A brief history on the birth of the comic book and Famous Funnies
By the end of the nineteenth century, every newspaper had a comics section, and the comics featured in that section determined the popularity of the paper. Comics were the driving force in selling newspapers. Since they were popular with readers from every walk of life, it wasn’t long before books of various shapes and sizes began appearing at newsstands and general stores featuring reprintings of comic strips. The comic book we think of today, however, would end up being created out of a need to keep an expensive printing press running. It would be an innovation spawned by two crafty salesmen who would inadvertently create an industry.
The first pure collection of comics appeared in 1911 when the Chicago American offered a book reprinting Mutt and Jeff comic strips in exchange for six coupons clipped from the paper plus postage. It was a marketing tool used to boost the paper’s circulation and it worked. The Chicago American would go on to print over 45,000 copies of their Mutt and Jeff collection.
By 1919 Cupples & Leon would introduce the dominant form for reprint collections at the time, a black and white 9 1/2 inch square book with a flexible cardboard cover. Cupples & Leon even decided to number their collections, a clever commercial move that instantly alerted readers to the availability of other volumes for purchase. The collections were sold on newsstands and passenger trains for twenty-five cents (a little over $4 today), each book centering on a popular comic strip of the day, like Foxy Grandpa or Buster Brown. These early collections, however, were priced like books at the time, making them not easily accessible to the working-class audience that made stars out of the comic strips in the newspapers. A cheaper solution was needed.
George McManus, cartoonist of the hit strip Bringing Up Father, would try his luck in 1922 when he teamed up with Rudolph Block Jr. to produce the first regular newsstand comic, Comic Monthly. Sized more like a magazine, Comic Monthly offered readers reprints in each issue of comic strips from the previous year, a different strip each issue, all in a 8 ½ by 10 inch package. The real innovation Comic Monthly added to the melting pot of what would become the modern day comic book was how it was printed. Utilizing a soft paper cover and cheaper interior paper all at a ten-cent price tag seemed to be the sweet spot for the general public. Unfortunately, Comic Monthly ended up only lasting a year before folding.
The Eastern Color Printing Company in New York was responsible for printing the Sunday color comic supplements for many of the east coast newspapers as well as color printing for pulp magazines. Color printing at the time was still fairly new and a color press was very expensive. In order to justify their new machine, Eastern Color wanted to keep it producing materials as much as possible. This meant they needed to figure out how to keep their presses running during its generally idle third shift. George Delacorte and his Dell Publishing Company would come to the rescue, utilizing the press to print The Funnies in 1929.
The Funnies was a sixteen-page tabloid-sized (the size of a standard newspaper) comic magazine that was sold for five cents every Saturday at newsstands. Although Delacorte had created the first comic magazine to feature all original material, The Funnies didn’t last long. Perhaps the public thought it looked too much like the Sunday comics supplement they got for free with their newspaper every week or maybe the public just wasn’t ready for original material, either way, The Funnies ended its run at issue 36.
The end of The Funnies left Eastern Color back with the same problem of how to keep their presses running. This predicament and the belief that the public’s love of comics could be utilized to sell things other than newspapers got Eastern Color’s sales manager, Harry Wildenberg, thinking. Wildenberg managed to convince Gulf Oil Company to order a tabloid-sized comics giveaway they could offer customers with every gas station fill-up. Gulf Comic Weekly, a four-page tabloid, first appeared in April, 1933. When an advertisement on the radio appeared for the comic, it quickly became an overnight sensation. By the fifth issue, over three million copies were flying off the shelves weekly.
The success of Gulf Comic Weekly led Wildenberg to ponder over other ways to utilize comics as a sales premium. While working on a promotion for the Philadelphia Ledger, Wildenberg and some associates discovered that they could fit two reduced Sunday comic pages on a standard tabloid-size sheet of paper. After some further tinkering, Wildenberg figured out a way to use Eastern Color’s presses to print 7.5 by 10-inch magazines that soon would be dubbed comic books. Meanwhile, one of Wildenberg’s salesmen, Maxwell C. Gaines approached Procter & Gamble with the idea of offering their customers a comic book as a premium to be exchanged for coupons cut from their products.
Wildenberg and Gaines would soon give birth to Funnies on Parade, the first modern format comic book. Procter & Gamble ordered 10,000 copies of the comic which was composed of eight pages of several color comic reprints of popular strips like Mutt and Jeff and Joe Palooka. Funnies on Parade was so popular that the initial print run quickly vanished. This led to Eastern Color printing 100,000 copies of a new advertising premium, Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics which contained thirty-six pages of comic strip reprints. Gaines sold this newest advertising premium to various companies such as Canada Dry and the Kinney Shoe store, amongst others, to give away to their customers as they saw fit. Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics was yet another success, which quickly led the same companies to order a third book. Thus, in 1933, the hundred-page Century of Comics was produced with a print run of 250,000 copies.
According to Gaines, around this time he became curious if readers would be willing to spend money on these “comic books.” This prompted him to stick a 10 cent sticker on a few dozen leftover copies of Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics. He then gave them to several newsstands in his neighborhood on his way home one Friday night. The following Monday morning, Gaines was shocked to discover that all the copies he had delivered had sold out, and the newsstand vendors wanted more.
At the beginning of 1934, Eastern Color’s president, George Janosik, met with Dell Publishing Company owner, George Delacorte, in an attempt to convince Delacorte into ordering a comic pamphlet that would be exclusively for retail sale. The wounds of the Funnies failure from five years earlier were still in Delacorte’s mind, making him hesitant to commit. Nevertheless, Janosik talked him into it, and Delacorte reluctantly ordered 40,000 copies of Famous Funnies (a new comic with a similar name).
The plan hit a snag, however, when newspaper distributor American News refused to carry Famous Funnies. Delacorte pivoted and was able to sell the Famous Funnies comic in chain stores where copies sold out fast. Delacorte was disappointed by the less than enthusiastic reaction advertisers gave him towards the project, though. With the roadblocks of not having proper distribution and no advertisers, Delacorte decided to count his losses and abandon his option on the comic product before he ended up having another Funnies on his hands.
Unfortunately for Delacorte, not long after he had moved on, the New York Daily News published an article praising the commercial potential of comics. Eastern Color director Harold Moore saw this article as the perfect opportunity to turn the tides and showed it to Harold Gould, president of American News. A few days later, Gould ordered 250,000 copies of Eastern Color’s next pamphlet, Famous Funnies #1.
The new comic book hit the streets in May 1934, though there were still a few more hurdles to overcome. Newsstand vendors didn’t know how to display the new product at first, and Famous Funnies wouldn’t become profitable until issue #7. By then it was evident that the public was ready and a new medium was being born by reprinting syndicated comic strips.
Original content was another matter entirely. Conventional wisdom at the time was that readers wanted comic characters they recognized and were less prepared to spend their dimes on something new. Not to say that an original strip wouldn’t occasionally sneak in. In fact, the second issue of Famous Funnies contained one original strip, Dip & Duck by Meb, but the comic book wouldn’t feature another original strip until its sixth issue. This would all change when Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson arrived on the scene.
Wheeler-Nicholson was an ex-military officer who had a fairly prosperous career as a pulp magazine writer, producing adventure novels inspired by his years in the service. After seeing the potential in Famous Funnies, he decided to become a publisher of cartoon magazines. Wheeler-Nicholson would found National Comics Publications, which would one day become known as DC Comics, later that autumn. When he found he couldn’t afford to buy reprint rights to the popular newspaper strips, he decided on a cheaper solution. Just six months after Famous Funnies #1, New Fun appeared on newsstands.
New Fun contained thirty-two pages of black and white, all original comics. Additionally, it also contained advertising. At 10 by 15 inches, New Fun was twice as large as Famous Funnies, but cost the same price. It sold poorly at first. The larger size made it unwieldy for newsstand vendors, who were already having a hard time figuring out how to display comic books. Wheeler-Nicholson rebounded quickly, and three months later, New Fun was renamed More Fun and adopted the standard comic book size. More Fun, would even bring about the comic book debuts of two young kids from Cleveland, Ohio destined to change the new artform forever. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the future creators of Superman, would begin their careers with a swashbuckling adventure strip within the pages of issue #6. Wheeler-Nicholson would continue to grow his original material empire with New Comics, released in September 1935.
Surprisingly, it took the newspaper syndicates that owned the characters Famous Funnies were reprinting quite a while to see the potential this new format might have for them. By the end of 1935, however, Famous Funnies was no longer alone in the reprint game at the newsstands. It was joined by Popular Comics, supplied by Tribune News featuring reprints of strips like Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, and The Gumps. It was also published by none other than Delacorte, who was back for one more try at the comics game. By early 1936, Popular Comics was joined by King Comics containing King Features strips like Thimble Theater which featured the many adventures of Popeye and Tip Top Comics published by United Features.
By the middle of 1936, there were eight comic books appearing regularly at newsstands. Half of them were reprints: Famous Funnies, King Comics, Popular Comics, and Tip Top Comics. The rest were original material: The Comics Magazine, Mickey Mouse Magazine, More Fun, and New Comics. All were the same size and sold for ten cents. It was the dawn of a new medium and a new industry. No one knew where it was going, and everyone was learning on their feet what the public wanted. On the horizon, two short years later, was Action Comics #1, the birth of Superman, and the superhero gold rush. Things were just getting started.
References:
- Print, A Quarterly Journal of Graphic Arts Vol. III No. 2 Summer, 1942 “Narrative Illustration: The Story of the Comics” by M.C. Gaines
- Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books by Jean-Paul Gabilliet
- The Classic Era of American Comics by Nicky Wright
- Critical Insights: The American Comic Book edited by Joseph Michael Sommers
- The American Comic Book: a Brief History by Daniel Clark and Krystal Howard
- Great History of Comic Books by Ron Goulart
- American Comics: A History by Jeremy Dauber
- The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum