Comic Books 101

by Chris Ryall

  Captain America Comics #1 launched in the early months of 1941. Though America would enter World War II less than a year later, the threat Hitler posed was already well-known. Kirby's cover image (with inks by Simon) depicted this new red, white and blue-clad hero punching Hitler in the face (see cover image on page 118). The cover struck just the right note of patriotism and heroics. Captain America and his teenage sidekick, Bucky, were soon punching out Axis members on a monthly basis.

  There had been other patriotic heroes before, but Captain America quickly surpassed them in popularity. One such character, The Shield, published by MLJ Comics, precursor to Archie Comics, shared a few similarities with Cap. MLJ threatened to sue Goodman and Timely for infringement, and Goodman settled the suit in a manner that would make his character even stronger — he changed the design of Cap's shield from its traditional shield-shaped design to the round design the character carries today.

  Goodman chased his hit with more patriotic-themed characters, but none resonated the way Captain America did. Still, the company's sales and its staff continued to expand, and Goodman brought on his wife's cousin, young Stanley Lieber, to help. Lieber soon moved to writing backup features for the comics, and adopted the nom de plume that would stick for the rest of his life — Stan Lee.

  Simon and Kirby had a financial dispute with Goodman regarding Cap's high sales, leading them to begin moonlighting for Timely's competitor, National. They were fired from Timely after someone reported the news back to Goodman. Fingers were pointed at Stan Lee, a charge he denied. However it went down, it left young Lee to take over as the company's editor-in-chief.

  When America entered World War II in December 1941, many comic creators were drafted. Lee himself volunteered for Army service. With so many of his superhero creators off fighting, Goodman began publishing humor comics created by new talents like Basil Wolverton. Vince Fago filled in as editor-in-chiefand shifted the company toward “funny animal” comics. Despite the changes, and the paper-rationing that had begun to affect other publishers, Timely continued to prosper. Captain America was even given his own Republic movie serial in 1944. But soon, the public's appetite for superhero comics began to fade, and with the end of the war and the loss of many postwar jobs, the desire to spend hard-earned money to read about patriotic superheroes also began to diminish.

  POSTWAR CHANGES

  Stan Lee's postwar return as editor saw some new innovations on Timely's part — westerns, romance comics and superhero teams. Yet these titles faced stiff competition from more shocking horror comics as well as the advent of television, and none would find an audience.

  To combat the country's changing moods, Goodman published an increasingly diverse slate of titles, distributed through his own company, Atlas. He adopted the Atlas logo on his comics, effectively changing Timely Comics to Atlas Comics. Later, some distribution problems led Goodman to rapidly decrease the company's output. As Atlas debated its murky future, Jack Kirby returned to the fold. Kirby, with Stan Lee and some new artists such as Don Heck and Steve Ditko, pioneered many monster titles and westerns, some of which were emblazoned with a circular “MC” (Marvel Comics) logo on its covers. And some even prospered for a time. But no one could foresee how the industry would change as a result of the political climate of the 1950s. The Marvel Age of comics would eventually surface, but not yet.

  5 Fawcett Comics

  Holy moley

  The Fawcett logo, circa 1948. Fawcett wasn't one to hide its light under a bushel.

  COVER IMAGE, CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES #90 © 1948. PUBLISHED BY FAWCETT PUBLICATIONS. CAPTAIN MARVEL™ & © DC COMICS. ART BY C.C. BECK.

  Fawcett Publications was founded by the colorful Wilford Hamilton Fawcett (or “Captain Billy,” as he was known). Captain Billy was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, a police reporter and a hotelier to the stars. He launched Fawcett in 1919 when his crude war-story pamphlets found a huge audience in disabled veterans.

  Fawcett began publishing comics in 1940 and had immense success with its Captain Marvel character created by writer Bill Parker and artist C.C. Beck. Captain Marvel shared some similarities with Superman — both invulnerable strongmen wearing tights and a cape — but there were plenty of differences, too. His alter ego was a young boy, Billy Bat-son, who spoke a magic word — Shazam! — to be transformed into the caped hero Captain Marvel. The character's popularity quickly won him his own title, Captain Marvel Adventures, and led to the expansion of the Marvel family in the form of new characters Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel and, uh, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. In the mid-1940s, Captain Marvel's title even outsold Superman.

  SUPERMAN VS. CAPTAIN MARVEL

  As you can imagine, competitor National Comics wasn't overly enamored with this new character that looked derivative of its Superman character and was also outselling him. The lawsuit-happy National threatened legal action against Fawcett.

  Fawcett's owners knew that National had a strong case against them, so they initially elected to stop publishing Captain Marvel's adventures. But because the character was too important to the company, they had to fight back. The case took years to get to trial. When it did, it came out that National had mistakenly never fully copyrighted Superman. The judge ruled that, similarities or differences aside, National's copyright to Superman was not protected. Unfortunately for Fawcett, the judge also ruled that Captain Marvel was illegally copied from Superman.

  The news got worse. National appealed the decision (even while it seemed to crib from Captain Marvel, giving Superman the ability to fly instead of just “leaping tall buildings in a single bound”), and in the early 1950s, the decision was reversed. By this time, superhero titles were beginning to fall out of favor for horror comics, and Fawcett deemed Captain Marvel no longer important enough to fight over. It settled with National, and stopped publishing the character for good.

  As Captain Marvel went, so went Fawcett Comics. The publisher cancelled all its superhero titles and laid off all its creators. Many of its characters were later sold to another new publisher, Charlton Comics. But Captain Marvel's story wasn't completely over. The character lay dormant for two decades. In that time, the trademark lapsed, and Marvel Comics launched a character with the same name. In 1972, DC Comics acquired the rights to Fawcett's character, but since Marvel had secured the trademark for the “Captain Marvel” name, DC's new titles had to be launched under the name Shazam! This got very confusing to us kids, especially to those of us who also watched the 1970s live-action Saturday-morning show that was also called Shazam! but featured a character called Captain Marvel. Today he's probably known more by the name SHAZAM! than by Captain Marvel.

  Fawcett published a few comics into the 1960s, mostly newspaper strip reprints, and then pulled the plug for good. It's tragically ironic for Fawcett that it's best-known for a character that ended up in the hands of the company responsible for its demise.

  SCOTT SAYS

  I've always felt that it was the ingenious child-to-man transformation concept that made Captain Marvel instantly popular, to the point that it outsold nearly every comic on the stands throughout the 1940s. The central concept was one that every kid could get into. First off, the origin was fiendishly appealing: you could never be Superman, since it was pretty clear you weren't from Krypton. And sure, you could be Batman if you devoted decades of your life to study and training, but who wants to do that? But Captain Marvel? Hey, all it took was shouting a magic word, and instantly you're a grown-up (and therefore you couldn't possibly have any problems, right?), super-strong, super-smart, super-brave and you could fly. Oh, and whenever you wanted you could turn back into a kid again. Talk about wish fulfillment.

  Most of the Marvel Family stories were written by Otto Binder, who had a knack for churning out month after month of appealing, straightforward adventure stories with more than a hint of whimsy, which matched perfectly with the cartoony, humorous art of C.C. Beck. The result was a dreamlike romp that combined the fantastic non-log
ic of fairy tales with the action and adventure of the comic books of the era. And with monthly sales that at times topped one million copies, there must have been plenty who enjoyed the formula.

  6 Dell and Disney

  Gains and losses

  UNCLE SCROOGE #13 © 1956 DISNEY ENTERPRISES. PUBLISHED BY DELL COMICS. ART BY CARL BARKS. COLOR BY PETER LEDGER.

  Dell Comics was there at the beginning. It was Dell's Famous Funnies comic that kicked off the trend of publishing new material in comic-bookform (see chapter one). And for nearly half a century, it was one of the most successful publishers in the country.

  Despite the prevalence of superhero comics in the late 1930s, Dell followed a different path. In 1938, Dell changed its approach to comic-book publishing, choosing to operate differently from other publishers. After going it alone for nearly a decade, the company partnered with Western Publishing (a large publisher of licensed comics and children's Golden Books, among other things). Western would produce and package comic books based on its licensed properties — most targeted at a younger audience than other comics of the day — and Dell would foot the bill and distribute the comics.

  One of Western's largest licenses at the time was the stable of Walt Disney characters. Another was Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes. Dell's new releases, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories and Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies Comics, were huge hits with children. The company followed up those efforts with comics based on Walter Lantz's animated creations (Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, Chilly Willy and others) and even Our Gang comics, featuring the Little Rascals.

  Dell also launched Four Color Comics, an anthology that tried out different characters as its lead story. This title was also very popular, and many of the characters featured in its pages — Popeye and various other Disney characters — spun off into their own books. Four Color was published as often as twice weekly for a time, and ran for an amazing 1,300 issues.

  The arrangement with Western ended in the early 1960s, when Western spun off its licensed characters into a separate publishing line, Gold Key Comics. Dell found itself at a crossroads. With so many of its popular licensed titles belonging to Western, the company decided to delve into creating original properties and licensing some properties of its own (although TV properties like Bewitched, Ghost Stories and Combat would never quite replace popular titles like the Disney and Loo-ney Tunes titles).

  The timing of Western's withdrawal didn't do Dell any favors. By the start of the 1960s, the comic-book industry had stared down its greatest crisis and come out the other side as a superhero-dominated industry. Faced with DC's popularity and the resurgent Marvel Comics, Dell's non-caped comics failed to find the same audience it once had. The company held on for another decade, surviving into the early 1970s before finally realizing it no longer had a place in this new, superheroic world.

  DELL'S CREATIVE RENAISSANCE

  Licensed titles rarely receive the same respect in the comics industry as original creations. As a result, Dell's preponderance of licensed titles, as well as its struggle to find a foothold in the last decade of its existence, erroneously led many to dismiss the company's importance in comparison to EC Comics, DC and Marvel. In fact, Dell is one of the unsung champions of the early days of comic books and a cornerstone of the industry. Dell had a big role in the formation of the comic book itself as well as a roster of some of the most acclaimed artists who ever put pencil to paper in the creation of a comic.

  CARL BARKS — One of the biggest names ever to work for Dell. He began his artistic career as an illustrator for Disney's animated shorts, then left to strike out on his own. Western immediately hired him to work on Donald Duck comics, and he took the feisty-but-unintelligible Donald Duck character and gave him a true personality, a family and an entire town in the pages of the comics. Barks's comics were filled with such clean lines, sterling beauty, humor and heart that his “funny animal” comics had more resonance than most featuring human characters.

  WALT KELLY — A former Disney animator, Kelly is most known as the creator of Pogo. He was prolific during his time at Dell, working on many titles, including Our Gang and Dell's Disney titles.

  RUSS MANNING — The creator of Magnus, Robot Fighter and namesake of a comic-book award worked for Dell before working on many titles for Gold Key.

  ALEX TOTH — Acclaimed comic-book artist and animator for Hanna Barbera, Toth worked for DC Comics before being employed by Dell for a number of years.

  DAN SPIEGLE — After working for Dell, this veteran cartoonist went on to spend decades working for DC Comics.

  JOHN BUSCEMA — Best known for his work on Marvel's The Silver Surfer, Conan the Barbarian and The Avengers, Buscema produced many pages for Dell.

  7 EC Comics and the Comics Code Authority

  Reduction of the innocentThe history of comics can be divided into two basic eras: pre-1950s and post-1950s. Many comics companies' success depended on the outcome of the period in between. So what happened in the 1950s and how did it change everything? The answer is best explained through a look at EC Comics.

  EC Comics deserves a special place in the pantheon of comic-book publishers that have helped build the industry into what it is today. It is inexorably tied to a debate that arose over the role of comics in juvenile delinquency and the establishment of a governing body, the Comics Code Authority. Many of its accomplishments are given short shrift in comparison to the controversy.

  A TALE CALCULATED TO DRIVE YOU… MAD

  Authority figures have long thought that children are impressionable and should be protected, and the advent of accessible pop-culture elements such as radio, television and, of course, comic books only exacerbated that thinking.

  Comic books confounded the establishment from the start. Contrary to the older reader base that buys comics today, the buyers in the 1930s and '40s were primarily preteens, numbering more than a million strong at the time. That impressive sales figure was a particular source of consternation for many adults, especially teachers and librarians, who hated the idea of comics taking kids' attention away from more scholarly pursuits such as reading books. Dime novels and the pulps that came before were bad enough, but now comic books were enticing young readers with colorful characters and fantastic tales of wonder, too. Obviously, they reasoned, something had to be done.

  That something was eventually an investigation into the possible corrupting influence of comic books by a Senate subcommittee and the development of the damaging Comics Code Authority institution. This all led to the demise of one of the most creative and influential comic-book companies in the industry's history, EC Comics, which would have come as quite a surprise to company founder M.C. Gaines, who launched EC as Educational Comics in the 1940s.

  THE LIGHTER SIDE

  When Famous Funnies became one of the first bound-up, magazine-sized newspaper-strip collections distributed through newsstands, the idea was originated by Maxwell Charles (“M.C.”) Gaines, a paper salesman. Gaines, born in 1896, was a comic-book visionary, perhaps the most important figure in all of American comics, and responsible for helping launch the industry in the 1930s.

  Even today's accepted format of comics (folded, saddle-stitched newsprint pages) originated with Gaines, who at the time worked for the Eastern Color Printing Company. Eastern Color printed many Sunday comic-strip supplements for newspapers. Gaines helped pioneer the idea of folding the supplements in half, doubling the page count and producing an individual magazine-sized publication of comic strips. He offered comic-book reprints of this nature as a premium for companies such as Procter & Gamble, which turned into a profitable affair. Gaines assumed that if it worked for companies, the public would likely be willing to spend a dime for such magazines on the newsstands, too.

  Gaines was responsible for other groundbreaking contributions to comics, too. The public rarely hears his name in connection with the creation of Superman, but he was largely responsible for the strips getting picked up by National Comics. In the late 19
30s, he left Eastern Color to work for a comic-strip syndicate that had just turned down a new creation by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster. National Comics' publisher, Harry Donenfeld, asked Gaines if he had any suitable material for a new comic he was launching in 1938, Action Comics. Gaines wasn't crazy about Siegel and Shuster's character Superman, but his assistant, Sheldon Mayer, was. Mayer persuaded Gaines to show the strip to Donenfeld, who immediately saw the character's potential with his audience of young readers. History was made.

  A year later, Gaines was hired by National Comics to create a new publishing house, All-American Publications, working alongside Donenfeld's partner, Jack Liebowitz. The company's first publication, All-American Comics, launched some of the world's most successful superhero characters under Gaines, among them Green Lantern, the Flash, Hawk-man, the Atom and Wonder Woman. But despite these successes, Gaines and Liebowitz argued constantly until 1944, when Gaines was bought out.

  It's fortunate for the industry that he was. In 1945, the socially conscious Gaines started up Educational Comics. He recognized the power of the medium to reach children, so he continued to publish comics based on history and the Bible, something he'd started doing at All-American. But Educational Comics (known as EC Comics) would also go on to publish humor strips and even attempt to duplicate Gaines's earlier hits with superheroes, with limited success. Low sales began to afflict many of EC's sales, and by 1947, the company was near bankruptcy.