The Second World War was the backdrop to a phase of continuous growth for the comic book industry. The number of titles witnessed a continuous expansion, contents became increasingly diverse, and recurring characters multiplied in comic magazines. Comic books originated an industry that yielded considerable revenue and became identified by the public as distinct from newspaper comics and pulps. The wartime social and economic context—increased household income and reduced availability of consumer durables—boosted comic books and all forms of mass entertainment for all intents and purposes. The rise of illustrated magazines stemmed from the momentum gathered by the nascent industry before the war as much as the historic, economic, and sociological circumstances linked to the conflict that shaped the size, composition, and tastes of readers.
The links between comic books and newspaper comics were still strong at this time. Even though 80 percent of the 109 titles published in 1940 featured superheroes (see below), the nine titles offering only comic strip reprints still sold very well.1 Nonetheless the decade began with a development that showed comic books had started to cut into the newspapers’ historical monopoly on comics. In 1940, Everett M. “Busy” Arnold, the co-owner with Register & Tribune Syndicate of Quality Comics, proposed that the syndicate offer newspaper readers a supplement whose contents would match those of comic books. At the start of the year, following suggestions made by his associates, Arnold asked Will Eisner, then art director of the studio that produced the stories published by Quality, to make a comic-book-like insert for Sunday papers nationwide. The twinned goal was to offer a product different from the weekday comic strips in order to increase the visibility of comic books to newspaper readers. Eisner accepted, sold off his shares to his business partner S. M. “Jerry” Iger, and took away the studio’s best artists. On Sunday, June 2, 1940, the newspapers supplied by Register & Tribune treated their readers to the first Spirit section, a supplement comprising three complete stories and named after its lead feature; the two other strips starred “Lady Luck,” a masked adventuress first illustrated by Chuck Mazoujian, and “Mr. Mystic,” a magician whose adventures were signed by Bob Powell. Written and drawn by Eisner, The Spirit took up seven of the supplement’s sixteen pages. Over a twelve-year career the strip never experienced large-scale popularity (only a limited number of Sunday newspapers carried the Spirit section) but, after returning from the war, Eisner went through a five-year stretch of exceptional creativity that turned his strip into the most sophisticated US comic of his time both form- and content-wise. In terms of artistic achievement The Spirit stands out in America as the most worthwhile counterpart to the Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s Tintin in the mid-twentieth century.2
Arnold was not the first person who thought a full-fledged comic book might be inserted in a Sunday supplement. Starting on April 28, 1940, the Sunday Chicago Tribune contained an insert titled “Comic Book Magazine.” Originally a hodgepodge of Sunday pages, reprints of sometimes very old syndicated strips, and montages of Republic Pictures movie stills, it began to offer original strips only in 1942.3 King Features produced a supplement featuring Will Gould’s Red Barry detective strip that lasted only a few months. Yet only the Spirit section was to live for more than a decade. Quality was atypical because it was the only publishing house tied to a syndicate that released only original material. This unusual characteristic explains why the Spirit section did not have more competitors in the same format and its flagship series evolved without having to bow to the commercial pressures of the comic book industry.
Although the United States only entered the war on December 8, 1941, a warlike mind-set had already set in the country for several months, as witnessed by the era’s mass culture in general and comic books in particular. Superman was probably the first character to respond overtly to the international tensions of his time. By the late 1930s, all the popular literature narratives set in the present wove yarns about spies and saboteurs from aggressive nations, or dictators imposing their yoke on terrified, helpless populations. The first comic-book cover to show a war scene was probably that of Action Comics #10 (published in December 1938), where Superman was shown punching a bomber plane to pieces. Japanese and German spies had become occasional characters in comic magazines, but their recurrence was influenced by two major events by the decade’s end. When hostilities started in Europe in the late summer of 1939, the struggle against the Rome-Berlin Axis became the main topic of all action-oriented comics. The entry of the United States into the war two years later touched off a proliferation of patriotic heroes and superheroes single-mindedly participating in the war effort and the struggle against spies. The aggravation of the international context was the backdrop to the rise of the superhero genre, which unambiguously echoed ambient patriotism.
Just as international tensions were worked into scripts by comics writers before the United States officially entered the war, the first overtly patriotic superhero, “the Shield,” appeared in MLJ’s Pep Comics #1 (January 1940) in October 1939. The new character did not elicit an enthusiastic response from readers, which explains why the second patriotic superhero was created more than a year later. Captain America appeared in Marvel’s Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941) in December 1940. The first title in which the war was used as a permanent backdrop was arguably Quality’s Military Comics, which premiered in May 1941 and introduced “the Black-hawks,” a multiethnic team of adventurers struggling against Germany and her allies across the world.
At the height of the war, comic books featured several hundred male and female superheroes. They were so popular that publishers found it difficult to meet the demand. From 22 in 1939, the number of new releases jumped to 697 in 1940, 832 in 1941, 934 in 1942, 1051 in 1943, and stabilized temporarily around 1125 in 1944 and 1945. The only real effect of the paper rationing measures initiated in 1943 was the drop in the number of pages per magazine, which most often shrank from sixty-eight to sixty or from fifty-two to thirty-six pages, for an unchanged price of ten cents.4
The thinning of the pamphlets had little impact on sales. The US Army was the largest institutional customer of comic book publishers and the readers who stayed home, particularly the young, had comparatively little else than comic books to spend their money on as industrial production was geared toward the war effort. Several innovations specifically destined to attract preadolescent readers were introduced during the first half of the decade. Simultaneously, publishers were aware that parents had to be factored into the equation, as they were the ones who most often allowed children to buy comic magazines. In a period when government propaganda and mass media would give pride of place to “family values,” the public became aware of comic books from the angle of a power relation within the family. For parents, these magazines became components of children’s daily lives on which it was difficult to exert control. Some publishers decided to market their books toward parents so as to reach children. This tendency was exemplified by three editorial strategies—feature children and adolescents as protagonists or foils to adult characters; issue humor titles designed to compete with the comic books that reprinted syndicated strips; introduce “educational” content into certain comic books.
The pulp heroes on which most comic characters were based had traditionally been adults. Until the late 1930s, popular literature was in step with the social values of the times and featured children in fairy-tale-type stories or in naturalistic narratives that emphasized the potential social precariousness of children (mistreated, orphaned, or removed from their parents). The first juvenile foil for a superhero was office-boy Jimmy Olsen, appearing in Action Comics #6 (November 1938) at the side of Superman; yet he never graduated to the status of costumed hero and remained underused in the Superman stories until the 1950s. The first genuine junior sidekick of a superhero appeared in January 1940: in Detective Comics #38 (April 1940) Batman took in young Dick Grayson, the son of trapeze artist parents who had recently died, and made him his assistant “Robin” (a name inspired by Robin Hood). Robin’s origin embodied contemporary changes in the way children were represented in popular literature: Dick Grayson’s orphaning under tragic circumstances (just like Bruce Wayne/Batman, which justified the parallelism between the two characters) came straight out of nineteenth-century naturalist literature but he entered comic books as a superhero’s sidekick. He was the first of a line that would include Toro with “the Human Torch,” Bucky Barnes with Captain America, Captain Marvel Jr. with Captain Marvel, and many others. A variant of the new archetype was the group of children assisting a hero: its initiators were Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, also the creators of Captain America, who introduced “the Young Allies” for Marvel in the summer of 1941. After moving to DC in 1942, they came up with “the Boy Commandos” and “the Newsboy Legion,” a gang of New York street kids helping out “The Guardian.” Here again the conceit was plagiarized repeatedly by competing publishers.
The introduction of young characters was not limited to action-oriented comic books. Inspired by the blundering but sympathetic adolescent types that were then popular in entertainment media, John Goldwater, one of the co-owners of the MLJ publishing house, came up with the idea of an all-American teenager. Archie Andrews appeared in Pep Comics #22 (December 1941) in the fall of 1941. The original cast of Archie, his neighbor, blonde Betty Cooper, and his misogynous friend Jughead was subsequently complemented by the rich brunette Veronica Lodge, the pain-in-the-neck Reggie Mantle, and Riverdale High principal Mr. Weatherbee. Archie and his gang quickly experienced phenomenal success: MLJ renamed itself Archie Comics before the end of the war and Archie was the first non-superheroic comic book character to give his name to a long-lasting title; Archie Comics has appeared uninterruptedly since late 1942. It was the first teen comic, a genre featuring adolescents yet catering to preadolescents by presenting them a world of social and interpersonal harmony. Teen comic books were popular until the 1970s. Nowadays the Archie line is the sole survivor of a formerly expansive genre whose consensual contents never reflected the tensions and anxieties experienced by real-life adolescents.
In the early days of comic books, humor was found mainly in the magazines that reprinted newspaper strips and the titles featuring Walt Disney material. The intentional introduction of humorous angles in many titles was inspired by two economic factors. The first was the publishers’ desire to attract young readers—the largest potential domestic public—without alienating their parents. The second was the success of the animated cartoons released by Walt Disney, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox since the 1930s.
Humorous comic books for young children were among the true innovations of the 1940s. Up until then, the original characters created specifically for very young readers appeared in anthology titles where “serious” adventure strips alternated with lighter material. The period’s comic books would typically contain up to a half-dozen short stories over sixty-four pages.5 For instance Sheldon Mayer’s “Scribbly” appeared in the pages of All-American Comics alongside superheroes such as “the Green Lantern” and “the Atom.” Another example: two comedic strips by Basil Wolverton, Dr. Dimwit and Scoop Shuttle, appeared respectively in Sub-Mariner Comics and Silver Streak Comics. The first titles whose whole content was designed for very young readers came out during those years, such as Eastern Color’s Jingle Jangle Comics released at the end of 1941, or Marvel’s Joker Comics early in 1942.6
Nevertheless, the most prevalent genre during the period of 1940–1945 was unquestionably “funny animal” comics, the common offspring of animation and comics. Their popularity dated back to the first magazines containing Disney material. Launched by Dell in the summer of 1940 Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories was the first full-fledged funny animal magazine: it offered mostly comics, reprints of Al Taliaferro’s daily Donald Duck strip and original Mickey Mouse stories drawn by Floyd Gottfredson, unlike its predecessor Mickey Mouse Magazine, which contained a large editorial section composed of text, games, and various columns. In several years, Dell became a sizable supplier of funny animal titles: while many issues of Four Color were devoted to cartoon animals,7 it released Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics, a title that featured characters from the Warner Bros. animated cartoons (and by consequence the first funny animal without a link to Walt Disney) in the summer of 1941. Animal Comics came out in the fall: this collection of original material featured Walt Kelly’s Pogo Possum, a character who would have a great career in newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s. Marvel launched Terry-Toons Comics, a title featuring 20th Century Fox characters, in the summer of 1942. In 1943, an exceptional writer-artist named Carl Barks started working for Dell in the perfect anonymity that was then the norm; no one knew he was to become the most talented creator of stories featuring Donald Duck and, his own creation, the treasure-hunting miser Scrooge McDuck.
While funny animals accounted for a large chunk of humor titles, other concepts were targeted to younger readers, such as teen comics, which were humorous above all. Nevertheless, two subgenres were particularly conspicuous then: superhero spoofs and strips for very young children published in either their own titles or in other, non-humorous titles.
As the first superheroes were characters without much humor, the two deliberately humorous superheroes of the 1940–1945 period have been remembered by many. Created for Fawcett by Clarence C. Beck in Whiz Comics #2 (February 1940) at the end of 1939, “Captain Marvel” embodied a fantasy in which most young readers were likely to recognize themselves, that of a defenseless child transformed into a superhuman adult by a magic formula: by pronouncing the word “Shazam,” young Billy Batson became Captain Marvel, a flying superhero endowed with superhuman physical strength. The character’s numerous analogies to Superman prompted DC to sue Fawcett for plagiarism in 1940. Unlike standard comic book super-heroes the Fawcett characters had a sense of humor and often found themselves in oddball plots quite remote from the realistic veneer of most stories featuring other costumed heroes. Sales figures show that the most popular superhero during the war was Captain Marvel and not Superman: C. C. Beck’s rounded artwork, inventiveness, and humor appealed to more readers than the stiff linework and heavy-handed, repetitive scenarios of many a Superman story.
The second great humorous superhero was “Plastic Man” by Jack Cole, created in Police Comics (Quality). Due to a mysterious substance that conferred a rubber consistency to his body, the reformed criminal Eel O’Brien found himself capable of stretching his body into the oddest shapes. Because of its zany scripts, parodic secondary characters, and title character’s unusual power, this strip experienced long-lasting success. Captain Marvel and Plastic Man were popular because they were atypical concepts, clearly different from hundreds of superpowered competitors driven by one repetitive narrative formula.
The last notable innovation of the period stemmed from the bad reputation that comic books already suffered from, only a few years after their appearance. Like dime novels and pulps before them, they rapidly became the contemporary scapegoats of the supposed dislike of children for reading. With “real stories” and “illustrated classics” parents and educators became party to an industry that had so far been driven only by profit.
Parents Magazine publisher George Hecht hit on the idea of transposing to the comic magazine format the formula of Life or Reader’s Digest, presenting stories taken from authentic events. True Comics featured edifying comic-strip stories about general topics, historic events, and biographies of famous men. Widely advertised in Parents Magazine and described as a wholesome alternative to action-and-adventure comics, True Comics premiered in mid-February 1941; it contained biographies of Winston Churchill and Simon Bolivar and pages on malaria and the marathon.8 It was an immediate commercial success with three hundred thousand copies sold in ten days, although most buyers were certainly Parents Magazine readers rather than their children.
Thanks to the educational veneer of “real stories” the new genre seemed to respond to the parents’ aspirations yet eventually met children’s expectations, as cartooning easily made “reality” as eye-catching as fiction. Before the end of 1941, Parents Magazine Institute, Hecht’s publishing house, released Real Heroes Comics, an in-house plagiary of True Comics, and Calling All Girls, a girls’ magazine with substantial comics contents that aimed to take advantage of both magazine formats. Hecht issued another half-dozen similar magazines between 1942 and 1947. In the same vein, Nedor, a small publisher that had until that time only released adventure comic books, issued Real Life in the summer of 1941. Pulp publisher Street & Smith broke into this niche with two titles featuring frontier-and-pioneer stories: Pioneer Picture Stories and Trail Blazers. A marginal subcategory of educational comics destined for a scandalous posterity made its appearance at the same time: Crime Does Not Pay, published in the spring of 1942 by Lev Gleason, was immediately very popular, years before fathering the postwar wave of crime comics.
The other strategy to respond to the concerns of parents was the adaptation of literary works in comics form. The idea was not entirely new: the first magazines published by Major Wheeler-Nicholson already offered illustrated adaptations of adventure novels for children, such as Ivanhoe or Treasure Island. Similarly, the first issues of Action Comics contained an adaptation of The Adventures of Marco Polo and Jumbo Comics offered The Count of Monte Cristo and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. More than a didactic concern, this choice reflected the comic publishers’ desire to cash in on the public’s then considerable taste for film adaptations of literary works.
Albert Lewis Kanter had a different perspective. In the spring of 1941, he came up with the idea of publishing a comic book each issue of which would be an adaptation of a famous book from world literature. The self-taught son of Russian immigrants, he was dismayed by his own children’s interest in comic books and dislike of books without pictures. He thought that children would want to read the classics if they were first treated to comic book versions of the same stories. Two hundred fifty thousand copies of Classic Comics #1 (October 1941) were published by Eliot in the fall of 1941. The new title contained a sixty-four-page adaptation of The Three Musketeers with only house ads. Published by Gilberton (which Kanter acquired) starting with the fourth issue, Classic Comics became a long-lived best seller because it seemed to perfectly respond to the expectations of educators and, above all, proved an inestimable means for children to write book reports without reading the original works. Gilberton comic books were reprinted after selling out (Ivanhoe, the second issue of the series, was reprinted more than twenty-five times in thirty years) and could not be returned by retailers. But by 1945, Classic Comics (rebaptized Classics Illustrated starting in 1947) seemed to have won over the adversaries of comic books. Although its success was typical of the industry’s contemporary growth, Kanter’s line managed to weather the comic-baiting hysteria of the next decade.9
The only comics to have occupied the same space as Gilberton were produced by Maxwell C. Gaines, the self-proclaimed inventor of the comic book. The four issues of his Picture Stories from the Bible, a very condensed version of the Old Testament, appeared between fall 1942 and fall 1943 and were collected in one volume in December 1943. Between 1944 and 1946, DC published three more issues adapting the New Testament. Gaines’s next educational project, Picture Stories from American History, came out in four issues between 1945 and 1947. This educational line, which had sold several million copies by the end of the war, was first published by DC under the All-American imprint and, starting in 1946, by Educational Comics, the new house founded by Gaines. Distributed in the same way as the Gilberton titles, they were constantly reprinted until the end of the 1950s. Recast as a respectable publisher by the Picture Stories series, Gaines did not know that several years later his son William would make the family business the most remarkable and reviled publisher of horror, war, science fiction, and humor comic books in the postwar era.