Pre-Golden Age (1933-38) - The Birth of the Modern Comic Book 0

[innocuous]

Thanks Bob. I've read that article a few times and have enjoyed it..

 

Next time it is published in Overstreet, it would be really cool if there was a timeline horizontally across the pages with the highlights.

[BLBcomics-migration]

I appreciate the positive words, and would like to do all kinds of neat stuff in the section i compile, however, there is an acute lack of space, but if you have some ideas how to squeeze a time line into the mix, i am open minded about the concept

 

what i am asking for on a one time basis is those who think they know something about way back when to vet the data facts, so, do i have any part of the story wrong?

[Theagenes]

Gulf Oil Company also liked the idea and hired a few artists to create an original comic called Gulf Comic Weekly. Their first issue was dated April 1933 and was 10 1/2" x 15". Gulf copied Standard Oil by advertising their giveaway nationally on the radio beginning April 30th. Its first artists were Stan Schendel doing The Uncovered Wagon, Victor doing Curly and the Kids, and Svess on a strip named Smileage. All were full page, full color comic strips. Wildenberg promptly had Eastern print this four page comic, making it probably the first tabloid newsprint comic published for American distribution outside of a newspaper in the 20th Century. Wildenberg and Gulf were astonished when the tabloids were grabbed up as fast as Gulf service stations could offer them. Distribution shot up to 3,000,000 copies a week after Gulf changed the name to Gulf Funny Weekly with its 5th issue. It remained a tabloid until early 1939 & ran for 422 issues until May 23, 1941.

 

 

Hi Bob, welcome back.

 

Is the sentence highlighted above left over from an earlier version of the article before the 1932 Standard Oil was discovered? And anyway, wouldn't the 1929 Funnies series be the first comic tabloids outside a newspaper?

[BLBcomics-migration]

Gulf Oil Company also liked the idea and hired a few artists to create an original comic called Gulf Comic Weekly. Their first issue was dated April 1933 and was 10 1/2" x 15". Gulf copied Standard Oil by advertising their giveaway nationally on the radio beginning April 30th. Its first artists were Stan Schendel doing The Uncovered Wagon, Victor doing Curly and the Kids, and Svess on a strip named Smileage. All were full page, full color comic strips. Wildenberg promptly had Eastern print this four page comic, making it probably the first tabloid newsprint comic published for American distribution outside of a newspaper in the 20th Century. Wildenberg and Gulf were astonished when the tabloids were grabbed up as fast as Gulf service stations could offer them. Distribution shot up to 3,000,000 copies a week after Gulf changed the name to Gulf Funny Weekly with its 5th issue. It remained a tabloid until early 1939 & ran for 422 issues until May 23, 1941.

 

 

Hi Bob, welcome back.

 

Is the sentence highlighted above left over from an earlier version of the article before the 1932 Standard Oil was discovered? And anyway, wouldn't the 1929 Funnies series be the first comic tabloids outside a newspaper?

 

Hi Jeff

 

This is not my first "come back" post here, but the one from a couple days ago seemed to get buried in a Centaur Funny Pages cover blizzard

 

yep, looks like a fubar snafu up above to me - i thought i had caught all the language once we figured out that Standard Oil's comics no number first giveaway was dated Dec 1932.

 

Jon Berk and i did all this figuring re standard Oil Comics Dec 1932 nn ish back in Dec 2005, almost past my Gemstone deadline for them getting upset with me getting my stuff in late - it gets hectic here once i am in the last week of a December as the Gemstone boys want to close it off to send to the printer, as it takes a long time to bind the priceguide

 

I am going to be doing a revamp on the Modern Origin piece beginning next week, nice edit catch - any more hidden in there like some Poe-like purloined letter?

 

Most of my time is going to go into the Victorian and Plat articles - some "new" (to me) exciting data has been uncovered, including the now earliest known recurring comic strip character dating in 1852, plus some more word balloon-using comic strips in 1861-63

 

Here is a chance for readers here to give some input in a specific area of comics history, since there is supposed to be so many experts here "busting my chops" as one person described it

 

 

blb

[BLBcomics-migration]

And here is that "first" post reposted from Wednesday, prompting me to think maybe the tree fell in a forest and no one was there to "hear" it, therefore, did i make a noise? >

 

Back from NYC Big Apple and Columbus MidOhio, read thru this thread, and a few comments, of course, re Jon Berk's comments regarding my deduction from close up personal examining Comic Cuts #8 and #9 I own (last issue) side by side to NEW FUN #1 and #2,

 

plus a Lloyd Jacquet interview i came across from 1958 purporting to be an abstract Chapter One to a proposed history of American comic books he was supposedly working on at the time

 

this info (plus a lot more) is mostly in my Origin of the Modern Comic Book article in the newest Overstreet (as well as the last bunch going into the late 1990s, each version improving as we go along, with new data being uncovered, such as Jon B and i figuring out Standard Oil Comics was earlier than Gulf's comic giveaway effort

 

The distributor and printer are identical, key to understanding that they would have been the ones fronting the money to make such a project a reality, a common practice back in teh day for most comic book company start ups

 

there is a gap of just a couple months between Comic Cuts and New Fun

 

they are the same tabloid size, non comics features are

 

Comic Cuts is Brit reprint stuff, New Fun is original USA newspaper strip style wanna-be material - obviously they discovered Brit reprint material, from the long running Brit pub Comic Cuts, had no USA audience

 

Jacquet also wrote that the Brit Comic Cuts was the direct inspiration for New Fun, not the Eastern Color efforts - a smoking gun for that info

 

If one desires more info than what i scribe here, I refer the reader to the newest Overstreet Origin of the Modern Comic Book article

 

I most likely will not be up here very much as i am entering Deadline Time for the next Overstreet section with a few more new tid bits of data in the Modern Comics origin piece

 

PLUS, i have pushed back the "recurring comic strip character" in the USA of original USA drawn comic strips to 1852 and have also uncovered more comic strips from the 1860s using word balloons - and will have a couple new examples of these 1860s word balloon-using comic strips in the Victorian section of the next Guide

 

- new research i just accomplished during a few days between BYC Big Apple and MidOhio

[BLBcomics-migration]

[The book has 36 pages including it's cover. There are 5 - 7 different stories about 5 pages long each...all featuring Detective Dan in a different adventure/story. Norman Marsh signed a panel on every page...he obviously wanted everyone to know this was his baby. These 1st 2 pics include interiors, and the last pic is of the inside of the back cover. This issue has fantastic original art throughout..some of the best! Enjoy

 

Steve, I had intended to comment on this earlier, but I got a little distracted by Jon's post. I would imagine that the reason that Marsh signed each page was not due to vanity, but rather because he originally conceived DD as a newspaper strip. Each of these pages would have been designed as an individual sunday page. Like I mentioned in my first post in this thread, these early original comic magazines were often just springboards for creators that were trying to get their work in the newspapers where the real money was at. This definately seems to be the case with Marsh and Detective Dan/Dan Dunn. This book would have made the perfect portfolio for Marsh to shop around to syndicate execs -- 30+ sundays ready to go with sales figures to point to as well. Apparently it worked as NEA picked it up and Dan Dunn started running in fall of 1933. If, as Bob B. suggests, Marsh was also the publisher of the Humor books, in addition to being a contributor, then the fact that Humor closed it's doors that fall may have been due not to a lack of funds, but to the fact that Marsh had accomplished his real goal -- a syndicated newspaper strip -- and there was no longer any need to bother with stand-alone original comic books anymore. It would be very interesting to see some of the eariest Dann Dunn sundays -- are any of them reprints of these stories in Detective Dan or did he start over fresh? I believe Wu Fang did appear as a villain in the Dan Dunn strips -- Was his his first appearance in the strips a reprint of the preview page on the inside BC of Detective Dan? These would interesting things to follow up on. Who here has a run of Crackajack Funnies they don't mind flipping through?

 

And i meant to comment on the above thought patterns yesterday, but got sidetracked gearing up my comics business as i recently mailed out a brand new list of comics for sale

 

virtually ALL of the early "original" comic book material run in the various formats in the early to mid 1930s were by newspaper comic strip wanna-be creators

 

Reason i am now firmly convinced Norman Marsh was the publisher for the Humor line is due to a key phrase Jerry Siegel threw out in an interview some 25 years ago

 

He said that "the publisher of Detective Dan" (Secret Op 48) had come to Cleveland from Chicago to visit NEA, a newspaper syndicate, which was some time circa March April 1933

 

In October 1933 Dan Dunn Secret Op 48 made its debut in the nations newspapers

 

Norman Marsh was from Chicago, Dan Dunn exhibiting the crime-grit of Chicago

 

It's all circumstantial, of course, but i bet i am correct on this note - and your fleshing out the concept fits right in with my thinking

[BLBcomics-migration]

Thought there was a thread for pics such as this, but dunno where it is, so here goes.

 

the quiz is next Tuesday identifying every cover pictured here:

 

[Theagenes]

 

And i meant to comment on the above thought patterns yesterday, but got sidetracked gearing up my comics business as i recently mailed out a brand new list of comics for sale

 

virtually ALL of the early "original" comic book material run in the various formats in the early to mid 1930s were by newspaper comic strip wanna-be creators

 

Reason i am now firmly convinced Norman Marsh was the publisher for the Humor line is due to a key phrase Jerry Siegel threw out in an interview some 25 years ago

 

He said that "the publisher of Detective Dan" (Secret Op 48) had come to Cleveland from Chicago to visit NEA, a newspaper syndicate, which was some time circa March April 1933

 

In October 1933 Dan Dunn Secret Op 48 made its debut in the nations newspapers

 

Norman Marsh was from Chicago, Dan Dunn exhibiting the crime-grit of Chicago

 

It's all circumstantial, of course, but i bet i am correct on this note - and your fleshing out the concept fits right in with my thinking

 

It's circumstantial, but it makes sense. I wonder how Martin Nadle/Howard Dell (I'm assuming Dell is a pseudonym for Nadle) fits into the equation. Perhaps he and Marsh were partners. Any idea what happened to Nadle in the time between Ace King and Bob Scully and his creation of the Jumble puzzles 20 years later?

 

It's funny how today we place so much importance on the few orginal comics from this period, when at the time the reprint books were the cream of the crop (which reminds me - Bill, those early Famous Funnies are great! ). The original books were, as you said wannabes - in my initial post in this thread I compared them to the straight-to-video movies of today. I keep hearing that this emphasis on original material in the collecting community wasn't always so and that at one time books like Single Series 20, Feature Book 26 and Four Color 10 were considered grails right up there with Action 1 and Tec 27. I guess that was before my time - too bad as books like that are still personal grails for me; I guess I'm kind of an anacronism.

[ciorac]

 

It's funny how today we place so much importance on the few orginal comics from this period, when at the time the reprint books were the cream of the crop (which reminds me - Bill, those early Famous Funnies are great! ). The original books were, as you said wannabes - in my initial post in this thread I compared them to the straight-to-video movies of today. I keep hearing that this emphasis on original material in the collecting community wasn't always so and that at one time books like Single Series 20, Feature Book 26 and Four Color 10 were considered grails right up there with Action 1 and Tec 27. I guess that was before my time - too bad as books like that are still personal grails for me; I guess I'm kind of an anacronism.

 

Thanks Jeff. I am enjoying collecting Famous Funnies again, second go-round for me. I think I will stop at #50 this time. We'll see. I love Single Series 20, my second copy is on its way here even as I write this!

[Theagenes]

 

Thanks Jeff. I am enjoying collecting Famous Funnies again, second go-round for me. I think I will stop at #50 this time. We'll see. I love Single Series 20, my second copy is on its way here even as I write this!

 

Hey, was that you that snagged Metro's 4.0 copy before I could get to it?!

Superworld had an 8.0 w/ slight color touch listed for a long time on their site and last week I I finally decided to pull the trigger, but when I emailed Ted he couldn't find it - he said he's thinks it may have been one the books that got stolen last summer.

 

BTW, have you seen the Central Valley copy? When I saw it I was so blown away by the colors I had to make it my new av. Technically it's a little late for this thread, but I think all the reprint books like Single Series, Large Feature, Feature Book, etc. really fit more in this era content-wise even if some of them post-date Action 1. Check it out:

 

[ciorac]

 

Thanks Jeff. I am enjoying collecting Famous Funnies again, second go-round for me. I think I will stop at #50 this time. We'll see. I love Single Series 20, my second copy is on its way here even as I write this!

 

Hey, was that you that snagged Metro's 4.0 copy before I could get to it?!

Superworld had an 8.0 w/ slight color touch listed for a long time on their site and last week I I finally decided to pull the trigger, but when I emailed Ted he couldn't find it - he said he's thinks it may have been one the books that got stolen last summer.

 

BTW, have you seen the Central Valley copy? When I saw it I was so blown away by the colors I had to make it my new av. Technically it's a little late for this thread, but I think all the reprint books like Single Series, Large Feature, Feature Book, etc. really fit more in this era content-wise even if some of them post-date Action 1. Check it out:

 

 

oops! Sorry, yes I did buy the one from Metro. (Actually my daughter bought it as my Christmas present)

 

Thanks for posting the scan of the Central valley copy! My friend bought that book, and I will get to see it in person in a few weeks when he comes down for the annual comic gathering at my house. Can't wait to hold it!

[showcase4]

 

(Actually my daughter bought it as my Christmas present)

 

guess you want be needin' that Tec 1 anymore, since you have a new book comin'

[ciorac]

 

(Actually my daughter bought it as my Christmas present)

 

guess you want be needin' that Tec 1 anymore, since you have a new book comin'

 

I have to get a new book a week, or I have a panic attack! Any luck on a MPFW yet? I want that book BAD!

[showcase4]

I have to get a new book a week, or I have a panic attack! Any luck on a MPFW yet? I want that book BAD!

I have not found a MPFW yet...which doesn't suprise me, since there are only 8 copies out there ( 1 coverless....I don't do coverless )

I have funds set aside for a MFPW, which will one day surface...so you better be prepared for a bidding war!

[ciorac]

I have to get a new book a week, or I have a panic attack! Any luck on a MPFW yet? I want that book BAD!

I have not found a MPFW yet...which doesn't suprise me, since there are only 8 copies out there ( 1 coverless....I don't do coverless )

I have funds set aside for a MFPW, which will one day surface...so you better be prepared for a bidding war!

 

I'm ready!

 

But, I might just find one under the radar and avoid the carnage...

 

[Theagenes]

oops! Sorry, yes I did buy the one from Metro. (Actually my daughter bought it as my Christmas present)

 

Well if you upgrade again, I want first dibs!

 

Thanks for posting the scan of the Central valley copy! My friend bought that book, and I will get to see it in person in a few weeks when he comes down for the annual comic gathering at my house. Can't wait to hold it!

 

Man, I'm so jealous of your friend! That is just a gorgeous copy. To tell you the truth, after seeing the CV copy, I'm not sure I'll ever be satistfied with a VG copy. That Superworld copy would have been perfect for my budget. Stupid spooning comic thief!

[ciorac]

oops! Sorry, yes I did buy the one from Metro. (Actually my daughter bought it as my Christmas present)

 

Well if you upgrade again, I want first dibs!

 

Thanks for posting the scan of the Central valley copy! My friend bought that book, and I will get to see it in person in a few weeks when he comes down for the annual comic gathering at my house. Can't wait to hold it!

 

Man, I'm so jealous of your friend! That is just a gorgeous copy. To tell you the truth, after seeing the CV copy, I'm not sure I'll ever be satistfied with a VG copy. That Superworld copy would have been perfect for my budget. Stupid spooning comic thief!

 

I don't upgrade on that issue..I hoard!

 

[lou_fine]

I keep hearing that this emphasis on original material in the collecting community wasn't always so and that at one time books like Single Series 20, Feature Book 26 and Four Color 10 were considered grails right up there with Action 1 and Tec 27. I guess that was before my time - too bad as books like that are still personal grails for me; I guess I'm kind of an anacronism.

 

You are absolutely correct here!

 

When the first few price guides came out in the early 70's, the reprint books and books such as Single Series 20 and Feature Book 26 were near the top of OS's price list. Unfortunately, the market has become more and more narrow over the years until it has become virtually dominated by super-hereos only, with all other genres falling by the wayside. The only major current exceptions to this trend are the Ducks and the Archie books.

 

Anybody purchasing a Single Series 20 or Feature Book 26 back in the 70's would certainly be losing money right now since these books have basically remain the same in guide for all these decades. Big big dollars back in the 70's, but virtually peanuts in today's market relative to the super-hero books.

 

The same thing has also happened with the DC pre-hero books as they have come to a virtual dead stop over the past several years. I guess it all has to do with the demand side as prices on these books have plateau while the super-hereos contunue to go up.

[ciorac]

I keep hearing that this emphasis on original material in the collecting community wasn't always so and that at one time books like Single Series 20, Feature Book 26 and Four Color 10 were considered grails right up there with Action 1 and Tec 27. I guess that was before my time - too bad as books like that are still personal grails for me; I guess I'm kind of an anacronism.

 

 

 

The same thing has also happened with the DC pre-hero books as they have come to a virtual dead stop over the past several years. I guess it all has to do with the demand side as prices on these books have plateau while the super-hereos contunue to go up.

 

Thanks for depressing me Lou, since I recently bought a Detective #1.

 

[lou_fine]

I keep hearing that this emphasis on original material in the collecting community wasn't always so and that at one time books like Single Series 20, Feature Book 26 and Four Color 10 were considered grails right up there with Action 1 and Tec 27. I guess that was before my time - too bad as books like that are still personal grails for me; I guess I'm kind of an anacronism.

 

 

 

The same thing has also happened with the DC pre-hero books as they have come to a virtual dead stop over the past several years. I guess it all has to do with the demand side as prices on these books have plateau while the super-hereos contunue to go up.

 

Thanks for depressing me Lou, since I recently bought a Detective #1.

 

 

Just an absolutely great book to have!

 

But like they say, the best time to buy is when it's down. So, this might actually be a good thing since everything tends to go around in cycles.

 

Especially considering that this book has seriously underperformed pricewise in the last 10 years in comparison to the other big GA books.