[The illustory] now takes its place alongside the theatre, movies, radio and television. It is not unlike the dramatic arts; its contact is both visual and literary. The new visual journalism is as American as hot-dogs and chewing gum. It is a development of our times, the beginning of a trend” (Benton 41). Evidently, Biro’s “new visual journalism” was heavily laden with word balloons. Throughout its war years, Crime Does Not Pay had captions on its covers, but seldom word balloons. As a result, those covers relied on visual impact to attract the reader. But in 1946, balloons began appearing with
increasing frequency, and by 1948, there were routinely three or four balloons on every cover. If Biro and Wood were trying to convey a sense of the comic within, then they succeeded, because the guts of these issues are also extremely text heavy. It wouldn’t be until Al Feldstein’s stories for E.C. horror comics of the 1950s before Biro found a competitor for word count per panel.
One needn’t worry about such verbosity in a comic book published by Victor Fox. His derivative clone of Crime Does Not Pay, Murder Incorporated (first issue cover dated Jan. 1948) included the cover blurb “Living Proof That Crime Never Pays” (shortened to just “Crime Never Pays” with issue #3). Unsurprisingly, Murder Incorporated was as poorly written (and poorly drawn) as the rest of Fox’s line and included a gratuitous body count, gunplay with blood spurting across the victims’ bodies, and women in low-cut, revealing dresses.
Nearly equaling the violence of Fox’s books, the crime titles by newcomer D. S. Publishing were better drawn and produced, not only in comparison to Fox but to other fly-by-night firms who attempted to exploit this genre. D. S. Publishing was a one-man outfit, owned and edited
John Forte’s cover for Murder Incorporated #1.
by Richard Davis. It began publishing song sheets early in the decade before moving into the true crime genre with the magazine Select Detective in 1946. In late 1947, D. S. got into comic books, publishing one issue of Jeff Jordan, U.S. Agent and then launching a line of crime comic books which added significantly to the number of violent publications on the newsstands at the time. None of the D.S. titles managed to make it to double digits as far as the number of issues that were released and all were launched in early-to-mid 1948, including Exposed (nine issues), Gangsters Can’t Win (nine issues), Outlaws (nine issues), Pay-Off (five issues), Public Enemies (nine issues), Select Detective (three issues), Underworld (nine issues) and Whodunit (three issues). The D. S. books were among the better crime comics to be published this year, yet by the end of 1950, Richard Davis disbanded the company.
Murder, Morphine and Me
Misdated 1947 but on sale in March 1948, Magazine Village’s True Crime Comics #2 presented, arguably, the most infamous crime story to appear in a comic book: the luridly titled “Murder, Morphine and Me!” This 14-page story of drug addiction and murder was drawn (and likely written and edited) as if in a fever dream by Jack Cole, originator (and, at the time, still chief artist and writer) of Plastic Man. The notoriety of this story was not only due to
its shocking imagery but also because it was prominently referenced in Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent. The story’s “needle to the eye” panel became a touchstone for critics decrying the tasteless brutality of crime comics. To their point, “Murder, Morphine, and Me” wasn’t that much different than the crime stories being produced by other publishers.
Cole was only intensely involved with True Crime Comics for its first two issues (numbered #2 and #3), which both appeared in 1948. Issue #3 presented one of the most famous crime comics covers ever published. Again drawn by Cole, the cover shows a gang moll shooting around an informer who’s being blasted in the back in a gang-related shootout. The machine gun bullets killing the informer spell out the word “Rat” as they rip through his body and exit out through his blood-smeared white shirt.
True Crime Comics’ remaining four issues were edited by either Abner Sundell or John Guinta. A leftover cover by Cole appears on issue #5 and a reprinted story from issue #2 is included in the sixth and final issue (numbered as Vol. 2, #1).
Nearly all publishers had some sort of crime comic book. Even Dell Comics had its first crime comic of sorts, with the publication of Dick Tracy Monthly (first issue cover dated Jan. 1948).
Mob!” from issue #4 (May-June 1948), about a completely unrepentant female getaway driver. Issue #5 (July-Aug. 1948) features art by Jerry Robinson and Mort Meskin on “Murder Special Delivery” as well as S&K’s boxing-themed “Fight Fix,” an early example of an arrest caused by “bugging” the criminal’s room with a microphone. Justice Traps the Guilty #6’s “Capture of One-Eye” was distinguished by its unusual art pairing. Jack Kirby penciled and inked a part of the title page while Al Feldstein drew the rest of the story. Finally, issue #7 (Nov.-Dec. 1948) included comics’ take on the most famous grave-robbing case in history with “Burke and Hare, The True Story of an Unholy Partnership,” illustrated by R. Louis Golden.
Headline Comics also boasted some good tales in its six bimonthly issues dated 1948. The Simon & Kirby story “I Worked for the Fence!” from issue #28 (Feb.-March 1948) follows a pretty gal who is involved in crime and anxious to engage in murder. Fusing the hot Western and crime genres, Simon & Kirby’s “Bullet-Proof Bad Man” (HC #30: June-July 1948) recounts the story of corrupt lawman—and Devil lookalike—Jim Miller, whose concealed steel corset vest created the mystique that he couldn’t be killed. Acting on a petty grudge, Miller tackled one young cowboy, knifed him to death and, off-panel, scalped him! Headline Comics #31 (Aug.-Sept. 1948) presents an A.C. Hollingsworth-illustrated look at the real-life Cattle Annie and Little Breeches, “the Female Furies of the Old West.” Issue #32’s “Clue of the Horoscope” is considered the first comic story drawn by John Severin, his pencils inked by Will Elder (Vadeboncoeur 36).
When Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created the first romance comic book—Young Romance in 1947, they had hit upon a gold vein that had as yet been untapped. Other publishers didn’t join the “romance comic book gold rush” for about six months, and even then, most seemed hesitant about doing so. This delay gave Simon and Kirby time to set up a studio—in space located at 1790 Broadway, Manhattan, where Crestwood had its editorial offices—and get production moving on other titles. This included a second Prize romance comic book: Young Love (first issue cover dated February-March 1949).
Young Love followed the modus operandi of its “older sister” publication with stories that sometimes dealt with more sophisticated subject matter than their soon-to-be competitors. One need look no further than the lead story in its first issue: “The Man I Loved Was a Woman Hater!” which starred an uncommonly independent-minded young woman who remained undaunted by the forceful rejection of a man who had saved her from drowning but then seemed to want nothing more to do with her. He was a painter who needed to concentrate on his work and had been burned in a prior relationship.
Then, by way of contrast, there was “The Plumber and Me!,” illustrated by Bill Draut (who illustrated all of the stories in this first issue, except for the lead tale by Simon & Kirby). “The Plumber and Me!” is a story of a girl who wants to be part of the bohemian art scene in the city, only to realize that the man with a prosaic occupation who proposes marriage to her offered balance in her life. “Now my life is complete,” she thinks, after marrying the plumber. “I have my home, and my baby and my husband… My art is just a hobby. I have learned no one can live in just half a world! But I would have gone on all my life, in an empty brittle, cynical circle, if my Pete hadn’t come along … and loved me enough to stick around and help me come to my senses!” This could be seen as just one more voice pushing women into the subordinate role of wife and mother, the likes of which ran rampant in the postwar media, but the idea of balance between two different worlds meant the story’s resolution was actually not quite so simple.
After the first issue, Young Love began running photo covers, as did Young Romance starting with its thirteenth
issue (Sept. 1949). It was a successful gambit, and probably saved Simon and Kirby some money, as the covers were bought out of a catalog of stock photography.
And the money that the creative duo were making on their romance books was considerable. As Joe Simon claimed in an interview decades later, “Young Romance and Young Love are by far the most profitable ventures [that Jack and I worked on]! For over ten years, they sold two million copies a month, and with high percentage figures. Of course, everybody was copying them, but there’s something about the first titles.
If they’re pretty good, they’ll outlast all the others, and nobody seemed to approach them in sales. Young Romance and Young Love were the leading magazines in sales in Hawaii, for instance, leading Life magazine and everything else!” (Seuling 7). According to Simon, both he and Kirby were taking home $1,000 a week, which in the early twenty-first century would equate to an annual salary of $520,000.
At this point in time, Simon and Kirby were very close. They both bought houses in Mineola, New York, and lived just a block or two from each other. They commuted to the office together and practically raised their families together.
Why Romance?
At the beginning of 1949, there were exactly six romance comic books being published: Simon & Kirby’s Young Romance and Young Love from Prize/ Crestwood, Marvel’s America Magazine Young Romance My Romance (soon to be renamed My Own Romance with issue #4—March 1949), Fawcett’s monthly Sweethearts, and Fox’s sordid My Life.
The American Comic Book Chronicles continues its ambitious series of FULLCOLOR HARDCOVERS, where TwoMorrows’ top authors document every decade of comic book history from the 1940s to today! At long last, this 1945-49 VOLUME covers the comic book industry during the aftermath of World War II, when scores of writers and artists returned from foreign battlefields to resume their careers. It was a period when readers began turning away from the escapist entertainment offered by super-heroes in favor of other genres, like the grittier, more brutal crime comics. It was a time when JOE SIMON and JACK KIRBY created Young Romance, inaugurating a golden age of romance comics. And it was during this five-year period that Timely and National Comics capitalized on the popularity of Westerns, that BILL GAINES plotted a new course for EC Comics in the wake of his father’s death, and that JERRY SIEGEL and JOE SHUSTER first sued for the rights to Superman. These are just a few of the events chronicled in this exhaustive, full-color hardcover, further documenting the ACBC series’ cohesive, linear overview of the entire landscape of comics history! By RICHARD J. ARNDT and KURT F. MITCHELL, with editors KEITH DALLAS and JOHN WELLS
Soon thereafter, the newsstands began filling up with love comics. By March, the number of romance titles had
