“Hey! That Ain’t Funny!”(Part 1)

With this article, I begin what is intended to be a comprehensive history of the comic book industry in the 1940s. Many articles and books have detailed the rise of the super-hero, but relatively little attention has been paid to the ebb and flow of other genres in the same period. This series of articles is intended to help paint a bigger picture of the industry in its early years.

Super-heroes were all the rage in the early forties. And “rage” was precisely what concerned many of the medium’s early critics. Full of violent action, early comic books seemed short of redeeming value to many “discerning” adult readers. Any new medium so primal in its aggression was bound to come under critical scrutiny. The initial critique of comic books was not as potent or as widespread as the one that would emerge in the fifties, but it nonetheless influenced the industry in some important ways.

Early Critiques of the Medium

One of the earliest criticisms of super-hero comic books appeared in a Chicago Daily News editorial, written by the paper’s literary editor, Sterling North. First seeing print on May 8^th, 1940, the editorial was scathing:

Save for a scattering of more or less innocuous “gag” comics and some reprints of newspaper strips, we found that the bulk of these lurid publications depend on their appeal upon mayhem, murder, torture and abduction—often with a child as the victim. Superman heroics, voluptuous females in scanty attire, blazing machine guns, hood “justice” and cheap political propaganda were to be found on almost every page … Badly drawn, badly written and badly printed—a strain of young eyes and young nervous systems.

Eye strain would soon be dropped as a critical talking point, but the psychological impact of comic books on young “nervous systems” would remain a concern.

North’s editorial apparently struck a nerve. According to the research of comic book historian Steve Mitchell (Comic Buyer’s Guide, “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” 5/17/85), the diatribe was reprinted over forty times in the following two years in both magazines and newspapers. North took the issue further in 1941, offering up two longer articles for National Parent-Teacher magazine, in which he described comic books as “poison” and reflecting a “pre-Fascist pattern.”

Around the same time of North’s first editorial, George Hecht, publisher of the popular Parents Magazine, noted that reading comic books absorbed 75% of the leisure time of children nine to fourteen years of age. He reported with some alarm that 125 comic book titles were now featured in some 100,000 newsstands across the country. Some 15 million comic books were sold a month for a total of 180 million copies a year. His point was that the magnitude of this phenomenon could not simply be ignored.

A negative tone initially pervaded the discussion. But soon other, more sympathetic voices weighed in. The publishers of Superman and Batman were active in trying to tone down the debate, clearly having a vested interest in its outcome. The content of their comic books was already relatively mild in comparison to some of their rivals and so they felt they had little to lose by establishing an advisory board to comment on the appropriateness of their stories and an editorial review process to make actual suggestions.

Headed by Josette Frank, who was associated with the Children’s Book Committee of the Child Study Association, DC Comics’ early board had some interesting members. Among them were former boxing champ, Gene Tunney; an educational psychologist named Robert Thorndyke (who had already done some research on the subject); and Dr. William Moulton Marston, inventor of the lie detector. The experience of being on DC’s advisory board would prompt Marston to create Wonder Woman as a role model for female readers. But that’s a story for another installment.

It also seems likely that DC took their efforts one step further, dialoguing with educational professionals and perhaps even encouraging those professionals to write about the issue in their academic journals. The available evidence on DC’s interface with librarians is, at the very least, intriguing.

Librarians Take Up the Comic Book “Issue”

Librarians took their role as the literary gatekeeper for children very seriously. In the forties, they were a potent voice as to what was good and not so good for youthful readers. With the PTA already discussing the matter, librarians began assessing the potential danger of comic books in their profession journals. The discussion was surprisingly upbeat.

One article entitled “Our Friendly Enemy? The Library Looks At Comics” was published in the October 10^th, 1941 issue of Library Journal. There, Mary Lucas observed that libraries could use super-heroes to promote reading. She related how one particularly creative librarian had made her own poster of Superman encouraging kids to read. The circulation of books among children promptly went up.

When the publishers at DC read an article about the librarian’s effort, they created their own pro-reading Superman poster and made it available to schools and public libraries. On that poster, Superman declared:

An alert mind is as important as a sound and healthy body. One swell way of cultivating your mind is to read good stories. Your library has many books that you will enjoy and I have selected a few of them I know you will like particularly well.

DC also began running public service announcements in its Superman comic books in 1941 praising the reading of good books. Librarians noted that Superman’s advice seemed to have the greatest impact on children eight to eleven years old.

A follow-up article by Gweneira Williams and Jane Wilson appeared in the March 1^st, 1942 issue of Library Journal, “They like it rough: In defense of comic books.” Williams and Wilson surveyed over a hundred junior high school students as to why they liked comic books. Their conclusion? “Patriotism and nothing but a normal love of excitement, adventure and hero worship predominated in most of the statements.”

DC’s main stars, Superman and Batman, were most often identified as the students’ favorite characters. When asked for reasons for their choices, children offered answers like “because he captures bad people and rescues good ones,” “because he is a man evildoers are afraid of,” or “because he is always helping defend America.”

In response to criticisms that comic books were unhealthily sensational in plot and action, the authors answered:

There is little difference, emotionally, between watching a knight of Arthurian romance being violently unhorsed and a gangster being hauled to justice by Superman… In fact, compared to many of the old fairy tales, Superman’s morals are impeccably pure.”

Williams and Wilson went on to note that children are “gifted with an instinct for stern justice which may well be heeded by some of the rulers of our own namby-pamby moral code.” While production values and artistic merit could be called into question, it was the “heart of the story” that children respond to.

Finally, the authors deflected concerns that comic books might negatively impact children’s use of grammar. They noted:

Examination of the better comics leads to the conclusion, supported by Dr. Ernest Thorndyke, that the vocabulary range is wide, and not badly used … The heroic figures in the comics speak fairly pure English. In fact, they affect an almost blatantly epic style. The villains alone, save for a few humorous characters, misuse the King’s English.

All things considered, the article was very supportive.

It seems likely that the publishers at DC had at least something to do with encouraging this positive press. Is it entirely coincidence that the first article featured a vignette involving a Superman poster and that, in the second, Superman and Batman were chosen as the student’s favorites characters? Perhaps they genuinely were. But the reference to Dr. Ernest Thorndyke’s research into comic book vocabulary, the same area of research as Dr. Robert Thorndyke, a member of DC’s advisory board, is too much to be simple happenstance. Are the two men the same, Ernest being a middle name? Are the two men brothers? 

All of this begs the bigger question, did comic book publishers—much like the tobacco industry of today—have their own set of favored experts? Even by 1941, it was a huge industry. The financial stakes were certainly high enough to justify such an approach.

Then again, it should be recalled that in the early months of 1941 there were no crime comic books or horror comic books on the newsstands. Covers featuring sexy women were a relative rarity. There’s no compelling reason to question the sincerity of these researchers. Comics certainly did encourage reading. But from the calm tone of their articles, it seems unlikely they’d ever seen the Red Skull, the Claw or Iron Jaw in action!

In the meantime, not content with mild efforts at reform from within the industry, several publishers decided to take matters in their own hands. They sought to take children’s preoccupation with comics in a healthier direction. They attempted this daunting task by providing kids with comic books even the PTA could love.

Parents Magazine Tries Its Hand

Already a concerned observer, George Hecht, the publisher of Parents Magazine, decided to start his own line of comic books. Comics were obviously here to stay and Hecht felt an obligation to provide an alternative to garish super-heroes that concerned parents could buy their children.

The Parents line seemed to be based on the assumption that escapist fiction numbed the sensibilities of youth. Three of its first four publications revolved around true stories of heroism or interesting facts, pictorially illustrated. The first of these, True Comics, debuted in April 1941. Its running slogan expanded on a familiar saying: “Truth is stranger and a thousand times more thrilling than fiction!”

The cover of the debut issue of True Comics featured a large portrait of Winston Churchill, who was proudly declared “World Hero No. 1.”  It promised stories of air war, a marathon race, and frontier fighters. One cover illustration portrayed a Davy Crockett type shooting an Indian. A parent must have complained. Even that degree of violence was absent on subsequent covers.

Printed on the inside front cover of that first issue was an editorial by Hecht, who took this opportunity to more clearly lay out his objections to violent “funny” books:

Nowadays most of the comic magazines no longer even try to be funny. They consist largely of exciting picture stories which everyone recognizes as not only untrue but utterly impossible.

Hecht believed fantasy supermen reduced the ability of children to believe in their own abilities and potential.

Hecht furthered this perspective in an editorial in True Comics #5 (10/41). There, the publisher reassured his readers that the heroics featured in his comic book, however amazing they might seem, were entirely true:

Their heroic deeds or their brilliant accomplishments are not imaginary…they are real…and any of us with sufficient courage and will power and ambition might earn an equally important place among the world’s great names.           

Here it becomes clear that Hecht hoped his comic books would be inspirational as well as entertaining.

But Hecht was also a pragmatist. Inside the pages of True Comics, his stories often revolved around military and sports heroes, presumably in an effort to provide some minimal action for male readers, who appeared to be the comic’s target audience. Biographies of inventors and heroes of the “wild west” were also favored. Nurses of the Red Cross were honored in issue #2, but True Comics was always a predominantly male affair.

Even so, the broadly humanistic instincts of publisher Hecht should not be underestimated. In his excellent internet article on True Comics, William E. Blake, Jr. determined that nearly every issue featured at least one story about the achievements of women. Efforts were also made to include stories of blacks and American Indians, as well as some sort of balance between tales of Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

Hecht’s sense of fairness even carried over to politics. During the presidential election campaign of 1944, True Comics #39 featured a biography of F.D.R., but promised a feature on the Republican candidate the very next issue. The bio of Thomas Dewey reminded readers Roosevelt’s life had been portrayed the month before. It’s clear that Hecht believed in a balanced approach as fully as he might have favored progressive values.

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Recognizing the need to pay at least some attention to reader preferences, later covers of Real Heroes would provide several scenes of violence-free action. And stretching the initial premise just a tad, Hecht’s editorial team added a new text feature, “Reel Real Heroes.” The editor argued in Real Heroes #10 (Su/43) that “fact and fiction combine to make today’s films thrilling, inspiring, believable.” The accompanying photo of a decidedly skinny Mickey Rooney working out may have been believable, but it was not exactly inspiring.

Much like True Comics, stories of aviation heroes, sports stars and explorers were Real Heroes staples. In fact, flyboys proved to be so popular with readers that Hecht began publication of True Aviation Picture Stories the following year. With the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, the content of both titles was increasingly  devoted to true stories of World War II. In doing so, they garnered additional readers attracted primarily to military action.

Hecht’s choice to oversee the editorial duties of his comic book line was a fellow named Elliot Caplin. Caplin just happened to be the brother of Al Capp, the creator of the highly popular comic strip Little Abner. Later in the forties, Caplin would leave Hecht’s employ and start his own publishing enterprise, Toby Press.

While the aspirations of Hecht and his creative team were consistently high minded, practical realities kept intruding. Movie features and advertisements sometimes undercut the progressive publisher’s intentions. Hecht might criticize the violent fantasy of the super-hero, but he was forced to accept advertising that enticed children with a vivid description of a “secret weapon you must have!”

“Yes,” the ad copy read, “even though you weigh no more than 100 pounds, a power-house lies concealed in that modest frame of yours, waiting to be sprung by the commando-like destruction of Lightning Ju-Jitsu.” The presence of these ads, appealing to the same aggressive fantasies that Superman and the Sub-Mariner did, must have made Hecht at least a little bit uneasy.

The same month that Parents Magazine issued Real Heroes, it also launched Calling All Girls. “Susan,” the magazine’s spokeswoman, addressed female readers directly:

Well, girls, at last we have a magazine of comics and stories and things that is published just for us! I wonder why nobody ever thought of this before. Most of the comic magazines are filled largely with comics that boys like better than girls, but Calling All Girls is going to have what we want and nothing else… The first magazine of its kind for girls and sub-debs.

An innovative move, Calling All Girls really was the first comic book especially targeted to a youthful female audience.

Running 64 pages, Calling All Girls was published in a half- photo and text, half-comics format. The new title regularly included true stories of notable women (Queen Elizabeth II being the first), as well as two fictional series.

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Another article was entitled “Adventure with supper!” The female reader was cheerily informed that “it’s fun to learn to cook. Start by giving your mother a helping hand. She knows lots of ‘hot’ tricks from which you can profit.” These text-only features tended to subtly undermine the “you can accomplish anything” tone of the illustrated biographies.

Seeking to provide a little something for readers of all ages, Parents issued Funny Book in December 1942. Geared towards beginning readers, the comic was a mix of particularly juvenile funny animal and light fantasy fare.

While hardly a blockbuster success, sales for the new Parents line of comic books was enough to insure its continued presence on the newsstands. By 1943, True Comics had paid per issue sales nearing 400,000. Calling All Girls, for its part, was selling over 300,000. These were mid-range figures for the industry at that time. DC’s All-Star Comics, for example, sold just over 400,000 copies per issue. A title like Novelty’s Blue Bolt matched True Comics’ sales.  

The Parents line-up of comic books remained stable throughout the war years, in part because paper restrictions didn’t allow for further expansion. Each title was carefully stocked with material targeted towards its intended audience, but all lacked the spontaneity and vivid emotional impact of their more fantastic rivals.

Many of the stories were written for Hecht by Caplin. Caplin was capable of far more involving work and would deliver years later with newspaper comic strips like “The Heart of Juliet Jones” and “Big Ben Bolt.” Not only were most of Caplin’s True Comics stories purposely down-to-earth (and thus often pedestrian), but the artwork provided by the Jacquet shop was largely flat. Once a creative enterprise, the Jacquet group had become one of the more colorless art studios of the period.

Even so, Hecht had clearly secured a portion of the market. Readers who—like Hecht—eschewed fantasy as superficial and found fact more bracing were drawn to his comic books. Parents who sought to influence their children’s reading habits in positive ways felt safe in buying Hecht’s titles. They soon would have other choices as well. 

Classics Illustrated

The father of Classics Illustrated was Albert Kanter, a Jewish Russian immigrant who came to the United States at the age of seven with his parents and two brothers. Kanter never went to college, but he described himself as “a serious student of literature, biography and history.” But this was hardly all he was. An entrepreneur and jack of all trades, Kanter had worked as a real estate broker, text book salesman and toy manufacturer. He also turned out to be an astute businessman, accurately reading the financial and emotional tenor of the times.

Comics may have been a growth industry, but as we have seen, they were also criticized for lacking apparent educational value. The idea of producing comic book versions of literary classics appealed to both the student and businessman in Kanter. He entered into a business arrangement with a fellow named G.W. Putz and formed the A. Elliot Publishing Company.     

In the fall of 1941, the first issue of Classics Comics appeared. Kanter had 200,000 copies printed up of his first adaptation, The Three Musketeers. The novel by Alexandre Dumas was a natural choice, a well-respected “classic” but also full of action. Although the artwork by Malcolm Kildale was only passable, the book proved to be a financial success. Adaptations of Ivanhoe and The Count of Monte Cristo quickly followed.

The fourth issue of Classic Comics, and most subsequent ones, would be published by a new company, Gilberton Publishing. According to Classics historian Dan Malan, Kanter sought to centralize his operation under a single publisher. While the exact details aren’t entirely clear, one suspects the burgeoning success of Kanter’s venture required new capital. This time he brought in Raymond Haas and Myer Levy for financial backing. But, as with Putz, the immigrant entrepreneur remained clearly at the helm.

Albert Kanter knew very well that much of his success was based on the perception that he was doing something more uplifting than other publishers of comic books. He constantly strove to underscore that sense. His editors created a contest for their readers in which they promised to publish the best answers to the question of why they liked Classic Comics. One young fellow from Cleveland enthused, “Classic Comics is suitable even for an adult. I believe that Father gets as much out of it as I do. Classic Comics is the best comic book for your money.” The folks at Gilberton followed up this solicited praise by cheerily announcing their intention to “please every age group from eight to eighty.”

Educators were also wooed by Kanter, for obvious reasons. In one issue, the editors at Gilberton breezily announced that “a school teacher from Nebraska has written to state that Classics Comics has helped her students considerably in understanding such great works as Ivanhoe and Last of the Mohicans.” Teachers were regularly praised for the initiative they showed in using Classic Comics to entice students into reading the real classics. 

By 1943, new adaptations were consistently selling well, justifying a nearly monthly schedule. But demand for out-of-print copies of earlier adaptations was also great. Kanter decided to go back to press! He began issuing second editions of past issues that very same year. 

Second editions were unheard of in the comics industry. Understandably so. Why would a publisher reprint a particular issue of, say, Detective Comics, when that same set of characters would be appearing in new adventures the next month? But Kanter had accidentally created a different dynamic. If a reader missed purchasing the comic book version of The Three Musketeers, he had no alternative but to go without. The following month a different novel would be adapted. Kanter’s decision to print as many additional editions of his comic books as necessary to keep them in print would prove to be very profitable. By the end of the war, most of his early adaptations boasted six or seven editions!   

While the early Classic Comics were unquestionably a sales success, they were often artistic disasters. Adapting classics was a time consuming process, requiring the author to both read the original work and adapt it into a comic book format of a specific length. The strain of trying to produce a new adaptation every month appears to have pushed Kanter into cutting corners with unfortunate results. 

Albert Kanter was, by some reports, quite frugal. He wouldn’t buy the classic in question for his writers, but instead had him or her check the book out from the public library. The artist looking for textual details to inform his illustrations would also have to visit the library. The temptation for writers to churn out their adaptation must have been great. They weren’t being paid by the hour after all, but by the page! And the artwork supplied by the Jacquet studio, the same folks who worked for True Comics, was often substandard. During the war, many of their best young artists were in the armed services.

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As a result of these multiple factors, Classic Comics became increasingly less reliable as literary adaptations. Issue #13 (published in August of 1943) began a string of inferior productions. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in particular, bore little resemblance to the novelette by Robert Louis Stevenson. A few examples will demonstrate just how bad the Gilberton adaptation actually was.

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In the original story, for example, the reader doesn’t realize that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the same individual until the end of the story. The Classic Comics adaptor, perhaps correctly, assumed the cat was already out of the bag on that one and let readers in on the secret from the very start. But other variations from the original story were far less defensible, only made by the adaptor to enhance a sense of action and graphic violence.

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In both versions, Hyde tramples over a young girl in careless haste. In Stevenson’s original, she is merely shaken and “not much the worse, more frightened.” In the Classic version, the girl dies from her injuries. In the novelette, Dr. Jekyll has no fiancée; at least, none that is mentioned. In the comic book version, she is a beautiful blonde named Lorraine and she is terrorized by Hyde for no less than five pages. In one panel, he almost strangles her to death!

In the original story, alone in his laboratory, Hyde recognizes capture is inevitable and kills himself. In the Classic version, Hyde leads the police on a seven page chase across the rooftops of London. He is killed by an officer’s bullet.

The philanthropic motivations of Kanter were fast becoming suspect. At best, he can be said to have run a very sloppy operation during the war years. By 1944, paper restrictions made issuing new adaptations impractical. It was just as well.

Luckily for all concerned, Kanter had also established a business association with Jerry Iger during this same period. Iger ran his own comic art shop and, together with Kanter, had started  producing adventure comics (Bomber and Spitfire) and children’s books under the Elliot Publishing imprint. In early 1945, Iger approached his business partner about producing Classic Comics for him as well. Kanter, who hadn’t published any new or old editions for over six months, agreed.

The first Iger shop material appeared in Classic Comics #23, dated July 1945. Their first effort was Oliver Twist. The new stories were either written or edited by Ruth Roche, Iger’s business partner and a creative powerhouse in her own right. New artists were soon enlisted. The quality of this and subsequent adaptations markedly improved.

By the end of 1945, Albert Kanter told Publishers Weekly that he had sold some 100 million copies of his 28 classic titles. If true, that translates into over three million copies per adaptation! Since best-selling comic books like Superman or Captain Marvel approached two million sales per issue in the mid-forties, without the benefit of multiple editions, these figures may well be accurate.  

What’s known for certain, from the excellent research of Dan Malan, is that Kanter penetrated far more sales markets than the average comic book publisher. Despite the inaccuracies in many of his adaptations, Classic Comics were used in roughly twenty thousand schools during the war years. Participating parochial schools used all of the titles except for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, reportedly due to Alexendre Dumas’ anti-clerical attitudes.

Not only that, beginning with issue #8 (Les Miserables), Kanter began encouraging readers to mail copies of Classic Comics to soldiers stationed overseas. In 1943, he managed to sell the Red Cross over a million of his comic books for distribution to servicemen and women. Department stores, who otherwise ignored comic books, readily sold Classics, five to a box. New adaptations began to appear in Sunday funnies sections, continuing for several weeks and then concluding. They would later be cut and pasted and appear in the more familiar comic book format.

All the while, story and art continued to improve. An adaptation of Lorna Doone, for example, featured a lively script by Ruth Roche and beautiful illustrations by a talented newcomer named Matt Baker. In March of 1947, quality was such that Kanter felt comfortable changing the title of his periodical to Classics Illustrated. By doing so, he also meant to distance himself from some of the increasingly lurid comic books flooding the post-war market.

For over twenty years, Classics Illustrated remained the only real option in pictorial adaptations. The Count of Monte Cristo and Moby Dick were Kanter’s most popular titles of the forties, each boasting nine editions. By 1948, the ever ambitious Kanter had even begun issuing foreign language editions of his series!  

There was really nothing else quite like Classics Illustrated series in the comic book industry. Only a few publishers even tried to copy its success.   

The Classic Competitors

Classic Comics didn’t inspire many imitators at first. This isn’t as surprising as it might seem at first blush. During the war years just about anything made a profit, and literary adaptations seemed like a lot of extra trouble. Most companies were content to just keep on doing their own thing and raking in the profits.

Dell Comics was an exception. Perhaps because they felt they were already publishing more savory comic books than most, Dell stuck their toes in the literary adaptation market. They ended up issuing only two issues of their Famous Stories in 1942, adapting both Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer. Editor Oskar Lebeck hoped that a classic novel, “told through a new and vivid medium, will recommend itself to parents and teachers everywhere, as well as to the boys and girls for whom it was created.” The folks at Dell, however, barely gave the new venture a chance at succeeding before they canceled it. Presumably they felt the paper could be used more profitably elsewhere.

David McKay, best known for publishing reprints of comic strips like Flash Gordon and Mandrake the Magician, tried his luck at adapting novels in 1944. His American Library series was an ambitious try at creating comic books for an adult audience.

Rather than adapting classics, McKay obtained rights to recently published books and excerpted as much text as would fit in the bottom half of a 64-page comic book. In the upper half of each page, he had his editors place black and white illustrations in comic book style panels. There were no word balloons; any dialogue was printed in typeface below the artwork. McKay did six such visual condensations, including Richard Tregaskis’ Guadacanal Diary and Earle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Crooked Candle. They were classy efforts, all things considered, but probably too cerebral and artistically static for the typical comic book reader, adult or otherwise.

Martin Goodman and the folks at Timely tried their hand at “classical comics” in 1948. Comics were coming under renewed criticism and Goodman probably felt a title devoted to “higher” literature would make for good public relations. Timely’s Ideal, A Classical Comic featured full length stories of Anthony and Cleopatra, The Corpse of Dr. Sacotti, Joan of Arc and Richard the Lion-Hearted. In actual execution, the series tended more towards illustrated biography than actual adaptation. Sales must have been dismal. By issue #5, Timely had retitled the comic book, Ideal Love & Romance. Before they cancelled it altogether, that is.             

There was only one book adaptation that brought real success to a publisher besides Gilberton. Anyone want to guess which book?

Stay tuned for the next installment of “Hey! That Ain’t Funny!” in the next issue of Nostalgia Zine. All comments, corrections or additions to this ongoing history of the comic book industry are welcome!

• Welcome!
  
  
• I Was Twelve
  Years Old in 1964
  
  
• "Hey!
  That Ain't Funny!"
  
  
• Carl Barks
  and the Perversity
  of Beasts, Machines,
  and Nature
  

• Vol 1, Num 2
  
  
• Vol 1, Num 1