Issuu

THE

1940-1944

B y K U R T F. M I T C H E L L w i t h R OY T H O M A S

Dedication To Mitch and Dee, My First Heroes Writer: Consultant: Editor: Logo Design: Layout: Proofreading: Cover Design: Publisher:

Kurt F. Mitchell Roy Thomas Keith Dallas Bill Walko David Paul Greenawalt Scott Peters Jon B. Cooke John Morrow

Publisher’s Note: Some of the images in this book are of varying quality, since many vintage pages are available only from less-than-ideal microfiche reproductions. In every instance, we used the best images available to us. Also, some of the comics covered here depict ethnic and racial stereotypes and slurs that were commonplace in the 1940s, but are offensive by today’s standards. In the interest of an accurate documentation of comics history, they are not being censored, so we ask for your understanding, and to keep this context in mind, when viewing them. Special Thanks to Rich Fowlks and John Wells for providing many of the images presented in this volume.

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • 919-449-0344 email: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • May 2019 • Printed in China ISBN 978-1-60549-089-2

American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944 is published by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27614, USA. 919-449-0344. Kurt F. Mitchell, Writer. Keith Dallas, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. All characters depicted herein are TM and © their respective owners, as noted where they appear. All textual material in this book is © 2019 TwoMorrows Publishing. Archie, Black Hood, The Comet, The Fox, The Hangman, Madame Satan, Mr. Justice, Principal Weatherbee, Reggie Mantle, The Shield, Shield Sterling, Veronica Lodge, The Web, The Wizard TM and © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. Li’l Abner TM and © Capp Enterprises Inc. Doc Savage, The Shadow TM and © Condé Nast. Aquaman, Atom, Batman, Black Condor, Blackhawk, Blue Beetle, Bulletman, Bulletgirl, Boy Commandos, Captain Triumph, Commando Yank, Doctor Fate, Dr. Mid-Nite, Doll Man, Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Guardian, Hawkman, Hawkwoman, Hour-Man, Johnny Quick, Johnny Thunder, Joker, Justice Society of America, Kid Eternity, Lex Luthor, Liberty Belle, Lois Lane, Midnight, Minute-Man, Mr. Scarlet, Penguin, Phantom Eagle, Plastic Man, Prankster, Red Tornado, Robin, Sandman, Sargon the Sorcerer, Scarecrow, Seven Soldiers of Victory, Shazam Heroes, Solomon Grundy, Spy Smasher, Spectre, Starman, Star Spangled Kid, Stripesy, Superman, Uncle Sam, Vigilante, Wildcat, Wildfire, Wonder Woman TM and © DC Comics. Buck Rogers TM and © The Dille Family Trust. Bambi, Donald Duck, Dumbo, Goofy, Mickey Mouse, Pinocchio, Pluto TM and © Disney Enterprises Inc. Tarzan TM and © ERB, Inc. Sheena TM and © Galaxy Publishing and Valdoro Entertainment. Green Hornet TM and © The Green Hornet, Inc. Popeye, Prince Valiant TM and © King Features Syndicate, Inc., LLC. Angel, Captain America, Destroyer, Human Torch, Miss America, Patsy Walker, Red Raven, Sub-Mariner, Tuk Caveboy, Whizzer TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc. Pogo TM and © Okefenokee Glee & Perloo Inc. Skyman TM and © Ron Frantz Dick Tracy TM and © Tribune Content Agency. Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig TM and © Warner Bros. Lady Luck, Mr. Mystic, The Spirit TM and © Will Eisner Studios Inc. Airboy, Amazing-Man, Black Cat, Black Owl, Black Terror, Blue Bolt, Boy Heroes, Bulldog Denny, Candy O’Connor, Camilla Queen of the Jungle, Captain Battle, Captain Battle Jr., Captain Fight, Captain Midnight, Captain Wings, Cat-Man, The Claw, Crimebuster, Daredevil, Fantomah, The Face, Fighting Yank, The Flame, Flame Girl, Flash Lightning, Girl Commandos, Green Lama, Hack O’Hara, The Heap, The Kitten, Lash Lightning, Lightning Girl, Magno the Magnetic Man, Miss Fury, Miss Liberty, The Owl, Owl Girl, Pyroman, Raja the Arabian Knight, Rangers of Freedom, Red Blazer, Red Panther, Samson, Señorita Rio, Shock Gibson, Sky Girl, Skyman, Sub-Zero, Supermouse, Tiger Girl, V-Man, Valkyrie, Volton, Wambi-Jungle Boy, Yank and Doodle TM and © respective copyright owners.

Table of Contents Introductory Note about the Chronological Structure of American Comic Book Chronicles.................. 4 Note on Comic Book Sales and Circulation Data ......................................... 5 Introduction & Acknowledgements.............. 6 Chapter One: 1940 Rise of the Supermen.......................................... 8 Chapter Two: 1941 Countdown to Cataclysm................................62

Chapter Three: 1942 Comic Books Go To War................................ 122 Chapter Four: 1943 Relax: Read the Comics................................. 176 Chapter Five: 1944 The Paper Chase.............................................. 230 Works Cited....................................................... 285 Index .................................................................. 286

1940

Rise of the Supermen

America on January 1, 1940, was a nation on edge. Still suffering the aftershocks of the Great Depression despite Franklin D. Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal nostrums—unemployment stood at 17% for 1939—Americans eyed the expanding wars in Europe and Asia nervously. Some tried to dismiss Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as comic opera buffoons, decrying the hostilities as a “phony war” because not much had happened since the blitzkrieg dismemberment of Poland the previous September. These naysayers did not see it for what it was: the calm before the storm. Before the first year of the new decade was out, Nazi Germany seized Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and ultimately France, while attempting to bomb the United Kingdom into subjection. The British held out defiantly, and Hitler reluctantly abandoned his plans to invade England. That small victory brought no cheer to the conquered nations, where Der Führer’s relentless oppression of Jews and other scapegoated minorities was in full force. Il Duce, too, continued his aggression, as Fascist Italy invaded Egypt and Greece. The Soviet Union, the MarxistLeninist people’s paradise that replaced the brutalities of Tsarist Russia with mass starvation and bloody political purges, was no better. Soviet strongman Josef Stalin— named Time’s Man of the Year in its first 1940 issue— signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in August ‘39, then helped himself to a piece of Poland and completed his de facto takeover of Finland. The Japanese Empire’s seemingly insatiable appetite for territory was also cause for alarm. Its brutal occupation of vast swaths of China was in its third year with no end in sight. Once Paris fell, Japan marched into French Indochina. That the warlords had their collective eye on the United States’ Pacific possessions was an open secret.

CHAPTER ONE

At home, Republican congressmen and a majority of Democratic legislators remained publicly isolationist, claiming with some justification that they were obeying their constituents’ wishes, all while enacting laws expanding the Navy and imposing the nation’s first peacetime draft. FDR, elected to an unprecedented third term later in the year, pledged he would not “send American boys into any foreign wars.” The public believed him or pretended to: polls suggested the man or woman on the street expected the country to be pulled into the slaughter sooner or later. The American Communist Party, with approximately 75,000 members at the start of the decade, also stood firm for isolationism despite internal unrest over Stalin’s pact with Hitler. Fascism and anti-Semitism had their homegrown 8

apologists and sympathizers—including prominent and influential citizens like industrialist Henry Ford, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, and radio orator Father Charles Coughlin—but overt Nazism failed to find a foothold. The German-American Bund, despite a rally at Madison Square Garden the previous February that attracted some 20,000 participants, effectively fell apart as a national movement later in ‘39 when its leader, Fritz Kuhn, was convicted of embezzling its funds. That kind of venality wasn’t limited to would-be dictators. Corrupt political machines ruled many big cities, though New York’s popular mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had finally put an end to the dominance of infamous Tammany Hall. What the bosses didn’t control, the mob did. Prohibition was long over, but the crime organizations it spawned remained. The national syndicate organized by Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, now headed by the “prime minister of the underworld” Frank Costello, had its fingers in more than the usual no-nos (drugs, gambling, loansharking, prostitution). It had worked its way into many legitimate enterprises like construction, sanitation, labor unions, and magazine distribution, using bribery, intimidation, extortion, and violence to gain every possible advantage.

By 1940, the major movie studios were coming to see the value in licensing their films for adaptation to comic books. TM and © respective copyright owner.

by the studios. Among the films they saw that year were The Grapes of Wrath, Rebecca, Fantasia, His Girl Friday, The Sea Hawk, Kitty Foyle, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Pinocchio, the anti-Nazi The Mortal Storm, and a slew of westerns featuring Roy Rogers, Bob Steele, Tex Ritter, Johnny Mack Brown, and their fellow Hollywood cowboys. Feature films were only the tip of the iceberg. Theaters had a complete evening’s program in those days, including newsreels, travelogues, short films equivalent to modern music videos, even the occasional live appearance by a movie star. Serials, comedy shorts starring Our Gang or The Three Stooges, and animated cartoons made the Saturday matinee a rite of passage for kids of the 1940s. Walt Disney was the undisputed king of American cartoons—Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were recognized around the globe—but other studios were girding their loins to challenge him. Fleischer Studios had released its own feature, Gulliver’s Travels, at Christmas ‘39. Less ambitious producers like Leon Schlesinger, Walter Lantz, and Fred Quimby contented themselves with improving and expanding their own cartoon brands. In addition to new installments of proven favorites Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Barney Bear, Andy Panda, and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, 1940 saw the screen debuts of Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Woody Woodpecker, The Fox and The Crow, George Pal’s Puppetoons, and a cat-and-mouse duo not yet named Tom and Jerry. Whether your tastes ran to prestigious literary adaptations, high-gloss melodrama, singing cowboys, or wascally wabbits, the movies had something for everyone.

Small wonder, then, that Mr. and Mrs. Average American and all the little Americans sought comfort and escape in entertainment, turning to three art forms born at the turn of the century—the motion picture, the pulp magazine, the comic strip—and their younger sibling, radio, to provide it.

Media Nation Movie factories like MGM, Warner Brothers, 20th CenturyFox, Paramount, Universal, RKO, and Columbia were happy to supply all the entertainment the public could handle. Americans spent $735,000,000 ($12.5 billion in 2018 terms) on movie tickets in 1940, often at theaters owned

A new medium called television would threaten film’s supremacy within pop culture by the end of the decade but for now it remained a novelty accessible to few. Not so with

Bugs Bunny made his screen debut in the 1940 short A Wild Hare. Animated cartoons would provide a rich vein of material for comics of the 1940s to mine. Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd TM and © Warner Bros.

Countdown to

Cataclysm It is an image familiar to comics aficionados: a powerfully built man clad in red, white and blue chain mail, protected from gunfire by a metal shield, bursts into the war room of the German High Command and delivers a crushing right jab to the jaw of a terrified Führer, a redundant caption exclaiming “Smashing through, Captain America came face to face with Hitler!” There is nothing subtle about the image, nothing restrained or polite. It is an unapologetic exemplar of the “cheap political propaganda” Sterling North sneered at in his indictment of the comic book industry. Captain America Comics #1 (cover dated March 1941) hit the newsstands late in ‘40. It sold nearly a million copies, instantly becoming Timely Publications’ best-selling title, and made stars out of co-creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. “The time demanded it,” Kirby explained in a 1970 interview. “The country was almost at war; we needed a super-patriot” (Steranko 53). Their flag-draped super-soldier served as both herald and epitome of the industry’s embrace of patriotic themes. If war was coming, comic books were ready. So, increasingly, were the American people, though clinging to the hope the United States could avoid direct involvement in the fighting overseas. Polls showed 80% of the populace supporting the Lend-Lease program and other initiatives to shore up Britain as she suffered through relentless bombing and U-boat predation. Nevertheless, isolationism remained a significant factor in the public dialogue. The America First Committee had begun life as an anti-war movement at Yale University that quickly spread to other campuses, but by 1941 it had fallen under the influence of the same reactionary industrialists, financiers, and media moguls who had bitterly opposed Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal from the beginning. Anti-British sentiment ran high in this group, leading America First to oppose aiding the UK with money or materiel, resources they contended should be devoted to the nation’s own defenses. Heading the aid-for-England forces was the Century Club, a New York-based private organization of “movers and shakers in the East Coast’s top journalistic, legal, financial, and intellectual circles” (Olson 139), many of them combat veterans of the earlier World War, all proBritish and fervently anti-fascist. Internal dissension over priorities and tactics led to the club’s disbanding early in

CHAPTER TWO 62

‘41. It was replaced in April by Fight for Freedom, a more militant movement that advocated direct military action, criticized Roosevelt and Congress for their caution, and labeled America First a Nazi front. Historian Lynne Olson, author of Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, observes that “most of [America First’s] leadership and members were … decent, honest, sincere citizens who passionately believed that foreign entanglements were bad for the United States” (235), but FDR didn’t see it that way: “In his May 26[, 1941] fireside chat, Roosevelt contended that attacks on the government’s … foreign and military policies were not part of ‘a wholesome political debate of honest and free men,’ as [Charles] Lindbergh and other isolationists maintained. Instead, those assaults were connected to the ‘clever schemes of foreign agents’ … To preserve the country’s unity and safety, he said, Americans must combat this new Fifth Column with all their might.” (105) America First was the loudest section of the isolationist chorus, but it was by no means soloing. A number of militant mothers’ groups staged angry protests in the halls of Congress and on the streets of Washington, where they hanged interventionist Senator Claude Pepper in effigy. Passions on both sides rode high. Protests and counter protests at each other’s rallies frequently erupted into violence. The controversy raged throughout the year until the question became moot in the early morning hours of December 7.

Joe and Jack vs. the Axis Captain America was not the first costumed hero to dress himself in the nation’s colors—M.L.J.’s Shield and Quality’s Uncle Sam preceded him—but he was the one whose adventures captured the imagination of American kids, the one whose sales guaranteed a horde of patriotic copycats. Some forty such characters had appeared by year’s end. A handful—Better’s The Fighting Yank, Fawcett’s Minute-Man, and DC’s The Star-Spangled Kid among them—proved viable characters in their own right. Many—Dynamic’s Yankee Doodle Jones, Fiction House’s Captain Fight, Helnit’s The Flag Man, Harvey’s Captain Freedom, and Timely’s own The Defender, to name but five—were shameless imitations, unimaginatively aping the new hero’s name, costume, setting, origin, villains, or all of them at once. What they couldn’t duplicate was the one element that made “Captain America” click with readers: the storytelling magic of Simon and Kirby.

Many heroes to follow would steal elements from Captain America’s origin story, but none would match, let alone surpass, the Simon & Kirby prototype. TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc.

them a terror to spies and saboteurs!” No sooner had this serum transformed the scrawny young patriot into a tall, muscular Adonis than a Nazi mole within the project assassinated its creator, grandfatherly Professor Reinstein. Alas, Reinstein had not committed the formula to paper. There would be no army of super-soldiers. After intensive training under the military’s best instructors, Rogers was given the rank, name, costume, and shield of Captain America. His true identity known only to the top brass, “Cap” hid in plain sight as a bumbling buck private, the bane of hardbitten Sgt. Duffy’s existence. When orphaned Camp Lehigh mascot Bucky Barnes stumbled on Steve’s secret, the boy inexplicably won the right to don his own costume and go into action with him. With the addition of gutsy FBI agent Betty Ross to the cast later in the first issue, the stage was set for a series that redefined how action was depicted in comic books.

As a wave of sabotage and other acts of subversion swept across the United States, a pure-hearted but frail 4F named Steve Rogers volunteered as a test subject for a secret government-sponsored experiment. He was injected with a chemical formula capable of “rapidly building his body and brain tissues, until his stature and intelligence increase to an amazing degree,” making him “the first of a corps of super-agents whose mental and physical ability will make

The initial idea was apparently Joe Simon’s—he reportedly designed the lead characters before coming to Timely— but it was the unleashed imagination, breakneck pacing, and electrifying action scenes of partner Jack Kirby that 63

Comic Books Go To

War

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. … [T]he distance from Hawaii to Japan makes it obvious the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. … [A] lways will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” With those words, spoken to Congress in emergency session and, by radio, to the nation, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the assembled legislators to declare war on the Japanese Empire. The outrage and defiance in the president’s voice that Monday morning echoed the reaction of the nation’s citizenry. Isolationism was off the table now, rendered irrelevant by Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declarations of war on America by Hitler and Mussolini. On January 1, 1942, the United States stood with Great Britain, China, the Soviet Union (now an ally since the Third Reich’s attack on its erstwhile treaty partner the previous summer), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, three Caribbean nations, five Central American countries, and the governments-in-exile of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Greece in issuing the Declaration By United Nations, each signatory pledging “to employ its full resources, military and economic, against … the Tripartite Pact [i.e., the Axis powers]” and “not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.” Even as the Allies concentrated their individual and collective war efforts, Nazi Germany was implementing the “Final Solution,” the systematic extermination of Jews and other peoples Der Führer deemed “inferior.” The names of the concentration camps in which they died— Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and too many more— survive down to the present day as synonyms for genocide. Seven decades of accumulated hindsight have made the outcome of the Second World War seem inevitable, but 122

victory was by no means certain. The attack on Hawaii was only the first strike in Japan’s all-out bid for military supremacy in the Pacific. By New Year’s Day, 1942, the Japanese had seized Guam, Wake Island, and Hong Kong and soon launched invasions of Burma and the Philippines. In the latter, a joint force of American and Filipino troops held off Tokyo’s troops until April, the surviving defenders afterward forced to endure the living hell of the Bataan Death March. The war was going badly for the United Nations on other fronts as well. Over the previous six months, the Germans had penetrated hundreds of miles into Soviet territory and, despite a counteroffensive by the Russians and their fabled ally “General Winter,” now threatened Moscow and Stalingrad, simultaneously striking at the Crimean peninsula. In Libya, Rommel’s Afrika Korps retook all the ground lost the previous winter and continued its relentless advance on Egypt and the strategically critical Suez Canal. Could America harness its resources in time to save her allies? The nation had 2.2 million men and women already in uniform at the time of Pearl Harbor. Over the next four years, they were joined by 6.3 million volunteers and 11.5 million draftees. To keep them armed with the guns, ships, tanks, and airplanes they would need, American industry converted to war production, creating an enormous demand for factory workers. This push for mobilization had unexpected consequences, changing the societal status quo. Women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, taking on jobs previously deemed too strenuous for “the weaker sex” - a myth they quickly debunked, at least for those who had eyes to see. The final wave of an African-American emigration from the agrarian South that began in the 1920s filled industrial jobs in the Rust Belt and on the West Coast. Even the nation’s disabled citizens did their part, with the deaf manning unbearably loud machinery and little people laboring in spaces too tight for a fullsize worker. The unemployment rate plunged, the burgeoning defense effort raising the lingering fog left by the Great Depression, though hardship was by no means at an end.

The Roosevelt administration made it clear from the start that Americans would have to make sacrifices if victory was to be assured. Production of automobiles, radios, household appliances, and similar consumer goods was suspended for the duration. A national speed limit of 35 mph was imposed. To ensure that our fighting forces had everything they needed to win, the government encouraged citizens to recycle—a term coined in the ‘20s but not yet in vogue—their used metal, rubber, lard, and paper, and ordered strict rationing of coal, firewood, tires, gasoline, sugar, coffee, meat, butter, prepackaged (canned, bottled, frozen) food, and other items whose availability had come to be taken for granted. Most citizens complied, but a black market in rationed goods sprang up practically overnight, an underground economy that endured until the postwar lifting of restrictions. The mass media, which had been beating the war drums steadily if guardedly prior to Pearl Harbor, was now encouraged to go all out. Movie theaters offered up patriotic pictures like Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver, Across the Pacific, Flying Tigers, Saboteur, the oddball gangsters-vs.-Nazis thriller All Through the Night, and Prelude to War, first of the “Why We Fight” documentaries directed by Academy Award-winner Frank Capra with animated sequences provided by the Walt Disney Studios. War-themed songs like “American Patrol,” “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones,” “I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen,” and Spike Jones’ mocking “Der Fuehrer’s Face” ruled the airwaves. The syndication services vied to see which could get more of its comic strip characters into uniform. Among those serving were Terry and the Pirates’ Terry Lee and Pat Ryan, Scorchy Smith, Smilin’ Jack, Captain Easy, Joe Palooka, Mickey Finn, Flash Gordon, Little Orphan Annie’s Government-issued propaganda posters were everywhere in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, urging men to enlist in the military, women to join the workforce, and all Americans to do their part by buying war bonds and stamps.

123

TIMELINE: 1942

March 18: President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9102, which creates the War Relocation Authority, responsible for the relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. By 1944, 120,000 Japanese-Americans will have been placed in internment camps.

A compilation of the year’s notable comic book history events alongside some of the year’s most significant popular culture and historical events. (On sale dates are approximations.) January 1: In Washington D.C. representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China sign the Declaration by United Nations which formalizes their military alliance. The next day 22 other nations—including Australia and Canada—join them.

April 18: Led by Lieutenant Colonel James “Jimmy” Doolittle, sixteen U.S. bombers conduct an air raid on Tokyo, the first strike on Japan since the Pearl Harbor attack.

March 12: With Japanese forces approaching, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, under orders from President Roosevelt, leaves the Philippines. Eight days later, after being flown to Australia, MacArthur declares, “I shall return.”

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

May 29: Yankee Doodle Dandy—a musical starring James Cagney as Broadway star George M. Cohan—premieres at a New York City theater before gaining wider release a week later. The film will earn nine Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Actor, Best Musical Score, and Best Sound Recording.

April 4: The first chapter of Spy Smasher—a twelve-part film serial produced by Republic Pictures and starring Kane Richmond as Fawcett Comics’ caped vigilante—is released to movie theaters.

MARCH

June 7: Considered one of the turning points of World War II, U.S. naval forces win the Battle of Midway, severely damaging the Japanese fleet and halting their advance in the Pacific.

APRIL

March 6: Comic book publisher Victor Fox declares bankruptcy. To settle part of his printing bill debts, Fox relinquishes publishing rights to the Blue Beetle to the Holyoke Publishing Company. January 20: At a meeting of Nazi officials in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, Germany, “The Final Solution to the Jewish problem” is implemented. It calls for all European Jews to be deported to camps in Poland where they will be exterminated.

May 13: Edward Hopper’s oil on canvas painting Nighthawks— which portrays late-night patrons at a city diner—is sold to the Art Institute of Chicago for $3000. It will become one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art.

January 30: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s first work for DC Comics appears in Adventure Comics #72 as they take over and revamp the “Sandman” feature, providing the masked crimefighter with a new setting and modus operandi.

M AY

April 29: With its 22nd issue, Lev Gleason’s Silver Streak Comics is retitled Crime Does Not Pay. Created by Charles Biro and Bob Wood, the “True Crime” series will soon become one of the industry’s bestselling (and most notorious) comic books.

JUNE

June 24: The lead story in Detective Comics #66—produced by Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson and George Roussos—introduces Batman’s latest villain, Two-Face.

April 9: After 76,000 American and Filipino soldiers surrender to Japanese forces at the conclusion of the Battle of Bataan, a brutal 60 mile “Death March” begins, resulting in the deaths of over 20,000 prisoners of war.

Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, Starman, Two-Face TM and © DC Comics, Bambi TM and © Disney Enterprises Inc., Pogo TM and © Okefenokee Glee & Perloo Inc.

Daddy Warbucks, Gasoline Alley’s Skeezix Wallet, Tailspin Tommy, Harold Teen, Barney Google, Snuffy Smith, and Tillie the Toiler, who joined the new Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. The pulps, too, put their best foot forward despite an alarming downturn in sales. Paperback books, which offered recent bestsellers and classic literature in editions the working class could afford, had been eating away at the pulps’ core audience since Simon & Schuster introduced its Pocket Books line in 1939. Ironically, many of the most popular paperback titles reprinted the work of pulp authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Zane Grey.

where servicemen could enjoy free food, entertainment, and a dance with their favorite film ingénue. If the war seemed to bring out the best in the American people, it sometimes triggered the worst as well. The armed forces remained strictly segregated, with AfricanAmericans relegated to supporting roles and subjected to discrimination, verbal abuse, and the occasional act of brutal violence in the towns near their bases. Riots broke out in Detroit in February when an angry white mob attacked black industrial workers and their families attempting to move in to the new Sojourner Truth housing development. A long-simmering hostility towards Japanese-Americans had blossomed into open displays of bigotry even before President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102, ordering more than 125,000 people, over half of them U.S. citizens, removed from their homes and businesses on the West Coast and relocated to internment camps in the interior, where they were kept behind barbed wire under armed guard despite little or no credible evidence of espionage or subversion. This action remains an indelible blemish on FDR’s progressive legacy.

For some entertainers, onscreen heroics were not enough. Movie stars Clark Gable, James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Gene Autry volunteered for military duty, several later distinguishing themselves in combat. Those who could not serve threw themselves into volunteerism or participated in war bond drives that took them around the nation, offering a brush with Tinseltown glamor in exchange for Americans’ dollars. Bob Hope launched the first of his legendary USO tours, bringing live comedy, music, and a bevy of screen beauties to homesick soldiers and sailors, at times performing near the frontlines. Back home, actors Bette Davis and John Garfield (classified 4-F due to a congenital heart defect) organized the Hollywood Canteen, a nightclub

Rallying Round the Flag The comic book industry, which more than any other branch of pop culture had been agitating for a showdown with the Axis, reflected this dual nature of America in 124

August 8: Six German saboteurs are executed two days after a military tribunal finds them guilty of conspiring to attack various targets throughout the United States. Two other Germans are spared the death penalty for their help in exposing “Operation Pastorius.” (They are released from prison in 1948.)

November 11: DC Comics debuts Boy Commandos, a series created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby about a group of orphaned boys who are trained to fight in World War II. The first issue sells over a million copies, the bestselling DC comic book of the year.

August 14: After treating the Timely Comics and Funnies, Inc. staffs to a screening of Bambi, Timely publisher Martin Goodman announces he is ending his business relationship with the Funnies, Inc. packaging service. September 8: Dell’s Animal Comics #1 opens with a fivepage story written and drawn by Walt Kelly that introduces a group of anthropomorphic swamp creatures that will become featured in Pogo, Kelly’s syndicated comic strip that will run from 1948 to 1975.

November 13: Written by Otto Binder and drawn by Marc Swayze, the lead story of Captain Marvel Adventures #18 introduces Billy Batson’s long-lost twin sister, Mary Bromfield, who upon saying the magic word of “Shazam” turns into the super-powered Mary Marvel.

August 7: The first major American offensive, the Battle of Guadalcanal, begins as Allied amphibious forces land on the strategic island of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific.

J U LY

AUGUST

December 2: As part of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, physicist Enrico Fermi and his team initiate the world’s first self-sustaining chain nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago.

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

October 30: After boarding the German submarine U-559 as it sinks in the Mediterranean Sea, British sailors retrieve an Enigma machine and codebooks which help the Allies decipher German radio transmissions.

November 26: Casablanca—a romantic drama starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman—premieres at a New York City theater before gaining wider release in early 1943. Considered one of the greatest films in cinematic history, Casablanca will earn eight Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, Screenplay.

August 13: Walt Disney’s fifth full-length animated film, Bambi, premieres at a New York City theater before gaining wider release later in the month. The movie will earn three Academy Award nominations, including Best Sound, Best Song, and Best Original Music Score.

wartime. On the one hand, it reminded its young readers of the country’s history and values, encouraged them to aid the war effort whenever and however they could, and reassured them that victory and peace were possible if everyone did his or her share. On the other, it demonized the enemy. In his study Comic Art Propaganda, Fredrik Strömberg observes:

November 28: A fire breaks out at the packed Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston, Massachusetts, killing 492 people, the deadliest nightclub fire in history.

shared by all Germans and Italians. No such distinction was made for the Japanese, depicted in and out of uniform as treacherous, degenerate subhumans. Captions and word balloons teemed with references to “slant-eyed dogs,” “yellow monkeys,” and similarly derogatory terms emphasizing their otherness. A few lone voices insisted there were also “good Japs,” at least in America, and even questioned the justice of Executive Order 9102, but they were drowned out in the howl of the mob.

“Looking through the covers of superhero comics from the war years, it is evident how much they resemble official propaganda posters from the era. The same rhetorical techniques and strategies were used in order to attract readers. The ideas represented in [these] comics were simple, often supporting the myth of American superiority and the enemy’s inferiority, and depicting imminent victory. The official doctrine of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was that the makers of popular culture should contribute with a form of propaganda that informed rather than inflamed. But comics writers were soon responding to the angry mood of the American people, and comic books became more hate-filled, depicting the representatives of the Axis as stereotypical villains.” (42)

There were surprisingly few 1942-dated comics devoted to overt propaganda, most publishers preferring to insinuate it into their existing titles and features (if and when they indulged in it at all). One of the first was Remember Pearl Harbor, a one-shot from Street & Smith released in February and thus prepared in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Its 45-page lead story by writer Otto Binder and artist Jack Binder recounted the raid and the double-dealing diplomacy leading up to it in vitriolic detail, backed by shorter pieces from Jack Farr and Winsor McKay, Jr. There was also War Victory Comics, sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department and edited by Lt. Alfred Harvey (U.S. Army). A collection of one-pagers extolling the virtues of recycling, it starred Superman, Dick Tracy, Blondie, Li’l Abner, Joe Palooka, The Green Hornet, and other characters from public-spirited comics publishers and syndication services, some reprinted from other comics. Buyers could

This animus was not distributed equitably. Nazis might be portrayed as crude thugs and Fascists as inept cowards, but there was little suggestion that these attributes were 125

Relax: Read the Comics! The question of when the war would end could not yet be answered, but by the summer of 1943 it was becoming evident to all but the most dedicated pessimist which side was going to win. Costly but critical Allied victories on three fronts shattered the myth of Axis invincibility. The Japanese Empire, which claimed nearly a tenth of the planet’s surface, had banked on the United States’ commitment to the Allies’ “Europe first” strategy to delay the Yanks long enough to make its stranglehold on East Asia and the Western Pacific irreversible. Had Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and his fellow militarists known that American cryptographers had cracked the Empire’s top secret Purple Code, they would have realized the futility of that hope. A costly-for-Japan stalemate at the Battle of the Coral Sea the previous May and the Battle of Midway a month later, which cost the Imperial Navy four aircraft carriers and the 248 planes aboard them, forced the warlords to dig in their heels, switch strategies, and contest control of their conquests island by island. The Allies’ six-monthlong effort to clear the island of Guadalcanal made it clear that Japanese troops, indoctrinated to consider surrender dishonorable, would resist their advance to the last man. The folks back home got a measure of revenge on April 18 when the airplane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned and oversaw the raid on Pearl Harbor, was shot down, his whereabouts betrayed by intercepted code messages. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Casablanca, Morocco, in January to discuss their next move following the reclamation of French Africa from its Nazi and Fascist overlords. Despite an unsettling rout at February’s Battle of Kasserine Pass, armored infantry commanded by Gen. George S. Patton teamed with British forces led by Lt. Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery four months later to trap Rommel and his Afrika Korps between them, costing Germany and Italy over a quarter million troops dead or captured. Another 300,000 German casualties fell during the five-month siege of Stalingrad, as much victims of Adolf Hitler’s delusions of grandeur—Der Führer refused to heed the warnings of his military staff—as of the Russians severing their supply lines. The Soviets desperately wanted the Allies to open a second front on Germany’s western flank, but had to settle for the strategy Churchill and Roosevelt agreed on at the Casablanca summit: a drive through the Third Reich’s underbelly by way of Italy. Meanwhile, the once-feared 176

Luftwaffe could no longer hold the Allied Air Forces back, and the German people began to pay the price for their dictator’s madness, the United States making precision bombing runs by day, the RAF carpet-bombing by night. In the wake of these military setbacks, the Axis coalition began to fracture. On July 25, King Victor Emmanuel III deposed Benito Mussolini and prepared to surrender to the invading Allied armies. Hitler had other ideas. The German Army took control of the Italian government and restored Il Duce to the illusion of power, for Mussolini was now no longer an equal partner but just another Nazi puppet like Norway’s Vidkun Quisling. The battle for Italy would be long and bloody. It also served as the proving ground for a band of heroes determined to vindicate themselves and their people in the eyes of a hostile American public: “On [January 28, 1943, Secretary of War Henry L.] Stimson announced that the Army would accept Nisei volunteers. Immediately more than 1,200 signed up, and before the war’s end 17,000 Japanese had joined … In Italy they served with great distinction in the 100th Infantry and the 442nd Infantry. No Nisei ever deserted. During the Italian campaign the 442nd alone suffered the loss of three times its original strength while winning 3,000 Purple Hearts with 500 oak leaf clusters, 810 Bronze Stars, 342 Silver Stars, 47 Distinguished Service Crosses, and 17 Legion of Merit awards. In Europe these units were a legend.” (Manchester 368-69)

By 1943, the leaders of the Axis Nations were no longer portrayed in comics as fearsome monsters but as clowns to be laughed at and humiliated. TM and © respective copyright holder.

rationed goods, doing without. They might grumble about the shortages and laugh knowingly at a radio comedian’s latest ration book joke but most took pride in their contributions to the war effort. The comic book industry, too, had to adjust its appetite for newsprint to the new reality. The temporary adjustments to their production schedules the previous year had steeled the publishers for the inevitable reductions in paper allotments to follow. Word came down from the War Production Board: publishers of all stripes were allotted 90% of their 1942 usage. Different houses met the challenge in different ways. Some cancelled titles. Others reduced the frequencies of some or all of their lines: monthlies became bi-monthlies, bi-monthlies became quarterlies, new series wound up as one-shots. The most common change was in page count. The standard comic book had until now been 68 pages (including covers) for a dime. Circumstances and the rationing board necessitated a change. By the time 1943’s December-dated issues were on the newsstands, all but three publishing outfits, Street & Smith, Holyoke, and Hillman, had converted their titles to the new 60-page standard. Some took it further, experimenting with 52-page and 48-page comics. Most publishers made the change quietly, but a few insisted on underlining their own public-spiritedness. Consider the full page announcement Comic House ran in its July issues:

It was a record to be proud of. It also seemed to make no difference: “Those who fought beside the Nisei knew what drove them. They were trusting that when word of their war records reached [the Home Front], attitudes toward their families would improve … It was a vain hope.… The Nisei themselves, returning in uniform, were rejected by barbershops and restaurants. After the San Francisco Examiner had run the headline soldiers of jap ancestry allowed to roam on coast, a Nisei who had lost a leg in the ETO was publicly beaten.” (369) To judge by their contents, comic books were also not ready to forgive their fellow countrymen for the actions of their ancestral homeland. Japanese villains continued to be a staple of the medium, though the number of slavering, fang-sporting fiends among them seems to have dropped off. Dehumanizing epithets and demeaning racial caricatures persisted, but hindsight suggests that the industry’s heart wasn’t in it anymore, given that it employed Japanese-American artists Bob Fujitani, Fred Kida, and Irv Watanabe. Hitler and his goons were regularly vilified in the comics, though they now tended to be treated as barbarous clowns, a target for whatever humiliations the cartoonist could dream up, including being tossed around by a cape-wearing, super-powered infant. Mussolini, if depicted at all, was reduced to one of Der Führer’s yapping lapdogs like Göbbels and Göring.

“The most important thing at the moment is winning the war—isn’t it? Well then, we’re going to ask you to suffer a sacrifice with us—beginning with this issue our magazines will be reduced from 68 to 60 pages! Because paper has 1,001 uses in the armed forces of our nation. Knowing you as we do, we realize it would be wasted effort to say more—you want victory—complete victory, as soon as possible—a reduction in your favorite reading matter will help bring this about. You are ready to stand with us until Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini are brought to their knees and [our comics] once more scream their 68 pages from the newsstands of the country! Rest assured in the meantime the quality of these books shall not be changed in the least!

A year into the war, Americans were growing used to doing with less or, in the case of an ever-lengthening list of 177

TIMELINE: 1943

March 31: Oklahoma!, the first musical written by the team of composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein, opens on Broadway. It will become the longest-running Broadway musical of its time, garnering Rodgers and Hammerstein a special Pulitzer Prize in 1944.

A compilation of the year’s notable comic book history events alongside some of the year’s most significant popular culture and historical events. (On sale dates are approximations.) January 14: President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, among others, secretly meet in Casablanca, Morocco to plan Allied forces strategy in Europe. The subsequent “Casablanca Declaration” announces that the Allies will accept nothing less than the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers.

May 29: As a symbol of the millions of women who entered the workforce to replace the men who were drafted into military service, Rosie the Riveter appears on Norman Rockwell’s cover to the Memorial Day issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

February 9: Considered one of the turning points of World War II, the Guadalcanal Campaign in the South Pacific Ocean ends with the United States in command of Guadalcanal island.

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

June 20: Due to a dramatic population increase and shortage of housing, a race riot ensues in Detroit, Michigan. Federal troops arrive to suppress the rioting, but not before 1,800 people are arrested, over 400 people are injured, and 34 people are killed.

May 13: In North Africa the German Afrika Korps surrender to Allied forces.

MARCH

APRIL

M AY

JUNE

May 31: The Archie Andrews radio show, based on MLJ’s Archie comic book, debuts on the NBC Blue Network. The series will remain on the air until 1953. February 2: The Battle of Stalingrad ends with the surrender of the German 6th Army to Russian troops.

February 10: In advance of his appearance in the Batman film serial, Batman #16 introduces Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler, in a story written by Don Cameron and drawn by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson.

April 19: Residents of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland resist Nazi efforts to send them to concentration camps. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising will last until May 16, resulting in the deaths of 130,000 Jews and the complete destruction of the ghetto.

68 or 60 you’ll love them just the same! Remember we did it first!” [They didn’t.]

year for packaging services like Roche & Iger or the Sangor Studio to recruit new talent while they were still finishing high school. It was a hardship, to be sure, but Quality publisher Busy Arnold had been right about the salutary effect on sales that the cutbacks paradoxically led to. Entire print runs were selling out. 1943 was the most profitable year the comic book industry had experienced yet.

The occasional self-congratulatory message notwithstanding, the industry was more concerned with providing its young audience with a welcome distraction from the horrors of the daily headlines. Eastern Color captured this attitude perfectly in an ad in its April-dated titles:

Year of the Bat

“War is a terrible thing… We must sacrifice and work hard to produce the materials necessary for our boys to win. But in spite of it all—we can still laugh—Relax! Read the comics!”

Among the first publishers to convert to the new 60-page standard were Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz, whose Detective Comics began making the switch with the June issues of the monthly Action Comics, Detective Comics, and Star Spangled Comics and the Summer issues of the quarterly Boy Commandos and Leading Comics (with the 100page World’s Finest Comics dropping to 92). The company’s senior titles, More Fun Comics and Adventure Comics, were demoted for the duration, joining Superman and Batman on the bi-monthly schedule. Several veteran features were retired over the course of 1943, replaced largely by humor strips – a trend culminating in the launch of the first DC title devoted entirely to comedy.

The industry sacrificed a lot more than eight pages of content. The military continued to vacuum up talent, at times faster than it could be replaced. Among those called to arms this year were Joe Simon, Nick Viscardi, Bob Powell, Martin Filchock, Frank Borth, Bill Ely, Dan Zolnerowich, Odgen Whitney, Jack Lehti, Arthur Peddy, Harry Harrison, Sam Burlockoff, Pierce Rice, Mort Leav, Pagsilang Isip, Bob Lubbers, Dave Gantz, Ed Robbins, Al Walker, Bob Fujitani, and Reed Crandall. Nobody was immune, as the drafting of Jerry Siegel and Jack Kirby proved. The loss was mitigated somewhat when some of them—including Whitney, Lehti, and 1942 inductees Syd Shores, Marc Swayze, Bob Jenney, Gill Fox, and Mickey Spillane—were able to continue working even while in uniform, but it was not uncommon this

Liebowitz and Donenfeld could certainly afford to laugh, for the industry-wide production cuts dictated by newsprint rationing were offset by the revenue coming in from 178

December 29: Published by Quality Comics through Vital Publications, Plastic Man #1 arrives on newsstands.

July 4: During a “Liberty Bell” celebration in Cleveland, Ohio, Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel is honored before reporting for military service. September 8: U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower announces that Italy has surrendered to the Allies. Several days later, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini— who had been arrested in July after being ousted from the Italian government—is rescued from his prison by German commandos. July 10: Operation Husky commences as Allied forces land on the island of Sicily, opening the way for an Allied invasion of mainland Italy.

J U LY

AUGUST

December 4: President Roosevelt closes the Works Progress Administration, officially ending the Great Depression.

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

July 16: The first chapter of The Batman is released to movie theaters. Distributed by Columbia Pictures, the fifteen-chapter serial stars Lewis Wilson as Batman and Douglas Croft as Robin.

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

October 25: The first installment of the daily Batman & Robin comic strip appears in newspapers. Produced by Batman’s co-creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger, the strip will last until 1946.

the multimedia use of and commercial licensing fees generated by a certain golden goose in red cape and blue tights. Joining the Last Son of Krypton in the broader public consciousness this year was the team of Batman and Robin. On July 16, the Dynamic Duo became the first DC property translated to live-action film with the debut of The Batman, a fifteen-chapter serial from Columbia Pictures. Lewis Wilson starred as Batman, Douglas Croft as Robin, and Shirley Patterson as Linda Page, the series pitting its masked leads against the fiendish scientist Dr. Daka, played by character actor J. Carroll Naish using every “yellow peril” stereotype the filmmakers could evoke. (Early production art has come to light suggesting Naish was originally cast as The Joker, a role still reflected in Daka’s clothing and pallid makeup, but the part was rewritten to be more topical.) Although the Caped Crusaders were recast as secret agents of the U.S. government rather than unsanctioned vigilantes, the serial remained relatively faithful to the source material, sometimes to its detriment:

both Batman and Robin closely followed those in the comics, but were unconvincing. In tight closeups, one could see ragged cloth edges to the eyeholes merely poked in the masks. Neither Wilson nor Croft, nor their stunt doubles, had the style and grace of the comic book version, or of the action men in the competing serials from Republic Pictures.” (Harmon 235-36) For all its faults, The Batman did make two important contributions to the mythos of its title character. It was the serial that introduced the Bat’s-Cave, the hero’s subterranean headquarters, and Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler Alfred. Though he debuted in the May-June issue (#16) of the Batman solo book, the character was created for the screen, appearing in studio story treatments months before his comic book intro was assigned. Indeed, in his initial appearances Alfred bore little resemblance to the dignified gentleman’s gentleman played by William Austin in the serial. Instead, the portly manservant—a former music hall performer bullied into entering domestic service by his dying father Jarvis, butler to the Wayne family in Bruce’s early childhood—spoke with a thick pseudo-Cockney accent and fancied himself a sleuth. He simply appeared on the doorstep of the Wayne mansion one morning and announced he was assuming his duties. Some fun was had at his expense before his caped employ-

“[The leads] were played by a pair of relative unknowns.… Wilson’s face did resemble the comic book Bruce Wayne’s, but he was too thick in the middle and very unathletic in appearance. Croft was a bit too old for the part, and looked even older when a hairy-legged stuntman doubled for the bare-legged “boy” in the fights. The costumes of 179

The Paper Chase D-Day. It is now as much the stuff of legend as of history. On June 6, 1944, over 156,000 American, British, Canadian, and ANZAC troops participated in the largest amphibious assault of all time, storming the beaches of Normandy. After months of planning and preparation, the Allies had finally begun their invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europa. Just two days before, American forces under Gen. Mark Clark captured Rome. This was welcome news in the hardpressed Soviet Union, where the two-year siege of Leningrad had at last been lifted and the Red Army was busy recapturing the Crimean Peninsula from the Germans. In the Pacific, the Empire of Japan continued to lose ground, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps taking the Marshall and Admiralty Islands, laying waste to the enemy’s warships, and establishing an airbase in the Aleutians from which to launch bombing raids on the Japanese homeland. None of these were easy victories, each claiming the lives of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, but victories they were nevertheless. The war was far from over but its end was no longer a distant dream. As the United Nations continued to hammer at the edges of Axis territory, the availability of certain resources became of critical importance to the war effort. This included pulp paper and two key ingredients in its manufacture, chlorine and sulphur. Comic book publishing houses found their newsprint quotas lowered once again, this time to 75% of their 1942 levels. This triggered a new round of cancellations, reduced frequencies, and cut page counts. A new standard of 52 pages for a dime swept across the industry, with only a fraction still offering 60 pages when their December-dated issues arrived at newsstands. Despite this (and, paradoxically, because of it), the industry was still booming. Every comic book publisher in business at the end of 1943 was still in business a year later. Detective/AllAmerican, Dell, Fawcett, Eastern Color, Novelty Press, and Parents’ Magazine Press, as divisions of larger publishing empires or affiliates of major printers and/or distributors, were assured of a reliable supply of paper. Several companies followed Timely’s lead in diverting paper to their comics from their pulp lines, as pulp sales continued to slump in the face of competition from paperback books. For most players in the industry, it was a year of stability. Fawcett, Fiction House, Parents’, Eastern Color, Family, Crestwood, and Novelty Press neither cancelled nor launched a title in 1944. Minor lines like Hillman, Et-Es-Go, and Ace were able to juggle their quotas judiciously enough to add new books to their schedules. 230

But there were those who weren’t content with this state of equilibrium. Whether through greed, hubris, or sheer cussedness, some publishers were determined to milk the cash cow for all she had to give, and if they had to skirt or break a few pesky rules, so be it. Some, noting Quality’s profitable partnership with Vital Publications, turned to proxy publishers, who used their excess paper to print others’ content for a percentage of the proceeds. The most prolific of these was Wm. H. Wise & Co., better known for its reference books, poetry collections, and coffee table art books. Wise issued comics under its own name for Nedor, Columbia, Comic House, a resurrected Fox, and All-American. Some were identical in appearance to the real publisher’s books, right down to the trade dress, with only the indicia revealing the switch. Others were jumbo-sized one-shots offering 132 pages for a quarter or 196 pages for 50¢. These comics usually bore no issue number, no date beyond the year, no advertising except a public service announcement or two, and omitted the two pages of text required for second class mailing privileges. Many of these comics were, in fact, illegal. As comics historian Will Murray has observed: “During the war, when you practically needed a license to print anything, [publishing black market comics] was an offense taken seriously by the War Production Board under Limitation Order L-244. The order stipulated that any publisher who did not issue a magazine in 1942—which was the base period used to determine paper quotas—had no allotment for paper.… The temptation to pirate comics during the war was great. With print runs virtually selling out for even the least popular titles, no [financial] risk was involved. Publishing comic books was the next nearest thing to printing money!” (Murray 40-42)

Movie star Roy Rogers headlined Dell’s Four Color #38, the start of a long, profitable partnership between the wholesome singing cowboy and the comic book publisher. TM and © respective copyright holder.

It stands to reason, then, that out of more than a dozen publishers entering the comic book marketplace in 1944, some were bound to be of questionable legality. Indeed, rumors of organized crime using these fly-by-night comics outfits to launder mob money persist to this day, though conclusive evidence has yet to turn up. Some stiffed the freelancers or packagers who provided their content: when the talent came looking for their paychecks, they found an emptied office. Although most of these publishers fit the profile of what Murray aptly labeled “unknown quickbuck companies” (44), cranking out comic books to exploit the sales boom without regard to quality, a few seemed determined to offer value for their readers’ dimes.

With up to three issues reaching the newsstands every month, Four Color was a dominant presence (though unless they paid attention to the tiny “Four Color Comic” blurb appearing on the covers during this period, buyers were oblivious to the fact that there was such a comics title). Fourteen out of the 34 1944-dated issues featured reprinted syndicated strips, including “Dick Tracy,” “Smilin’ Jack,” “Popeye,” “Terry and the Pirates,” and “Little Orphan Annie.” Two cancelled titles got new leases on life as issues of Four Color. Issue #50 brought back Fairy Tale Parade, offering a fresh round of childhood classics as illustrated by Walt Kelly, Arthur Jameson, and an artist known to comics scholars only as “The Great Unknown,” whose stylized interpretation of “The Fourth Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor” was in the same spirit as the “Arabian Nights” issue of Classic Comics drawn by Lillian Chestney the previous year. In a similar vein were “Tiny Folks Funnies” in issue #60, a showcase for adaptations by George Kerr of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Chicken Little,” “The Gingerbread Man” and other favorites, and two issues (#s 41 and 59) of “Mother Goose and Nursery Rhymes Comics.” These were exactly what they sound like: illustrated nursery rhymes aimed at the preschool set, the first issue by Jameson, the second by Kelly. “Gene Autry” rode from the pages of his defunct solo book to issue #s 47 and 57, bringing artist Til Goodan and scripter Gaylord DuBois along for the ride. DuBois was also at the typewriter for issue #38’s “Roy Rogers,” the first comic book appearance of the singing cowboy

Above the Fray To mighty Dell Publishing, a new round of cutbacks to their paper quotas meant no more than a phased conversion to the slimmer 52-page format. The monthlies Popular Comics and Super Comics switched with their March issues, Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories and Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies with their April issues, and New Funnies with May. Our Gang Comics began the year at 52 pages, but its fellow bi-monthlies, Animal Comics and Red Ryder Comics, managed one and two issues, respectively, with the higher page count before converting. None of the eight titles missed an issue. In fact, the only changes to Dell’s schedule in 1944 were the cancellations of Gene Autry Comics at the start of the year and of the quarterly War Heroes at the end. 231