Platinum Age (Famous Funnies vs. Funnies on Parade, etc) 0

[jcb193]

Platinum Age (Famous Funnies vs. Funnies on Parade, etc)

I'm curious as to what you guys think is the hierarchy of the Platinum Age comics?  I've seen lengthy write-ups on Famous Funnies, or even Famous Funnies: Carnival of Comics, but I rarely see auction houses pumping up the Funnies on Parade- which CGC lists as the "1st comic book."

 

Is this just an oversight? Curious how you guys think this all shakes out, as Funnies on Parade is seriously rare, barely more common than Famous Funnies: Series 1?

How would you rank:

Funnies on Parade

Famous Funnies: Carnival of Comics

Century of Comics

Famous Funnies: Series 1

Famous Funnies #1

 

Is this a dead category overshadowed by superheroes? I personally think it's a very overlooked category in comic collecting. 

[rjpb]

I was fortunate that this got overlooked in the John Berk auction.

[KirbyJack]

Nice book, rjpb! 

I love the pre-hero comics, but they do seem to be 2nd class citizens these days. They are, however, well represented in Jon Berk's collection. 

As for ranking, it's hard not to give it up to the very first comic!

 

[jcb193]

I mean, let's take the Jon Berk collection for example.   How is there no homage paid to Funnies on Parade????  Even Carnival of Comics (2nd) and Century of Comics (3rd) get a lengthy introduction or exclamation.  Funnies on Parade, which is only 5 graded issues rarer than Famous Funnies Series 1, and multiples rarer than the others, doesn't even warrant a single sentence.

Am I missing something?  The write ups from Comic Connect are the following.

 

Funnies on Parade:

1st comic book; 1933 Eastern Color giveaway
 

Century of Comics:

100 pages! RARE; Eastern Color giveaway (1933)
The Jon Berk Collection

VF Overstreet is $25,000.00 and is so much rarer than Famous Funnies:A Carnival of Comics or Famous Funnies #1.

Overstreet Guide 2016 FN+ (6.5) value = $8,736. 

 

Famous Funnies #1:

ow/white pgs; Mod (B-3): pcs added, cvr clnd, int. lightened, reinforced
RARE!! 1st monthly newsstand comic book; golfing cover
The Jon Berk Collection

 

Eastern Color published Famous Funnies 1, in July 1934, a sixty-eight-page periodical they distributed to newsstands through American News Company. While it was a huge hit with readers during the cash-strapped Great Depression and sold close to ninety percent of its original 200,000 print run, the expenses left Eastern Color with a $4,000 loss. Eastern's luck would eventually change as the book turned a $30,000 profit with every issue after 11. Famous Funnies ran for 218 issues, inspiring imitators and launching a new form of entertainment readily consumed by the masses. It's quite possibly one of the most important comics ever published. Without this trailblazer it is hard to imagine that American comic book readership would have developed as successfully as it has.

"Famous Funnies reprinted popular newspaper strips of the day. As legend goes, the format of Famous Funnies was conceived by Harry Wildenberg, sales manager of Eastern Color Company of Waterbury Connecticut, to take up some of the slack time available on the presses. Eastern Color produced many of the Sunday comic funnies for the New York newspapers, and Wildenberg noted that the standard tabloid comic pages, when folded in half, yielded an appealing sized book which could be run on Eastern's presses. Adding a glossy cover, Wildenberg, together with M.C. Gaines, a salesman for Eastern Color, (yes, that M.C. Gaines!), came up with the idea of reprinting comic strips and giving away the books as premiums. 

"After the initial success of the give-aways Funnies on Parade, Carnival of Comics and Century of Comics, financial backing was obtained to experiment and try to sell a comicbook. This resulted in the production of Famous Funnies Series 1, which was distributed only in the greater New York area in early 1934. Apparently, this experiment was successful enough so that Famous Funnies 1 was released under cover of July 1934. 

"This historic issue, then, was the first newsstand comicbook series of the modern format." 
 

Famous Funnies Series 1:

crm/ow pgs; Sl/Mod (B-2) ct, glue cvr, tr sls, spn splts sld, reinforced
VERY, VERY, VERY, RARE! first-ever newsstand comic! Mutt 'n' Jeff, Joe Palooka
The Jon Berk Collection

 

This is the beginning, the start of it all. Incredibly historic and immensely important, this piece of Americana is the first comic book to reach American newsstands and survives in such low numbers that, for decades, collectors believed it to be a myth invented by the Overstreet Guide to prevent counterfeits! Time has proved otherwise, as copies have surfaced but only few and far between. Cobbled together with reprints of popular newspaper strips and rushed to market to attempt to move the slowly-dying comic strip field into a new era, this comic unwittingly launched a whole new business and a whole new medium. The success of the comic later led to the launch of the Famous Funnies monthly series and proved the viability of the medium. It's hard to overestimate the importance of this artifact to American comics and American pop culture in general.

 

Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics:

2nd comic book; 1933 Eastern Color giveaway; wraparound cvr
The Jon Berk Collection

 

It begins here. Considered by most serious comics historians to be the first true American comic book, this 1933 one-shot established the size, length, and format of the comic book for decades to come. A sprightly, vivid, seismic shock that may not have seemed important at the time, but essentially provided the foundation for the art form that would come to dominate the latter half of the 20th century and fire the imaginations of generations of readers and artists. This incredibly rare comic, distributed through the late, lamented chain of Woolworth stores, enjoyed an aggressively high print run, yet survives in extremely low numbers today, making it not only one of the most important comics ever published, but also one of the most coveted.

 

 

 

Edited June 14, 2017 by jcb193

[rjpb]

As historically important as they are, I don't know that a lot of collectors are that keen on the early newspaper strip reprint books. With some exceptions, the early original content pre-hero books, while not as widely sought after as superhero comics, seem to get more attention. 

[jcb193]

17 hours ago, rjpb said:

As historically important as they are, I don't know that a lot of collectors are that keen on the early newspaper strip reprint books. With some exceptions, the early original content pre-hero books, while not as widely sought after as superhero comics, seem to get more attention. 

Yeah, I understand this.  Mostly curious why Funnies on Parade get the least hype of them all, when it's the "first comic book."  The fact that is is pretty freaking rare too seems like it would garner a little more attention. Just found it interesting in the Jon Berk collection that it didn't even warrant a paragraph.  

[BOOT]

7 hours ago, jcb193 said:

Yeah, I understand this.  Mostly curious why Funnies on Parade get the least hype of them all, when it's the "first comic book."  The fact that is is pretty freaking rare too seems like it would garner a little more attention. Just found it interesting in the Jon Berk collection that it didn't even warrant a paragraph.  

The early history of comic books is still being explored. Some really significant milestones are not yet appreciated as such. This presents some opportunities for the collector...

There is a lot of misinfo out there about early comic book history. For example...

On 6/13/2017 at 11:36 PM, jcb193 said:

From the ComicConnect description about Famous Funnies 1...

...this comic unwittingly launched a whole new business and a whole new medium.

Comic books were already well-established as an entertainment medium. Some of the early Platinum books were incredibly successful and probably distributed in far larger numbers than anyone suspects. For example, check out some of the Foxy Grandpa books. The internet has revealed that these are relatively common, meaning many were sold at the time. Some say they are only comic strip reprints, but we have to consider the media environment at the time. For readers of these comic books, these may have been the first time they saw a series of color comics collected in one place.

[IngelsFan]

As a matter of personal preference and as someone that has been casually collecting Platinum Age books since 1985, I make the distinction between books containing original vs. reprint material. I'll only pick up reprints if the cover interests me, but love the all original comics. This was a major leap forward for the medium, at least as significant as the format itself. Early books from what would become DC even promoted this fact, with New Comics 3 bearing the slogan "AOC and how" on the cover and several other issues having it throughout the interior. AOC? All Original Comics. This is what paved the way for the medium to really take off, because there was no issue of paying royalties to the syndicates for reprints. This way, each company paid the artist and the printer and the rest was profit.

[jcb193]

@BOOT @IngelsFan@rjpb@KirbyJack  Thanks for the responses guys!  How do you feel about the 5 I listed above (as these seem to be the mainstream "firsts" of the Platinum era."  

[rjpb]

36 minutes ago, jcb193 said:

@BOOT @IngelsFan@rjpb@KirbyJack  Thanks for the responses guys!  How do you feel about the 5 I listed above (as these seem to be the mainstream "firsts" of the Platinum era."  

I think one of the issues, is that just in reading the descriptions, it's hard to say what is considered the first "comic book". Combine that with other books, tabloids and magazines, whose format wasn't quite like that of the traditional GA comic in dimension, binding or page count, but were concurrent or pre-dated these 5, and the general  understanding that these were part of a progression, not just some entirely original concept to repackage newspaper comic strips for sale, and the whole notion of "first comic book" becomes even less clear. Books become the first of a type; first original material, first stapled comic book, first of a standard size, first of a continuously published title, first costumed hero, etc. Some collectors would find all these books desirable and an important part of the medium's history, for others, it all starts with Action #1, and nothing before that is really relevant, and some are somewhere in between - perhaps caring about DC pre-hero books, or early Centuars, etc, as the dawn of the creative aspects of the GA.

For me personally, I'm attracted to non-humor style covers from this era, and would seek out pre-hero Detectives, and other action/adventure/detective type pre-hero covers before I'd look at the various Eastern Color "firsts".

[Bo_Hogg1]

[rjpb]

41 minutes ago, Bo_Hogg1 said:

That cover is amazing! Does it collect strips, or single panel cartoons?

[jcb193]

Any other thoughts on this topic? I know in the Jon Berk auction, in the descriptions, he seemed to place more importance on Famous Funnies: Carnival of Comics than on Funnies on Parade.  CGC lists Funnies on Parade as the first comic book though, and it's hard to find research on these books. 

Just curious for more thoughts on these five books:

 

[jcb193]

Any other thoughts on this topic?  

[Ameri]

If memory serves me correctly, back in the early days of collecting, Funnies On Parade and Century of Comics were usually lumped together and indistinguishable in price. They were considered historic and cool but they had the stigma of being giveaways. Funnies On Parade may have been slightly higher demand perhaps because the title was more exciting than Century of Comics. Carnival Of Comics and Famous Funnies were in more demand with Famous Funnies (golf cover) in highest demand than any of the other books because it had the 10 cents sticker and was the first newsstand comic. It also was not a one shot like the others. Historically, one shots have never been as much in demand as continuing series.    

Edited February 3, 2018 by Ameri

[Electricmastro]

For reference, comic book titles that came out before 1938:

January, 1929 - The Funnies (Dell Comics)

June, 1933 - Funnies on Parade (Eastern Color Printing)

October, 1933 - Famous Funnies – A Carnival of Comics (Eastern Color Printing)

December, 1933 - Century of Comics (Eastern Color Printing)

April, 1934 - Skippy's Own Book of Comics (Eastern Color Printing)

May, 1934 - Famous Funnies Series 1 (Eastern Color Printing)

July, 1934 - Famous Funnies (Eastern Color Printing)

February, 1935 - New Fun (DC Comics)

November, 1935 - Big Book of Fun Comics (DC Comics)

December, 1935 - New Comics (DC Comics)

February, 1936 - Popular Comics (Dell Comics)

April, 1936 - King Comics (David McKay Publications), Tip Top Comics (United Features)

May, 1936 - The Comics Magazine (Centaur Comics)

November, 1936 - Funny Picture Stories (Centaur Comics)

December, 1936 - Detective Picture Stories (Centaur Comics)

January, 1937 - New Book of Comics (DC Comics)

February, 1937 - Star Comics (Centaur Comics), Star Ranger (Centaur Comics), Western Picture Stories (Centaur Comics)

March, 1937 - The Comics (Dell Comics), Detective Comics (DC Comics), DickTracy the Detective (David McKay Publications), Popeye and the Jeep (David McKay Publications)

April, 1937 - 100 Pages of Comics (Dell Comics), Ace Comics (David McKay Publications), Western Action Thrillers (Dell Comics)

June, 1937 - Feature Books (David McKay Publications), Picture Crimes (David McKay Publications)

October, 1937 - Feature Funnies (Quality Comics)

Edited January 4, 2020 by Electricmastro

[Montezuma]

1922 reprint series, they're sort of a cross between the Cupples and Leon books and regular comics. Closer to comics in dimension. 12 issues that don't show up very often. Arguably the first monthly comic.

[lou_fine]

On 8/26/2017 at 12:18 PM, jcb193 said:

Any other thoughts on this topic? I know in the Jon Berk auction, in the descriptions, he seemed to place more importance on Famous Funnies: Carnival of Comics than on Funnies on Parade.  CGC lists Funnies on Parade as the first comic book though, and it's hard to find research on these books. 

Just curious for more thoughts on these five books:

 

On 2/2/2018 at 5:38 PM, jcb193 said:

Any other thoughts on this topic?  

If you are still interested in these 5 books after such a long time since your last post here, you should probably dig up one of the old Overstreet price guides from back in the 80's/90's or thereabouts.  

I believe he had a section in there which ran for several years in which it specifically talked about this particular time period, the players involved such as Harry Wildenberg, Gaines, etc, and how these books (and these 5 in particular)  came about.