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Some Funny Articles

Dawn of the Dark Knight

Holy History Lesson, Batman!

Up until 1939 Superman, the man from Krypton, had been DC Comics' main draw, the comics world's first "super-star." He was soon to be joined by a second hero with no super powers at all, a creation so fascinating in his own right that he would come to share top billing with Superman for a career spanning six decades.
That man was, of course, the playboy philanthropist Bruce Wayne, or The Batman. Born in Detective Comics #27 in May 1939, Batman was the creation of Bob Kane, with Bill Finger assisting in the development. Like so many others, Kane had started his career in comics at the Eisner-Iger studio, working on his first story, Peter Pupp, for Jumbo Comics in 1938, supplementing his income with work on small fillers at DC Comics. Finger was a science fiction fan living near Kane in the Bronx, and when the two met at a party a friendship began that resulted in collaboration between the two, a strip called Rusty And His Pals for Adventure Comics.

It was apparent that Superman was the wave of the future. DC wanted more super heroes and Kane was asked by editor Whitney Ellsworth to create another one. Inspired by a 1920s movie, The Bat, Kane began producing sketches at home, basing them on the bat-like costume of the villain in the film. Finger, who had been invited over to Kane's apartment, suggested that the costume include a cowl, further suggesting that The Batman be a combination
Sherlock Holmes and Doc Savage.
The new crimefighter's Detective Comics debut was a six-page story , The Case of the Chemical Syndicate. "My first story was a take-off on a Shadow story," Kane later recalled, "but I didn'twant Batman to be a Superman. I wanted Batman to be hurt. Everything he did was based on athletics, on using his astute wits, and acute observation."
Unfortunately The Batman came close to meeting his end while still in his infancy. In July of that year a pulp magazine, Black Book Detective, hit the stands featuring G. Wayman Jones' TheBlack Bat, a character very much like The Batman, down to the cape and cowl. "There was a lawsuit almost pending," recalled Finger, "It was a weird coincidence. Apparently this character had already been written and on the drawing board. Whit Ellsworth used to be a pulp writer for Better Publications. So through Ellsworth's intervention a lawsuit was averted."
Speaking of legal matters, unlike Superman's creators, Siegel and Shuster, Bob Kane had the good fortune to have an attorney relative who counseled him to retain a copyrighted interest in the new character. Good advice-- and as a result of it Kane would reap a large salary from DC for the rest of his career.
Kane and Finger continued to develop their hero. In issue 29 they had invented the gas pellet utility belt, and in issue 36 Batman gained his finned gauntlets. By the 35th issue of Detective Comics, the Caped Crusader was featured on all the covers, and by 1940 had a second comic, Batman.
Finger, who had been working on a freelance basis for Kane for the first six or so stories, was officially hired by DC Comics and given other writing assignments. Gardner Fox, fresh out of college, took on Batman scripting with a vampire tale that introduced the Batarang and the Batgyro. Batman also acquired another newcomer, Mort Weisinger (of Thrilling Wonder Stories), as his first editor.
At around this time Kane took on an art assistant, Jerry Robinson. He had met Robinson, who had been selling ice cream after school, and had been impressed with the self-decorated jacket the young artist had been wearing. Robinson started work with Kane as a letterer, working his way up to penciling backgrounds, and then inking. The seventeen-year-old had a good design sense and Batman's look became crisper and more polished.
For the first few issues of Detective Comics Batman had been portrayed as a menacing loner, a night bird of prey. Kane and Finger realized that their vigilante needed a humanizing influence, someone to talk to. That someone was Dick Grayson, the orphaned son of trapeze artists killed in an accident, or Robin, the Boy Wonder. Robin was an excellent addition to the strip if only as Watson to Batman's Holmes. He premiered in Detective Comics #38, April 1940.
For a brief period The Batman packed an automatic. Said Finger, "I goofed. I had Batman use a gun to shoot a villain, and I was called on the carpet by Whit Ellsworth. He said 'Never let us have Batman carry a gun again.' He was right."
A good hero needs good villains. Jerry Robinson came up with The Joker, the best of the worst. Robinson got his idea for the criminally psychotic clown from the image of a playing card Joker. Bill Finger wrote the first two tales of The Joker that appeared in Batman #1. He also recalled showing Kane a magazine clipping on the film The Man Who Laughs, a movie whose protagonist's mouth has been permanently twisted into a ghastly grimace. Other great villains, Two-Face, The Catwoman, The Penguin, would soon follow the garishly garbed lunatic, but to many fans The Joker would always be the most memorable. In 1988 his origin story would be retold in Batman: The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, to my mind the definitive Joker story and a classic well worth reading.
In addition to Finger and Fox, other writers turned their talents to Batman scripts. Weird Tales writer Edmond Hamilton contributed to the Batman mythos as did Otto (Adam Link) Binder, Al Schwartz, and Bill Woolfolk. Artists working on the strip included George Roussos, Dick Sprang, Hal Sherman, and Curt (Superman) Swan. Sheldon Moltoff, the man credited with giving Bill Gaines the idea for horror comics, ghosted Batman for Kane in the 1950s. In the next four decades Batman would be continually reinvented and defined by writers and artists, most notably by Frank Miller in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986).
In the fifties Kane went to Hollywood to work in animation, helping to develop the tv series Courageous Cat. In 1965 he helped with the Adam West campy Batman television show. There had already been two Batman serials, in 1942 and 1948, and there would be five Batman movies (four by Tim Burton), a novel, a radio show, numerous animated cartoons, coloring books, Batmobile kits, action figures,and virtually every known form of merchandise imaginable. Although Bob Kane and Bill Finger are no longer with us to guide their creation, it seems certain that Batman will endure well into this new century.

Source:-

http://stevestiles.com/batman.htm

Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat
Few cartoon animals have hit the public's fancy with as much force as a certain rotund cat named Felix. As a generator of comics-related merchandise, Felix outdistances even that other memorabilia maestro, Garfield, and as for Sylvester... well, Felix leaves that puddytat behind in a cloud of dust. There have been Felix the Cat comics from numerous publishers (Dell, Felix, Gladstone, Harvey, Toby, Western), various animated cartoon series, Felix songs and Felix newspaper strips. And there have been Felix watches, clocks, mugs, cookie jars, flexible figures, brass rings, and just about every kind of collectible imaginable, stretching from Felix's earliest days right down to the present: this cat's got legs!
Success has many fathers, as the saying goes, while failure remains an orphan. While Felix's success has never been in doubt, there have been conflicting claims concerning paternity. Up until I started this article, I had been under the impression that Felix's creator was none other than Pat Sullivan, whose signature adorns many a Felix drawing. But, as with comics and some other animation studios, it was a case of the Pat Sullivan Studio owning the cat's copyright. The actual creator is Otto Messmer, who came up with Felix for a Paramount short, Feline Follies, which was released in November 1919.

Born on August 16, 1892 Messmer began his commercial art career with a work-study program illustrating fashion catalogs but became interested in cartooning, especially animated cartooning, when he happened to see Windsor
(Little Nemo) McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur vaudeville act in New York one day in 1912. Fascinated by this combination of live action and animation, Messmer began submitting his own strips to newspapers, and by 1915 began attempting to get work as a set painter at film studios (fortunately, the film industry hadn't made its mass-exodus to California yet).
An executive at Universal liked the young artist's work and signed him on to make a test film. Being totally inexperienced, Messmer nonetheless managed to put together a crude short called Motor Mike. While never released, his first attempt resulted in getting work with an established cartoonist, "Hi" Mayer, who taught him the ropes of peg board and cel registration techniques necessary in those early days of crude animation.
After helping Mayer on Travels With Teddy, an animated short based on Mayer's friend Teddy Roosevelt, Messmer sought out additional work with Pat Sullivan, who had set up his own studio and produced a number of shorts, including Twenty Thousand Laughs Under the Sea, a satire to be released with the second film version of the Jules Verne classic (1916). As with Disney and Ub Iwerks, Sullivan became more engrossed with the business end of running a studio, while Messmer handled the creative chores.
So it should come to the surprise of no one at least half as cynical as I am that when Feline Follies first debuted in 1919 (beating out Mickey Mouse by nine years), the name Otto Messmer was nowhere to be found in the credits.
According to Maurice Horn's The World Encyclopedia of Comics (Chelsea House), Messmer was inspired by Rudyard Kipling's "cat who walks by himself." Felix certainly was a loner, battling against the callousness of fate and humans while adventuring in the land of Mother Goose, on the moon, in the wilds of Africa, in a mechanized future civilization, and on the planets of the solar system, all done in a dreamy surrealism where Felix was able to utilize punctuation marks as weapons and thought balloons as parachutes to effect escapes.
Felix's screen career in the 1920s includes Felix Saves the Day (one of twelve made in 1922), Felix in Hollywood (1923), Felix Switches Witches (1927), and Comicalamities (1928). Year by year, the list is far too long to include here. Music wasn't neglected either; the twenties saw such memorable British hits as Felix Kept On Walking and Fido Followed Felix.
In 1928 famous jazz master Paul Whiteman had a hand in recording Felix! Felix! Felix the Cat!. And the twenties and thirties saw a lot of highly collectible Felix toys, games, and dolls as well. Eight inch jointed wood figures of Felix, made by the Albert Schoenhut Company, are valued between $350-$750.00, while British Cream Toffee tins featuring Messmer art, are probably the rarest of all Felix collectibles and can pull down prices as high as $2000.

In 1923 Felix the Cat made the jump to print, debuting in Britain on August 1, 1923 and in the U.S. as a King Features Sunday page on August 14, 1923 (the daily followed a few years later, on May 9, 1927). The strips are signed Pat Sullivan, although there are doubts as to whether he actually had anything to do with them. Messmer and his assistant Joe Oriolo worked on the print version of Felix as well as the films, and Bill Holman is thought to have ghosted the strip from 1932 to 1935. This first run of the syndicated Felix the Cat lasted until 1943. Felix's comic book career began in 1942 in Dell's New Funnies #66.
Felix's popularity continued from the twenties through the thirties, considered by some aficionados as the cat's Golden Age. Ultimately, however, the feline was overshadowed by the strides of studios like the Fleishers' and Disney's.
Sullivan, plagued by alcoholism, died in 1933 and gradually the studio declined, as did Felix's cartoon quality. Messmer continued on with the strip and some comics with Joe Oriolo's capable assistance. Unfortunately, other Felix comics have been uninspired affairs produced by anonymous hacks.
Years later Oriolo brought back Felix to animation with a new series for Children's Television (1958-1961). Redesigned, the fabulous feline gained a new supporting cast of characters (his nephew Poindexter, the Mad Professor, and the bulldog Rock Bottom), a "magic bag," and a new generation of fans. (Collectors also gained the next generation of Felix toys.)
Messner, who passed away on October 28 1983, didn't live long enough to see another (however brief) Felix newsprint run, Betty Boop and Felix, produced by Mort (Beetle Bailey) Walker's four sons, Mort, Morgan, Brian, and Greg. The King Features strip ran from November 1984 to the summer of 1987.
Eventually Oriolo passed Felix on to his son Don, who went on to create a mid-80s feature film (which still reruns on the Disney channel) as well as an animated series, Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat (1994-1996), and continues the Felix legacy to this day with plans for further animated adventures and other projects (earlier this year a Felix swing album was released, Meowzaaa! with Felix and the BuzzCatz).
For those who would like to learn more about Felix, there are two books available for the cartoon cat connoisseur: David Gerstein's Nine Lives To Live: A Classic Felix Celebration, which reprints the first decade of Messner's comic strip work, and John Canemaker's history, Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Feline.

Source :-

http://stevestiles.com/felix.htm

The Stone Age Of Comics
A Look At Early Comic Book History, Part 1

It's been generally recognized that the first "modern" comic book in history was Famous Funnies #1, which made its debut on the newsstands in July 1934. But what led up the long road to the publication of Famous Funnies? Going back centuries, we can look at one early ancestor on the family tree, the "broadside." First published in Europe in the thirteenth century, broadsides were not only used by local authorities to spread news and official announcements but as a form of entertainment. Resembling crude versions of early comic strips, broadsides retold popular folk legends through the use of text and decorative illustrations. Later innovations in printing, such as copper engraving and lithography, resulted in cleaner text reproduction, but the new processes were unable to match one advantage of the crudely printed broadsides in that they were unable to easily combine text and pictures on one page.
By the 17th century wood block engraving came into use and was able to do just that. By the middle of the century a booklet called Scraps was issued by a D.C. Johnson in London. Scraps specialized in running political cartoons that commented on the issues of the day. Since the booklet combined humorous art and text, it's fair to say that Johnson had taken the first step on a journey which would eventually led to the present day advanced era of Spawn, X-Men and Boiled Angel.
A few more decades passed, seeing improved printing techniques that permitted an increased use of art in such titles like T.S. Arthur's The Children's Hour (A Magazine For The Little Ones). Charles Dicken's The Pickwick Papers came into being after a publisher hired Dickens to write a booklet to accompany the cartoons by Robert Seymore.
In 1871 a translation of Germany's Max Und Moritz saw print in the United States. The recounting of the pranks of William Busch's two juvenile delinquents was obviously swipe material for Rudolph Dirk's The Katzenjammer Kids (German slang for "the hangover kids") which began in Hearst's New York journal in 1897. Unlike the cruelly mischievous Hans and Fritz, Busch's two brats paid the ultimate price for their hijinx, meeting a gruesome end in a meat grinder.
In 1884 Life magazine, one of America's longest-running publications, decided to reprint a variety of their cartoons in a collection entitled "The Good Things In Life," which ran as a series of hard covers that were sold in book stores. Two of the series editors then created a spin-off of that title, The Spice Of Life, which increased the use of sequential panel art. The two series proved to be a popular hit with the public, who had developed a taste for cartoons and text. Other cartoon reprint books were published to cash in on that popularity. The time was ripe for the development of the modern four-color comic strip.

This next step in panel art evolution came about through Joseph Pulitizer's experiments in the newly available color technology. Highly competitive and always seeking an advantage over rival papers, the publisher resolved to perfect color lithography. In 1893 his printers had succeeded in delivering illustrations that used red and blue, but the color yellow was proving to a problem; the dye simply took too long to dry on newsprint.
There were further experiments, using Richard Outcault's strip Hogan's Alley as the guinea pig. The eventual success of those experiments resulted in the birth of that famous ghetto youth, The Yellow Kid.
By 1895 The Yellow Kid had his own strip and a huge following. The kid's notoriety launched a Yellow kid magazine in 1896 and a host of merchandise like sheet music, post cards, and even a Yellow Kid doll (surely the most valuable of all the action figure collectibles).
Outcault was either ungrateful, or was working under a work-for-hire system because before too long he had turned his newly formed reputation into an economic advantage by jumping the Pulitzer ship for his bitterest rival, William Randall Hearst. This move, in addition to a more lucrative arrangement, resulted in the creation of Buster Brown, the first really Big Name comic strip character.
Outcault's success did not go unnoticed and soon there was an explosion of talent and energy that resulted in a huge increase in the number of newspaper comic strips. Happy Hooligan, Hairbreath Harry, Kin-der-Kids, and Little Nemo were just a few of the new strips appearing in papers across the country, all used as devices to increase circulation.
Just as had happened with the 18th century's The Spice Of Life, it was inevitable that someone would think of reissuing these strips in a booklet format. The first collection was the extremely rare Funny Folks by E.M. Howarth, published in1899 by E.P. Dutton. Others quickly followed through with strip collections like Harris Brown's The Adventures Of Willy Green, The Cruise of the Katzenjammer Kids by R. Dirks, E.C. Segar's Charlie Chaplin At the Movies, and Foxy Grandpa's Frolics by "Bunny." Some sixty-five "comic books" of this type were issued in a ten-year period, from 1899-1919.

One of these books was H.C. "Bud" Fisher's Mutt and Jeff. Henry Conway Fisher, originally a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle, had come up with a weekly sequential strip about a racing tout named A. Mutt. Fisher and Mutt (soon to be joined by his fall-guy sidekick, Jeff) were quickly snapped up by Hearst's empire. The first Mutt And Jeff book appeared in 1910 in an unwieldy format of 5" x 30". This format was to change by the sixth Mutt And Jeff book to 10" x 10" and was widely used in strip collections, reprinting four panels to a page. The Mutt And Jeff books were published by a company named Cupples and Leon , also handling reprints of Bringing Up Father by George McManus, Moon Mullins by Frank Willard, and Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie.
The next step on the evolutionary road to modern comics was the birth of the monthly comic book in 1922. Selling for ten cents and printed on a cheaper grade of paper, The Comics, published by Cupples and Leon, ran the strips S'Matter Pop?, Tillie The Toiler, Little Jimmy, and Barney Google. Perhaps owing to poor distribution, the series only ran for seven issues, but it did lay the foundation for other monthlies to follow, and the established ten-cent price tag would last until done in by rising paper costs in the 1960s.
Cupples and Leon would continue to be the major comic books publisher for the next 14 years. By 1933 that supremacy would be challenged by new format, and new ideas. We'll be covering these developments in the second installment.

Source :-

http://stevestiles.com/1stcomic.htm

The Stone Age Of Comics
A Look At Early Comic Book History, Part 2 In the previous installment of this feature, I covered the development of the comic book up through the birth and development of the first monthly comic book, The Comic Monthly. By 1933, that title would by challenged by new competition in different formats The first of these rivals were the highly collectable Big Little Books, published by

Dutton. Big Little Books, however, were not sold on the newsstands. A more directly competing title was Funnies On Parade, produced by Max Gaines, father of E.C.'s Bill Gaines, that same year. Unlike the Cupples and Leon publication, Funnies On Parade was printed in four colors and ran Sunday comics reprints rather than dailies, increasing the panel count on each page.
Another aspect which help to further boost circulation was that Gaines reprinted a wide variety of different strips appealing to individual members of an entire family. Role stereotyping was part of life in the 1930s so that strips could be slanted to both parents and their sons and daughters. The tactic proved so successful that Gaines was able to strike a deal with Proctor & Gamble to give away copies with their products. Funnies On Parade underwent a rapid jump in circulation, from 10,000 to 500,000, a run that any of today's comics publishers can only envy.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery. It was also resorted to in the 1930s as often as it is in the nineties. Gaines' success had not gone unnoticed. In 1934 the first comic to be sold on the newsstands appeared. This was Eastern's Famous Funnies #1. Although similar to Funnies On Parade, it had the advantage of featuring twice as many pages, 64 in all. Edited by Stephen A Douglas, the new comic closely followed Gaine's lead by limiting reprints to four pages of any given strip.
Douglas' innovation was to go beyond only running humor strips like Mutt and Jeff, adding adventure strips like Tailspin Tommyand Donald Dare, and romance strips like Connie and Dixie Dugan. A second, greater, innovation was to use new original material specifically done for the comic. Two new strips were Dip and Duck by "Meb," and Goofy Gags by "Veps." Editor Douglas continued the practice of using new material with S.M. Iger's Bobby and Pee Wee.
By the 16th issue Famous Funnies was being distributed in South America, China, Cuba, England, Java, The Philippines, and England. Douglas was a creative editor; in addition to being the first to use new material, he was also first to print editorials, and had started a readers' letter page. Perhaps less welcome were the new ads that appeared in the comic; one paid ad, in #7, was for .22 caliber rifles.
Famous Funnies only enjoyed an 18-month run as the sole newsstand comic. By the end of 1935 New Comics #1 appeared, the product of the National Allied Newspaper Syndicate, and the number of newsstand comics printing all new stories doubled.
By today's standards New Comics' art and stories were crudely rendered and written. The writers and artists were often young and inexperienced, and were charting brand new territory. There were no standards to follow, nor were creators hampered by set formulas and "house styles" of story telling. They had only newspaper strips as guides to follow, and newspaper strips utilized an entirely different form of continuity, with six four- panel daily strips and a full color Sunday page. Comic book pioneers had to learn to tell stories in a brand new format.
Like Famous Funnies, New Comics ran humorous material like Tinker Twins At Penn Point by Joe Archibald, and The Strange Adventures Of Mr. Weed, a time travel adventure strip by Sheldon Mayer. (Mayer would enjoy a long career at DC Comics, and was the creator of Sugar & Spike, rated one of the top 100 comics of all time by TheComics Journal.)
Also like Famous Funnies, creators branched out from humor and into other directions, writing adventure strips about travel with Genghis Khan, Viking exploits, and the comics field's first "What If?" series, H.C. Kiefer's Just Suppose, which explored the science fiction theme of alternate history. Two young men, who would soon become the most important creators in comics, made their debut in New Comics #2 with a four-page story, The Federal Men. The two were Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster, and their creation, Superman, would eventually be born in the pages of Action #1 in 1938.Another future Big Name to appear in New Comics was Walt Kelly, father of a possum named Pogo.

New Comics continued to forge ahead on the trail Stephen Douglas had blazed with other new directions. Sandra Of The Secret Service, by "Brigham," was unusual in that it featured a woman as its hero. There were seafaring stories, westerns, jungle tales, and a science fiction strip, Don Drake On The Planet Saro. Perhaps the most daring of all, for those times, was the interracial strip Spike Spaulding, the adventures of two boys, one white and one black
More Fun Comics, National's second title, hit the newsstands in March, 1936. It was in More Fun #9 that Siegel and Shuster created comics' first super hero under the pseudonyms of Leger and Reuths. Initially there was nothing too out of the ordinary about Dr. Occult, other than the fact that he was the world's first ghost detective. At first the deceased mystic investigator's only power rested in the bullets of his revolver. As the strip developed, Dr. Occult acquired a magic amulet, which resisted the powers of evil energy, an all-blue costume with cape, and powers of hypnosis, teleportation, telekinesis, and invisibility. The Doctor's "lifespan" ran for 27 issues of More Fun.
Roy Thomas would be resurrect him 49 years later in DC Comics' All-Star Squadron #49.

Source:-

http://stevestiles.com/1stcom2.htm

The Stone Age Of Comics

A Look At Early Comic Book History, Part 3 All right, Mr. Peabody, we're taking another jaunt with the Way-Back Machine again...
While the first issue of 1934's Funnies On Parade had been a Procter and Gamble giveaway, and Maxwell Gaines' second title, A Carnival Of Comics, had been marketed as a department store premium, Gaines hit on the idea of pasting a ten cent price on leftovers of Funnies On Parade, and as an experiment dropped the remaindered copies at several different newsstands. The test case was a greater success than he had expected; within 24 hours they had all sold out. Comic books were on their way as a new way of generating income for publishers. With the success of A Carnival of Comics, Max Gaines followed through with another comic-book title, a one-hundred page comic book called Century of Comics. Between 100,000 and 250,000 copies of both

Century of Comics and Carnival of Comics would be given away that year of comics' infancy.
But soon Gaines had competition. The first was the comic Famous Funnies, an innovative title, edited by Stephen A. Douglas, that used new material in addition to reprinting news strips. (Famous Funnies would endure until the fifties, and its last sixteen issues would feature covers by none other than Frank Frazetta.) Another was New Comics, which lived to its name by printing all new material. Gaines met the challenge by coming out with another comic that would sell on the newsstands, this one published by George Delacourt, founder of Dell Comics, and the third publisher (after Eastern Color and National Periodicals) to take up the new medium of story telling. The title was Popular Comics, which appeared in February 1936.
Initially Delacourt placed his comics in bookstores. At first, newsstand distributors didn't know what to make of the flimsy ten-cent booklets. One of them, American News, had refused to handle Funnies On Parade and other reprint comics. The situation altered when the New York Daily News ran a full-page ad praising the new form of print entertainment. American News suddenly had a change of mind and contracted for 250,000 comics.
As with Funnies On Parade, Gaines ran reprints in Popular Comics. His son Bill would later do a lot to set standards of excellence in comics publishing with E.C., but Max was more of an entrepreneur (selling ties that read "Bring Back Beer" during Prohibition), interested in the bottom line of getting out a "property" which would sell. Sheldon (Scribbly) Mayer worked with Gaines during this period and, as he put it, "We brought the material for next to nothing and slapped the books together." Some of that slapped together material included Milton Caniff's Terry And The Pirates, Sidney Smith's The Gumps, and the delightfully eccentric Smokey Stover.
King Features Syndicate must've taken notice of Gaines' efforts, but didn't imitate his slap-dash methods (Gaines had to be argued into running Terry And The Pirates in sequential order). In 1936 King Features made arrangements with David McKay to publish a title that exclusively ran their syndicated strips. This was King Comics,and the first issue appeared in April 1936. The title was slick and sophisticated in comparison to the other reprint titles. The lead feature in King Comics #1 was Brick Bradford, a s.f. time-travel strip written by William Ritt and drawn by Clarence Gray. Bradford's adventures had first appeared in the funny papers five months before Flash Gordon, another King Comics regular, and would enjoy a sixteen year, 110 issue run in that title (the strip itself lasted 54 years, until 1987).
Tip Top Comics made an almost simultaneous debut with King Comics. Like its rival, Tip Top Comics consisted entirely of strips owned by one syndicate, United Features, which acted as the title's publisher.Their lead was Hal Foster's Tarzan, the strip about Edgar Rice Burroughs' jungle lord. Other reprinted strips were Al Capp's L'il Abner and The Captain And The Kids (formerly The Katzenjammer Kids) by Rudolph Dirks.
To sum things up, Tip Top Comics, Famous Funnies, Popular Comics, and King Comics were reprint titles. National's New Comics and More Fun Comics were the first titles to use new material. Shortly National would suffer a loss which would result in the first comic book to use nothing but new material.
This was The Comics Magazine, and the loss was due to National's former managing editor, William H. Cook, and their business manager, John F. Mahon. Cook and Mahon took away more than National's practice of using new material; they took also some of that new material with them when they left.
Among the New Comics' strips to jump ship for The Comics Magazine were Freddie Bell, He Means Well and Sheldon Mayer's The Strange Adventures Of Mr. Weed. Other defectors appeared in the new title under assumed titles; National's It's A Dern Lie became Cook and Mahon's T'aintSo!, and Slim Pickins became Spunk Hazard.
Evidently signed contracts weren't an established practice in the early days of comics.
As for comics' first super hero, Dr. Occult, by Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster, the ghost detective underwent a further metamorphosis at The Comics Magazine, becoming Dr. Mystic, forerunner of The Spectre and The Phantom Stranger. Now their character could walk through walls, expand his size, and travel through space unaided by mechanical devices.
Siegel and Shuster had actually come up with the super hero concept while still in high school, printing the first Superman story in their science fiction fanzine. Incredible as it now seems, the two youngsters had been unable to interest any publishers in Superman. Dr. Occult and Dr. Mystic opened the door for Siegel and Shuster to finally put their new idea, the hero with superhuman powers, in print.
The new form of entertainment would soon discard the traditions and formats of the newspaper comic strips, dropping strip titles at the top of every page and varying the size and number of panels per page. Comics would also turn from the traditional adventure heroes of the Sunday papers and go to another source for inspiration. It was the thirties, the height of the Depression, and an era of spectacular mob violence.
Fictional characters sprang up to satisfy the public's yearning for street justice; men with names like The Spider, Doc Savage, The Shadow, and Captain Satan. Some comics writers, like Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, of New Fun Comics had already been writing such stories. It was the era of the pulps, and when it was over, comic books would remain.

Source:-

http://stevestiles.com/1stcom3.htm

A Place To Know

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Comics

GraphicRiver Advance Comics Publication Bundle

Dawn of the Dark Knight

Holy History Lesson, Batman!

The Stone Age Of Comics

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