To celebrate the Summer Solstice, Multiversity’s history column is back with a special installment covering events from the comic industry’s past that occurred during summertime. Keep reading for details about the first comic sponsored by the US Government, a failed attempt at an adults-only comic, a special award, an industry collapse, and covert covers.
Summer 1942
By the Summer of 1942, American life revolved around World War II, which was being financed in part by war bonds and war stamps bought by the public. The need for funding was great enough that the Treasury Department directly commissioned publisher Family Comics (later Harvey Comics) to created “War Victory Comics” #1, the first government-sponsored propaganda comic book. The 36-page anthology featured work by a host of creators with each story showing kids a new creative way to either get the dime needed for a war stamp or how their stamp made a difference in the war. Stories also starred diverse characters like Superman, Green Hornet, and Dick Tracy who weren’t typically seen in Family Comic books. Naturally, all profits from the 5 cent book were donated to the military.
Sales of “War Victory Comics” were so strong that the Treasury funded a second printing, but by the Fall they seemed to realize further direct intervention wasn’t needed because publishers were running enough anti-Nazi material on their own. Nevertheless, Al Harvey wasn’t one to walk away from success. He published two more issues as “War Victory Adventures” in 1943 at the normal 10 cent price.
The Treasury wasn’t content to limit its propaganda to just one comic in Summer 1942, though. Over 100 comics with June and July cover dates included a letter from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthou Jr encouraging kids to do their part. Read it yourself:
Summer 1949
Annual comic sales were over 340,000,000 copies in 1949, and a study found that about half of the readership was over age 20 with a better-than-average education. Lev Gleason, who was president of the ACMP and publisher of the true crime comic “Crime Does Not Pay,” wanted to prove the existence of his adult audience to the industry’s critics. Together with editor Charlie Biro, he created a comic magazine that was explicitly not kid-friendly. That’s not to say it was pornographic or hyperviolent – this was the 1940s, after all.
The new magazine was called “Tops,” billed on the cover as ‘The Adult Magazine of Dramatic Picture Stories.’ To show how adult it was, it didn’t feature comics, it featured illustrories, which were supposedly the final stage of comic evolution. Calling comics something other than comics is rarely successful (see: EC’s pictofiction), but Gleason can be forgiven for not realizing that truism yet. Instead, he made two mistakes that should have been obvious to an experienced publisher.
First, “Tops” was full magazine size. Comic books found their standard size in 1932 and variations from it found (and continue to find) failure. Those 1949 adult comic readers knew the newsstand dealers racked items by size, which meant all the comics were in the same location. Magazine or digest sized comics got displayed elsewhere (or not at all) and were easily missed by customers looking to make a quick purchase. Customers browsing the magazine section were probably confused or even irritated to find a comic book (or illustory, or whatever).
Second, “Tops” cost a quarter. A quarter! The same way comics had a standard size, they had a standard price. Charge more than a dime, and you’re guaranteed to lose sales (See: Dell). Shoot, charge less and you’ll have the same problem (See: Nickel Comics). To make matters worse, Gleason and Biro gave readers only 64 pages per issue. Sure, those pages might have been twice the normal size, but still – that’s asking for trouble.
How bad were these mistakes? Real bad. “Tops” vanished after its second issue. Being on a quarterly schedule, that second issue was released in the Fall of 1949. With the way newsstand sales data came back, Gleason would have had only preliminary information on issue #1 when the plug was pulled. That means sales on the first issue must have been truly, utterly, and completely abysmal. The failure of “Tops” was probably a deep wound for Gleason, who really needed to prove the adult audience was out there to resist the comics-are-ruining-our-children brigade.
Continued below
Summer 1992
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” was lightning in a bottle. It was a joke created on a whim that somehow captured the imagination of the nation. Co-creators Peter Laird and David Eastman found themselves ascending from cash-strapped artists to multi-millionaires in short order, but neither lost sight of their roots. Eastman used his profits to start Tundra, where creators were given grants to create their masterpieces regardless of commercial concerns. In Summer 1992, Laird started the Xeric Foundation to support self-publishers.
With initial funding of one million dollars, the Xeric Foundation invited self-publishers to submit entries and compete for an annual award intended to subsidize the upfront costs of printing. Finalists who didn’t win still received a bucketload of press they wouldn’t have received otherwise. The Xeric Award was discontinued in 2011 because the internet had made it unnecessary – start up costs for a webcomic were significantly smaller and avenues for promotion were easier to access. You can read more about the award here.
Summer 1993
It was the peak of the comic boom. Everything was selling, with milestone and debut issues pretty much guaranteed to have speculators buying multiple copies. Dark Horse, Malibu, Milestone, and a handful of smaller publishers all chose to launch their own interconnected comic series. Image and Valiant hyped their “Deathmate” crossover. At the time it was called “The War of the New Superhero Universes” among insiders. Less polite circles called it “the glut.” With everything promising to be huge, let downs were inevitable. The Summer of 1993 saw so many let downs that it sent the industry into a seven year recession.
Ask most comic fans, and they’ll tell you the ‘Death of Superman’ was what tripped the cycle from boom to bust. That’s true from a certain point of view, because it was the last big success and the one that got the most media coverage. It’s not the whole truth, though, because successes don’t cause downturns. Failures do. In this case, it was cascading failures.
The return of Superman in “Adventures of Superman” #500 was a big flop. The wider public had bought into the character’s death because they thought it was real (as in permanent). Extensive coverage on a slow news day fueled that. Retailers thought those buyers would all come back to see what happened next, but they didn’t. Maybe they felt cheated. Maybe it was because the story wasn’t compelling. I mean, he got punched to death by a nearly mute monster, and the big final chapter everyone bought only had 26 panels in 28 pages.
A related flop was Valiant’s “Turok” #1. Valiant had previously timed the release of “Bloodshot” #1 to coincide with Superman’s death and they put an embossed cover on it to get attention. It worked, so they tried to piggyback off the success of “Adventures” #500 the same way. Retailers ordered high on the chromium covered “Turok”, and that ended up worsening their losses. Convention attendees across the country saw boxes of unsold “Turok”, which put downward pressure on all the previously hot Valiants that had been driving the back issue market.
“Darker Image” was another big let down for a different reason. Ordered high when the market was good, it was shipped late and arrived in stores when fans were finally fed up with delays. The backlash was compounded by delays from the Image half of the “Deathmate” crossover, many of which are still clogging quarter bins in 2021. A second issue of “Darker Image” was planned but is now 28 years late. (This is a common problem for comics with “Image” in the title, I guess. Ironically, the self-parody “Splitting Image” was on time.)
Summer 2012
A mystery appeared in some comic shops in the Summer of 2012. Rumors of a special ‘Ghost Variant’ of “The Walking Dead” #101 spread among fans and many could find them online, but not in their local shop. It didn’t take long for details to emerge: a group of retailers had secretly commissioned an exclusive cover for the issue. The concept excited a lot of fans and industry insiders, but it wasn’t long before some of that turned to bitterness when it turned out the Ghost Variant club could be joined by invitation only, leaving other interested retailers in the cold and forcing collectors to shop outside their preferred local shop.
Frustrations grew with each successive Ghost Variant release getting significant press and selling for an instant premium. Tensions reached a head when the uninvited retailers formed the rival Phantom Group, which also secretly commissioned exclusive covers, but was open to an retailer and focused on titles that should be more popular instead of titles that were already top sellers.
You can read more about Ghost and Phantom Variants here and here.
