BLBcomics-migration

American Comics Group ad aimed at comics retailers from 1949.

Have ID'd the Adventures Into the Unknown as #7 pirate skeleton cover. During my taped interviews with Irwin Donenfeld some 13 years ago as well as looking at documents he showed me then, his father Harry was the de facto secret owner of ACG which at the time blew my brain. There is a LOT of other publishers as well as distributers (such as Leader News) which Harry had secret corporate control over.

This page aimed at comics retailers dates from July 1952. Paul Winchell was once upon a time a famous ventriloquist with his own TV and radio shows. As comics came under attack thru the early 50s, it was a brave soul who admitted in print he read comic books.

In this article he even admits to maintaining a comic book library !!

Everett Arnold also used Radio on ABC as a tie-in to hook those listeners into buying his Blackhawk comic book. This advert dates from Oct 1950. The radio show, and the serial which came out circa the same year, are important factors why Blackhawk survived when other hero comic comic books bit the dust.

GOODMAN PUBLICATIONS selling 175,000 per day

I have hundreds upon hundreds of this type of primary research data.

Collected over the course of decades now prepping for my book once again.

Want to see more? Let me know......

CIRCULATION #19 April 1925

cover by George McManus

Does any one have any issue of Circulation?

Tis one of the absolute rarest comics collectibles on the planet

CIRCULATION #26 Sept 1926

Biedermann cover of most King Features characters

WIlliam Randolph Hearst's media empire published this magazine three to four times per year beginning in 1921 which was sent to every known newspaper in the entire world.

Following is a list of the world's known copies. Evidently not one single library or news media consortium any where in the world managed to save any of these from extinction in their files.

About one third of each issue I have collected to date contains articles BY comics creators writing about their craft on how to use comics to sell more newspapers.

There are some obvious blanks which comics historians (including this writer) would jump up and down to score. I also know of a 1928 issue which resides in Germany.

If any one has a "missing link" to fill in as "known to exist."

I offer a Two For One color xerox swap if you have one.

This expando version has 24 pockets,

four more than the previous one.

Allows for full cover display on half of them

Not sure what that means but he has had some good books. I've bought from him over the years and was happy with the prices and grading.

Thanks for the kind words. Some how I have made my living in this comics gig for over 40 years now. It is simply a hobby which got way out of hand many moons ago.

Have bought & sold literally millions of comic books in my life time. Hopefully my eBay feedback speaks for itself regarding grading & pricing concepts. Every once in a while I misplace a book amongst the 45,000 popular culture artifacts in my current warehouse but by & large orders mostly ship out same day paid for. Am scanning and posting "new" vintage popular culture artifacts almost every day.

Currently I am collecting to read and enjoy Sunday pages and complete sections from the 1890s thru the mid 1930s. The more obscure the better.

I will continue to ignore the "peanut gallery" who seem to have a hard-on attacking my research efforts. I also wish to publicly apologize to Bill Ponsetti whose comments I said a couple times earlier in this thread were "silly."

 

In finally figuring out where he was coming from, I completely misinterpreted he was discussing "now" in 2013 towards the future regarding "super" hero characters as "content" while I was completely immersed in the past discussing evolution of the "form" or, more so to the point, "format" of a comic book as this wonderful art form evolved in America since the 1840s, so, consequently, neither one of us were communicating properly.

 

Obviously Superman et al were are and will forever more have far larger impact as "characters" on any given world wide contest agenda of popularity than that long ago guy named Obadiah Oldbuck.

 

 

Thanks Bob.

 

I appreciate all the historical information you've brought to light over the years. Gosh knows you've added books to my want list as a result though

 

Yo Bill, most of the persons who have posted in to this thread I value their opines. Am heartened to see us back on the same page. Thanks for the kind words regarding the energy I have poured in to figuring out where all this comics stuff has come from.

Contrary to some of the peanut gallery spewing their continuous venom which I will continue to ignore, I have had zero agenda re "marketing" this stuff or on any other level where my comics business research has taken me in providing answers to the many questionsI have posed to myself much less sharing same with the rest of the comics collecting community for many years now.

Have I made mistakes over the years? But of course. We ALL have, to err is simply being human as we seek knowledge. Wisdom comes from taking said accumulated knowledge and learning to place such in proper time line context.

I do wish to state I still consider Rodolphe Topffer's comc books once he began getting them printed up to be the most important comic books since his essentially created the "form" from whence all the rest evolved.

Have come across a lot more primary research documents I will continue to share here in to the forseeable future.

Below is a tid bit mainly for Theagenes, says he is pro archeologist, who posed pertinent queries earlier in this thread, as I spent a portion of today sifting thru my research files once again. Hopefully I scanned this large enough to be read by those interested in proper comics history.

This New York Times question and answer from 1904 stipulates D i c k & Fitzgerald still had Topffer's albums in print for sale. There is no way most ALL of the comics creators who entered the newspaper Sunday sections beginning circa 1894 did nto see Topffer's comic books.

There is more "proof" coming down the pike as I get to it. Please keep in mind my #1 goal these days is seeing my children healed. Any one who has children understands what I mean by that simple statement. [/size]

I was struck with this pic that the comics

are racked up in the high back where kids can not get to them.

Note Hyper Mystery for sale in the upper left corner area. Truly a scarce title.

Also looks to be Hit Comics #1 on this rack cover dated July 1940.

I also have never seen this type of "pulp" mag rack off to the left

Kable News Promotional Flyer from 1935

Mister Evans,

you do not have to do any thing.

One first has to contain empathy.

Yo Bronty, am unsure of what you are writing about. Many a time I am simply making a quick reply at the bottom of a thread. What I am now realizing is it answering the last person's post on any given thread. Have now learned to answer specific posts like I am here now. Am I uneducated re the ways & means of posting in CGC slab land? Yup, guilty. Am pledging to not simply answer at the bottom of a thread, but I hasten to add what you are making motion on, silly me.

 

How to sell over stock comic books in the late 40s

 

[font:Times New Roman]Love the entrepreneurship! If I'm reading it right, at 5/50 cents there wasn't any cost break to the consumer and the reseller's only expense was the twine.[/font]

 

The full page from which this pic was taken has the caption "How to Sell More Comic Books in December" with a lot of tips in the text for a retailer on how best to market comic books. Pretty soon when I come across it again I will post the whole page.

Keep in mind the guy in this pic also expended bucks on sign paper as well as the markers to make the signs. -

As the days progress there will be a lot more of this type of stuff to check out. My Number One Concern is getting Katy healed, body, mind & soul. Her recent medical nightmare experience has taken a lot out of my baby girl (who is now 33).

This next tidbit is a double page spread. Two winters back during a 'deep freeze' of some 20 below zero the old water meter in my rented warehouse burst sending cascading water some eight feet in the air, a small river flowing in to a portion of my comics business research archives.

Spent the next couple days doing triage saving and preserving same best I could.

Hence, the "water mark" on these two pages which shows innards of a distributor in New Jersey. I have many such pics going in to my comics business history book. My main problem is going to be figuring out what to leave out of Comic Book Store Wars as I define its parameters.

Hope you find some of this stuff fun as I plan on posting a lot more here. It is kind of trade off of sorts. The more vintage comics artifacts I get sold, the more time I have to sort thru all this kind of stuff, the more you here end up seeing. This is my version of a "kick starter."

I will continue to ignore the "peanut gallery" who seem to have a hard-on attacking my research efforts. I also wish to publicly apologize to Bill Ponsetti whose comments I said a couple times earlier in this thread were "silly."

In finally figuring out where he was coming from, I completely misinterpreted he was discussing "now" in 2013 towards the future regarding "super" hero characters as "content" while I was completely immersed in the past discussing evolution of the "form" or, more so to the point, "format" of a comic book as this wonderful art form evolved in America since the 1840s, so, consequently, neither one of us were communicating properly.

Obviously Superman et al were are and will forever more have far larger impact as "characters" on any given world wide contest agenda of popularity than that long ago guy named Obadiah Oldbuck.

And again, I thank those of you who see fit to support what ever efforts I am able to make in sharing those huge volume of research data I collected back when I was able to make it around the country in days of yore. Katy thanks you also. She is coming back from a horrible place slowly but surely stronger than before.

Here is a partial page blow-up of a comics rack from 1946.

The tid bit of "info" on this page says comic books had "peaked"

from some 40 million a month during World War Two.

Some said they dropped to a "mere" 27 million

but Independent News hastens to point out the numbers

were "only" down to 34 million.

Such were the days before Television made its inroads in to the

attention span of Americans and their entertainment.

I wish to thank those of you who placed orders with BLBcomics this past week or so.

Got "buried" in more than 100 orders from those of you who remain mostly silent it seems expressing

your empathy to help out oldest daughter Katy as she continues to heal from Stevens Johnson Syndrome.

As a reward, am placing some more comics business photo pics and such here for your edification.

I have been able to come up for "air" a bit to continue the sorting process of the primary research artifact archives

which are going in to this book I am once again working on as I find "spare" time I call Comic Book Store Wars.

The above is a blow up of the below page circa 1951 or so

How to sell over stock comic books in the late 40s

The sequential story telling comic strip per Topffer in the late 1820s using stone lithography pre-dates invention of camera concepts by a couple decades. Topffer used stone lithography in the beginning when he began printing them up in the early 1830s.

By the 1840s Daguerreotype concepts were being applied to printing

http://inventors.about.com/od/dstartinventions/a/Daguerreotype.htm

Camera: A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital [Paperback]

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1454900024

A Thumbnail History of the Daguerreotype by Kenneth E. Nelson

http://daguerre.org/resource/history/history.html

and Topffer's later comic strip books reflect this advance in technology.

ALL of Topffer's seven comic strip books are back in print now via wonderful translations by Prof David Kunzle from the Univ of Mississippi which can be ordered via Google searches to further one's education in to the origins of the comic strip book.

Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer

http://books.google.com/books/about/Father_of_the_Comic_Strip.html?id=12dQAAAAMAAJ

Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips

http://books.google.com/books?id=vJ_UADzj18oC&source=gbs_similarbooks

After the discussions we had on the Plat list more than a decade ago, there is no doubt that magic lantern concepts played a key role as well. All this stuff is inter-connected, just like and no different than "popular culture" inter-relates with various advances today which gets us such cool "super" hero movies which have captured imaginations world wide.

This isn't going to be popular and it's 100% speculation. I believe that comics are merely a byproduct of the motion picture technology as it was developed. The earliest device which was used to project pictures was the magic lantern.

 

Projection lanterns appear to date back as far as 1420. (http://www.magiclantern.org.uk/history/history3.html)

 

Here is a nice site covering the subject.

http://www.magic-lantern.eu/

 

"There has been some debate about who the original inventor of the magic lantern is, but the most widely accepted theory is that Christiaan Huygens developed the original device in the late 1650s.In the fifteenth century, however, Giovanni Fontana, a Venetian engineer, had already created a lantern that projected an image of a demon. And other sources give credit to the German priest Athanasius Kircher. He describes a device such as the magic lantern in his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae. There are possible mentions of this device associated with Kircher as early as 1646. Even in its earliest use, it was demonstrated with monstrous images such as the Devil. Huygens's device was even referred to as the "lantern of fright" because it was able to project spooky images that looked like apparitions. In its early development, it was mostly used by magicians and conjurers to project images, making them appear or disappear, transform from one scene into a different scene, animate normally inanimate objects, or even create the belief of bringing the dead back to life. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern#History )

 

As light sources became better, Edison was eventually able to make a camera that captured moving images. This is when comics started expanding as a form of art. I contend that there is noting particularly original about "comics" and that it is a byproduct of the moving picture technology that was simply displayed in a different form.

 

The desire for word balloons would have been part of the natural evolution of this technology.

 

Check out the rare uncut Magic Lantern transparencies from France.

 

http://www.toverlantaarn.eu/transparency_1.html

 

Seeing this technology would have been the equivalent of seeing a comic.

 

DG

 

We discussed magic lantern evolution more than a decade ago on the Plat list I began in 1999.

Here is a Hy Mayer 1896 comic strip from Truth to bolster aspects of your thesis statement.

I was running this puppy for years in the Victorian article in Overstreet.

Truth is the very same magazine which Outcault first intro's "Yellow" Kid.

Last few years powers that be there have been deleting the visual aid

rendering the words of the text harder to comprehend for the novice

exploring the origins coupled with evolution of the comic strip.

There is a short text running down the left side

- tiny, not sure how well it will show up here.

in the dark blue/grey area which reads per tier:

Our Artist

Draws -

A Picture

Before The Kinetoscope

While the origins of the comic strip are what I stated previously,

there is a definite evolutionary trail which runs concurrent with the origins of film production.

Comic strips which tell stories in the main are merely story boards for film

Wow, nothing as crowd pleasing as calling everyone stupid (and/or uneducated) Nicely done Bob. I guess you calling everyone stupid several times on this thread makes you smart. Me derr I caant tink so guud

under-uneducated is NOT calling some one "stupid"

- I do not believe i have called any one "stupid"

- unfair to alter one's exact words, but tis OK. It is what it is.

Stupid is when some one refuses to accept documented proof once said proof is established by the "peer" review it underwent from a consortium of world class comics history experts. There are very few such "experts" in slab land here,

Read what is contained in Comic Art #3 published by Todd Hignite in 2003 and then get back with me.

"Under-educated" is what I stipulate once I realized vistually no one here has that issue, or even seemed to know of its existence.

Under-educated is what one might describe not getting past 8th grade.

Stupid is believing the planet earth is less than 10,000 years old and dinosaurs roamed the planet same time with humans cuz supposedly the bible sez so

No one is "forced" to read what eve I post in this thread.

(thumbs u And you aren't "forced" to read anyone's responses. Have fun!

expanding the consciousness of some of the hard heads in this crowd is "fun" to be sure, especially those who "think" they know, yet, choose to remain severely under-educated in proper comics history. Must have been doing some thing right to be re-invited back every year in to OPG for some 15+ years teaching this stuff. Hard Heads Die Hard, wot?

No one is "forced" to read what eve I post in this thread. If they get to be a bit lengthy, well, there is a lot of ground to cover and am not a Sound Byte slogan kind of researcher. This is serious stuff being covered, and I surely did not mean to re-discover that 1842 Oldbuck, but it is what it is.

The only thing truly "different" from the 1842 Oldbuck and a Famous Funnies type of comic book is staples had not yet been invented.

And, yes, it is a shame he lost money caught up as he was in the real estate implosion vortex which consumed a lot of souls. Me, i ponder to whom those seven figure purchase guys are going to sell their Action #1, Tec 27 and now AF #15 "investments" to in order to make "profit" - same potential scenario in slow motion