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Ghosts of Comics’ Past: 1933

By | February 6th, 2023
Posted in Columns | % Comments

Multiversity’s history column returns with another installment of year-by-year analysis of the comic industry. Following our earlier coverage of 1932, today’s article on 1933 will be focused mainly on the first modern comic books.

In 1932, the Connecticut-based Eastern Color Printing Company experimented with a new reduction method that shrank Sunday comic strips to 7 inches by 9 inches, a quarter of their original dimensions. Their first commercial effort with this process was bought by the Philadelphia “Ledger” newspaper to use as a freebie for subscribers. This item was distributed at full newspaper size, but production manager Harry I Wildenberg realized that if the miniaturized strips were turned correctly, the printed page could be folded into 16-page booklet at half tabloid size with one strip on each page.

Years later, during a peak of national anti-comic sentiment, Wildenberg would tell interviewers that he never liked nor read comics. He said his part in their development was driven only by a motive for profit and that he regretted his choices. Modern ears might consider “I did it for the money” to be a weak excuse, but contemporary readers would have immediately known the context – 1932 and 1933 were the two worst years of the Great Depression. No one who had a job, especially a salesman, could overlook an opportunity to keep his family fed.

In was in this setting Wildenberg and his sales manager, Maxwell Charles Gaines, assembled the first modern comic book. Because both men still thought of comics only as a bonus that would attract buyers to another product, Gaines focused on finding an interested corporate buyer and talked Proctor & Gamble into buying 10,000 copies. Meanwhile, Wildenberg secured reprint rights to the most popular strips at $10 per page (equivalent to $225 in 2023). P&G offered the 36-page, 7½”x10” “Funnies on Parade” as a mail-in rebate on its soap products in spring 1933 and sold out within weeks.

This blowout success bolstered Gaines, who shared the news with other potential clients. Eastern’s second comic book, “Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics,” had a print run of 100,000 and was available through more than one company. Kids could request the comic through a variety of places like the cereal Wheatena, Canada Dry ginger ales, or Kinney Shoe Stores. One of the production workers on this book was 16 year old Sol Harrison, the future president of DC Comics. “Famous Funnies” did so well that Gaines started getting calls from advertisers asking for another. Eastern quickly supplied them with 250,000 copies of the 100-page “A Century of Comics.”

The demand for the giveaway comics gave Gaines an idea. He took a bundle of “Famous Funnies,” put a 10¢ sticker on each copy, then delivered them to local newsstands on a Friday. The next Monday, he went back to those newsstands to see if any sold over the weekend. Every copy was gone, and the dealers were asking him for more. Although Gaines later claimed credit for having the idea to sell comics on newsstands (and many historians were and are happy to let him have it), faithful readers of this column already know comic strip reprints had been selling at newsstands in various forms at various prices for decades.

Earlier in the year, around the same time they were packaging “Funnies on Parade,” Wildenberg put together another comic giveaway in a more traditional tabloid format. This four-pager, “Gulf Comic Weekly,” was exclusively for the Gulf Oil Company. Every week, Gulf Gas Stations across the US handed out around 3 million free copies. This was probably the first time a comic supplement or magazine was distributed without the help of a newsstand. “Gulf Comic Weekly” was later retitled “Comics Funnies Weekly” and ran until issue #422 in 1941.

In April, “Fortune” magazine ran the article shown above (you can read an excerpt here). It was a lengthy, illustrated piece that covered the business behind comic strips, their popularity across demographics, and even listed some incomes earned by the most popular artists. Its main points were how important comic strips were to maintaining or increasing newspaper circulations, and how advertisers had recognized the size of the audience. According to “Fortune,” over $1 million had been spent on advertisements in the comic section in 1932. That’s $21.6 million in today’s dollars, spent during the worst part of the Great Depression.

“Detective Dan” also appeared in 1933, and he has his special place in history, but this column previously covered the last protocomic a few years ago.

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//TAGS | Ghosts of Comics' Past

Drew Bradley

Drew Bradley is a long time comic reader whose past contributions to Multiversity include annotations for "MIND MGMT", the Small Press Spotlight, Lettering Week, and Variant Coverage. He currently writes about the history of comic comic industry. Feel free to email him about these things, or any other comic related topic.

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