According to Robert Beerbohm and Richard Olson, the earliest North American cartoon was found in a Puritan-era children’s book published in 1646: “The Burning of Mr. John Rogers” showed that the road to sin also led to the stake. But the format was not, by a long shot, a printed book containing an illustrated narrative. My intention here is not to track down the “first” comic published on American soil but to reconstitute the process that gave birth to books or magazines that contained little other than comics. In this field, like many others, European influence seems undeniable.1
Nowadays historians of American comics know that the first comic book published in the United States was a story created by the Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer. Cover-dated September 14, 1842, The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck (an English translation of Les Aventures de Monsieur Vieux-Bois whose first Swiss edition was dated 1837) was the ninth supplement offered by Brother Jonathan, a newspaper-format magazine published by Wilson & Co. in New York since 1839.2 This 11.5 by 9 inch, forty-four-page bootleg reprint of a British adaptation was hawked and sold by subscription for much less than a dollar, which was the minimum retail price of any bound book at that time. Brother Jonathan, one of the many periodicals competing with book publishers by taking advantage of second-class postal rates, disappeared when the post office revoked this privilege early in 1844. For this reason the second comic published by Wilson, The Strange Adventures of Bachelor Butterfly (a translation of the French cartoonist Cham’s plagiarism of Töpffer’s Monsieur Cryptogame) appeared as a 5.5 by 10 inch, sixty-eight-page book in 1846.
Little is known about the context in which those books were produced. The publishing boom of the Jacksonian era, when the demand for printed material from a rapidly increasing literate population in both urban and rural areas was met by publishers nationwide thanks to heavy duty cylindrical presses, provides the background. Although not all “comics” published in this era have yet been indexed, it appears that a growing number of works containing illustrated narratives—most of them cribbing Töpffer’s style to a greater or lesser degree—were released in the same oblong format as Bachelor Butterfly as of the middle of the century. If we leave aside The College Experiences of Ichabod Academius (New Haven, 1847), whose author remains unknown to this day, the first comic book drawn by Americans was Journey to the Gold Diggins by Jeremiah Saddlebags, published in Cincinnati (a hotbed of mass publishing at the time) and in New York in 1849; this 5.5 by 8.75 inch, sixty-eight-page book contained a story by James A. and Donald F. Read inspired by the California Gold Rush that had begun in the preceding year. In 1850, the same topic inspired The Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump, published by Philip Cozans in New York. Only after the Civil War did the New York publisher Dick & Fitzgerald reprint the oblong 1840s Töpffer books. They also added several other titles retailing for twenty-five or thirty cents to their catalog, including works that were blatant plagiarisms of their Swiss model: thus The Wonderful and Amusing Doings by Sea and Land of Oscar Shanghai (cited in the 1878 Dick & Fitzgerald catalog) cribbed several scenes from Monsieur Cryptogame.
Although few of Töppfer’s books were translated into English, Obadiah Oldbuck and Bachelor Butterfly were available almost without interruption from the 1840s to the end of the century. Their appeal was probably limited by their relatively high price (at least twenty-five cents at a time when a daily newspaper cost a penny) but the large-scale dissemination of pirated collections of British drawings across North America proved there were readers for cartoon collections. Americans of this era were also fond of cheaper publications that included comic drawings, such as almanacs. An interesting example was the yearly humorous collection Scraps, self-published by illustrator David Claypoole Johnston in Boston from 1828 to 1840 and in 1849: it did not contain comic strips but several humorous cartoons addressing current events.
The three decades that followed the Civil War, the so-called Gilded Age, witnessed increased economic activity fueled by large-scale rural migration and considerable immigration essentially from Europe. The daily press developed dramatically thanks to the growing urban working class’s taste for images and news, preferably of the sensational variety. Newspapers contained far fewer illustrations than magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar or The Children’s Magazine. Following the lead of Wild Oats, which started offering humorous cartoons in 1872, or The Daily Graphic (1873–1889), which ran drawings to illustrate the daily news, the large magazines appearing at the turn of the 1880s (like Puck, Judge, Life, and Truth) and children’s magazines (such as St. Nicholas) exploited the commercial potential of pictures.3 According to comics historian Rick Marschall, this development had four consequences: the formation among the American public of a taste for cartoon humor, the progressive emergence of an informal corporation of illustrators that would hereafter become the fathers of American comics, the shift of the single-panel gag to alignments of panels, and the birth of a market for newspapers published in color.4 In this context it is important to distinguish two parallel processes that are often confused: the popularization of comics, on the one hand, and the collecting of humorous illustrations in bound books, on the other. Before becoming mainstays of the Sunday press in the 1890s, humorous comics narratives were staples of the magazines cited above: they were authored by Franklin Morris Howarth, Frederick Burr Opper, Arthur B. Frost, George Luks, Syd Griffin, and Zim (Eugene Zimmerman), the remarkable illustrator of Judge, among many others.5
In 1884, the New York publishing house White, Stokes & Allen was probably the first to offer hardbound books reproducing humorous drawings. Released annually until 1893 The Good Things of “Life” offered captioned or wordless single panels reprinted from Life. The concept was successful enough to be picked up by other magazines until the end of the decade. Puck published collections of drawings by F. B. Opper in 1888, 1890, and 1895; in 1884 Scribner’s published Stuff and Nonsense, a collection of illustrations by A. B. Frost reprinted from Harper’s Monthly;6 in 1895, Chip’s Dogs, edited by R. H. Russell, collected strips by Frank “Chip” Bellew first published in Life.
And there were many others—among them The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats, published by G. W. Dilligham in 1897, stood out as the first collection of comics reprinted from a Sunday newspaper instead of from a magazine. This book was only one among dozens of merchandising items cashing in on the character created by Richard F. Outcault, a former collaborator of Truth magazine hired by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1894. His drawings of street urchins had led to the sudden appearance in the January 5, 1896, World of a snaggle-toothed, jug-eared kid, wearing an ample yellow night-shirt with a sooty handprint. Soon nicknamed the “Yellow Kid,” he would become the object of rivalry between Joseph Pulitzer and W. R. Hearst, the two tycoons of the New York press who had become aware of the public’s extraordinary attraction to illustrated color supplements.7
Contrary to what the retrospective celebrity of Outcault’s character might bring us to believe, The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats did not immediately spawn other collections of newspaper comics. More noteworthy was the publication by E. P. Dutton in 1899 of Funny Folks, a collection of humorous drawings by F. M. Howarth reprinted from Puck. The book was the first of a generation of more-or-less identical oblong sixty-page hardbound color albums published in New York during the first decade of the century, often by the newspapers themselves. The New York Herald, for instance, released two collections of Bunny Schultze’s Foxy Grandpa strip in 1901 and 1902 and Hearst’s New York American & Journal published two color collections of F. B. Opper’s Alphonse and Gaston in 1902 and 1903 and Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids in 1902. Among the twenty or so publishers that filled this niche at the beginning of the century, two New York publishers stood out by the size of their output, Cupples & Leon from 1902 and Frederick A. Stokes from 1903 to 1916. Moreover, occasionally strips would change publishers. Collections of Outcault’s Buster Brown were published by Stokes, others by Cupples & Leon, while Schultze’s Foxy Grandpa books, initially published by the New York Herald, were picked up by Hammersly, Donahue, and Stokes afterward.
The collections of Sunday pages did not noticeably evolve until just after the First World War. Conversely, the daily strips that appeared in the late 1900s were collected in a radically different format. In 1911, the first collection of Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff published by Ball in Boston was a narrow oblong book, 5.75 by 15.5 inches in size—once opened it spread across 30 inches. The Chicago publisher Donahue reprinted Charlie Chaplin daily strips in 9 by 16 inch paperbound books starting in 1917. The absence of rules regarding the format of comics collections seemed to come to an end in 1919, when the New York publisher Cupples & Leon started issuing square-bound paperback books offering fifty-two pages of black-and-white strips for twenty-five cents. A hundred were published between 1919 and 1933. Because such books were less cumbersome than their predecessors, this format proved popular with readers as well as with Cupples & Leon’s competitors, who soon adopted the new format. A representative example was Comic Monthly, whose twelve issues were published in 1922 by Embee Distributing Company—an outfit owned by none other than George McManus, the creator of Bringing Up Father.
Such was the situation at the start of the 1930s. Nothing seemed to foreshadow the coming of comic magazines. Since the late nineteenth century, collections of comics had been released by publishers who were used to putting out relatively expensive books—a far cry from daily newspapers that were usually disposed of after being read. The first collections of comics practically never contained any unpublished material simply because they were principally conceived as a means to cash in a second time on contents previously amortized in newspapers. These books were distributed on a fairly large scale. They were available from newsstands, department stores, and some bookstores that displayed them alongside children’s literature. They were also fixtures of bus or train station newsstands, where parents would buy them for their children before long trips. Still, because of their retail price, an average twenty-five to sixty cents, they were commodities marketed for the well-to-do middle class. For working-class families, purchasing a Sunday newspaper was better value for the money. This is why the appearance of comic magazines took place in three stages: the very first pamphlets collecting reprinted strips were advertising giveaways; soon they became periodical magazines sold on newsstands; finally they began to offer original material.
The idea of publishing collections of all-new comics actually goes back to an earlier period. In 1900, the New York publisher Blanchard released Vaudevilles and Other Things, a collection of original drawings by Bunny (Carl E. Schultze, the creator of Foxy Grandpa). The great originality of this volume was in the strip form (as opposed to single panels) of the comics it contained. Likewise, between 1904 and 1912, R. F. Outcault drew several advertising premium booklets containing original Buster Brown pages for various customers, the most prominent of whom was the Brown Shoe Company. However commercially successful, these initiatives did not have a lasting impact—or at least not immediately.
The formula of what would become the comic magazine featuring only original material appeared much later. In 1929, George Delacorte published a weekly tabloid that did not contain any reprints of newspaper comics. After a first issue priced at ten cents, The Funnies offered sixteen pages of original color artwork for thirty cents every Saturday. But it was not successful. Although after issue #22 Delacorte lowered the sale price to five cents, the magazine did not live past its thirty-sixth issue. The demise of The Funnies probably resulted from the quasi-prohibitive price of its first issues: between late 1929 and the autumn of 1930, a weekly expenditure of thirty cents was too costly for a sufficiently large readership to allow the survival of a magazine that, as underlined by comic book historian Mike Benton, resembled an incomplete Sunday newspaper. At the start of 1933, Humor Publishing, a publishing house about which hardly anything is known, released three cardboard-covered tabloid titles that contained only unpublished strips: however, Detective Dan, The Adventures of Detective Ace King, and Bob Scully, Two Fisted Hick Detective did not survive past their first issues. In the absence of tangible elements, we cannot know whether to interpret this as an actual failure or as merely a dry run: Detective Dan soon reappeared in the daily press as Dan Dunn, a Dick Tracy knockoff authored by Norman Marsh.8 Publishing comics that had not yet been tested in newspapers was a bold move at the time because money was scarce and the better graphic artists were always snapped up by syndicates.
Shortly afterward, in April, Gulf Oil Company printed Gulf Comic Weekly, a four-page tabloid that contained nothing but original strips to be given away at Gulf service stations. When the comic was advertised nationally on the radio, it became an overnight sensation. By the fifth issue, three million copies were flying off the shelves every week. Although Standard Oil stations were apparently the first to offer comics as giveaways to their customers in December 1932, the success of Gulf’s advertising campaign was such that in 1933–1934, the main petroleum companies followed suit with radio commercials promoting their own giveaways.9 This new product was the brainchild of Harry I. Wildenberg, sales manager for Waterbury, Connecticut’s Eastern Color, a company that printed Sunday color supplements for many East Coast newspapers. Wildenberg, a former adman, thought that the public’s taste for comics could be channeled to sell commodities other than newspapers. After the Gulf Oil experience, Maxwell C. Gaines, one of Wildenberg’s salesmen, sold Procter & Gamble the idea of offering their clients a comic magazine as a premium to be exchanged against coupons cut from the packaging of their products. In the meantime, his employer, while surveying a promotional folder for the Ledger syndicate previously manufactured by Eastern Color in which Sunday comic pages were reproduced in 7 by 9 inch format realized that a tabloid page folded in two was a convenient size for a magazine: from four large sheets folded into eight—four Sunday supplements, for example—could be made a thirty-two-page booklet that only needed a stapled cover to produce a 7.5 by 10 inch magazine after trimming.
Wildenberg and Gaines jointly fathered Funnies on Parade, the first stapled half-tabloid-sized pamphlet of comics of the kind that would later be known in the realm of American popular publishing as “comic books.” The 10,000 copies printed for Procter & Gamble contained strips purchased from the Ledger and Bell syndicates for ten dollars a page. The comic proved so popular that shortly afterward Eastern Color printed 100,000 copies of Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, an advertising premium for various companies, such as Canada Dry or the Kinney shoe stores. The success of the operation prompted the same companies to order a third book and the hundred-page Century of Comics had a print run of 250,000. In 1934, Gaines, who by then had left Eastern Color, supplied Phillips’s Dental Magnesia with half a million copies of Skippy’s Own Book of Comics starring Percy Crosby’s famous street urchin. Using comics collections for advertising ends was now a tried and tested strategy.
According to a probably apocryphal anecdote, Max Gaines, in order to find out if there was a readership ready to spend money on the new comic collections, allegedly stickered “ten cent” labels on several copies of Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, and then left them at several newsstands in his neighborhood on a Friday night. He found that they had sold out by Monday morning. Whether this empirical market study took place or not is secondary. What is important is that by charging ten cents, Gaines put comic books in competition with the “Big Little Books” (BLBs), the small black-and-white volumes with color paper covers that had been published by Whitman since 1932. BLBs contained up to 424 pages alternating text and full-page illustrations, which were in fact enlarged, wordless comic panels. Primarily destined to a juvenile audience, BLBs offered all sorts of stories, many of which starred comics characters. The very first BLB, for example, was The Adventures of Dick Tracy. Cheaper than the twenty-five-cent Cupples & Leon collections, BLBs were very successful from the start, notably because they were frequently purchased by parents for their children.10
At the beginning of 1934, Eastern Color president George Janosik talked the publisher George Delacorte into ordering a comic pamphlet that was exclusively destined for retail. Five years after the fiasco of The Funnies, Delacorte was still smarting from the failure of his previous collaboration with Eastern Color. He somewhat reluctantly ordered 40,000 copies of the sixty-eight-page Famous Funnies Series I. Because the newspaper distributor American News refused to carry them, they were sold in chain stores where they flew off the shelves and rapidly sold out. Meanwhile, following the less than enthusiastic reaction of several advertisers contacted to give their opinions, Delacorte judged it preferable to abandon his option on the product. Soon afterward, the New York Daily News published an advertisement praising the commercial potential of comics. This attracted the attention of Harold Moore, a director at Eastern Color, who eagerly showed it to Harold Gould, president of American News. A few days later, Gould ordered 250,000 copies of Eastern Color’s next pamphlet. Although the publisher’s name listed in the masthead was Harold Moore, Eastern Color was the real publisher of Famous Funnies #1 in May 1934.11
Famous Funnies did not post a profit until the seventh issue. Because of its novel concept and format, newsies did not really know how to display them, which was why, in the first three years of its existence, many Famous Funnies packages were returned to distributors unopened. Although they were interested at first since the new pamphlets ran strips that belonged to them, syndicates took over a year to become aware of the potential that the new format might have for them. Only at the end of 1935 was Popular Comics released, a title published by Delacorte and supplied by Tribune News. In early 1936 King Comics, a title containing King Features strips and published by McKay, came out at the same time as Tip Top Comics, published by United Features itself. That summer, the strips Delacorte ran in The Funnies were provided by Newspaper Enterprise Association and Tribune News.
Over three years, the reprinting of syndicated comic strips had spawned a new medium. Undreamt of until 1933, it was yet simply called comic magazines. Nevertheless, the initial enthusiasm was dampened when publishers and syndicates realized that the supply of daily strips was not inexhaustible and the contents of the new periodicals would need to be renewed. The publishing of original strips was to be the final stage in the structuring of the comic book. It did not take place without resistance, as the received wisdom of the time was that readers would be less prepared to spend a dime on unknown strips than on the tried-and-true material previously printed in newspapers.
The second issue of Famous Funnies contained only one original strip, Dip and Duck signed by Meb. In retrospect, this strip exemplified the commercial dilemmas inherent in the publishing of new material. Although it was not drawn for publication in a newspaper, it was laid out as a Sunday page with a header that repeated itself on each page. Despite editor Stephen A. Douglas’s efforts to give the magazine an identity thanks to regular columns, readers’ mail, and other features so that it would cease to resemble the bundle of Sunday pages that it had previously been, it was not until the sixth issue that a second original strip appeared: Goofy Gags by Vep.
And then along came Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. After quitting the army in the 1920s, this eccentric character started out on a fairly prosperous career as a writer of popular fiction, producing adventure novels inspired by his years in the military. He decided to become a publisher of cartoon magazines after having seen Comic Cuts, a five-cent tabloid weekly reprinting the contents of an eponymous British publication that appeared in nine issues between May and July 1934, at the very time of the debut publication of Famous Funnies.12 Unlike the established publishers who took up comic books, Wheeler-Nicholson could not afford to buy the reprint rights to popular newspaper strips from syndicates. Hence he found it cheaper to publish a black-and-white tabloid magazine that contained nothing but original strips late in 1934. Appearing just six months after Famous Funnies, the thirty-two pages of New Fun were twice as large and cost the same price.
Still, although it was a radical innovation, New Fun sold poorly because of its unwieldy size, the absence of four-color printing, and Wheeler-Nicholson’s dodgy management of his outfit, the pompously named National Allied Publishing Company. It occurred to him that business would improve if he published original material in the successful format of Eastern Color, his sole competitor. In September 1935 he released New Comics, which may well be considered the first comic book in the canonical sense of the term, that is, an affordable, small-size magazine offering original comics and available at newsstands.13 The stories published in the eighty-four-page New Comics were adventure and humor narratives that distinguished Wheeler-Nicholson’s new title from Mickey Mouse Magazine, the other, more tame comic book that only published original strips. Three months later, New Fun, renamed More Fun to avoid any confusion with other titles, also adopted the “comic book” format that National Allied Publishing used for all its subsequent titles.
It did not take long before Wheeler-Nicholson had to face direct competition. As the Major was terrible at managing his business and paying his employees, business director John F. Mahon and editor William H. Cook quickly quit to found Comics Magazine Company, whose first title The Comics Magazine appeared in January 1936. Renamed Funny Pages with its second issue, it proved an all-the-more serious competitor to Wheeler-Nicholson because Mahon and Cook had enticed several of “his” freelancers that were fed up with not being paid.
By the middle of 1936, eight comic books appeared regularly. Half of them primarily published reprints (Famous Funnies, King Comics, Popular Comics, Tip Top Comics), while the others published original material (The Comics Magazine, Mickey Mouse Magazine, More Fun, New Comics). All adopted the format inaugurated by Funnies on Parade in 1933 and the retail price of ten cents. All directed themselves toward a format destined to compete seriously with the comics of the daily press.