Part Five
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From 1938 on the superheroes enjoyed great popularity. So
successful were some of them that they quite frequently outsold news stand
magazines like Time and Newsweek. Captain Marvel reportedly sold over 2 million
copies per month at it's peak and other titles commonly sold close to a half
million or more copies making them extraordinarily ubiquitous in American
society.
When World War II began, all the comics chipped in to the
war effort. All the comic characters fought the Nazi's and the Pacific fleets.
One such hero even preceded our entrance into the war by several months. This
super hero, was fighting the Nazis in February 1941 when Captain America
blasted onto the scene, created by comic giants
Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. The cover
featured Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw!
(Please note: Comic books at the time were
put onto the stands approximately one month to six weeks before cover date,
which was the time an issue was to be removed from display. So the first issue
of Captain America, dated March 1941, was on the stands in
February) |
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But as the war ended, so did it seem the golden age of super
heroes began to wane. But there were other formats for comic books. Funny
animals were very popular as was evidenced by the tremendously successful Walt
Disney's Comics and Stories, which reportedly had very high sales. Science
fiction had it's own niche in Fiction House's "Planet Comics" which started in
January 1940. Even the teen idol "Archie" also had high sales figures. But the
comic companies that had slowing sales figures needed something new, different
and exciting to revitalize their net profits. |
So here it was, late 1946 and some publishers began to take
note of small publisher Lev Gleason. Gleason had a almost unnoticeable section
on the news racks because he only sold a hanincr=F|dful of titles. One was
Daredevil Comics which sold very well, and another was titled "Crime Does Not
Pay", which first came out in 1942.
It was a highly successful title, depicting according to the
blurb on the cover "ALL TRUE crime stories". The covers were real gruesome
events. On one a maniac is forcing a woman's head onto a burning stove top, on
the next three guys are blasting away with machine guns at a bloodied bank
teller, the next cover had a bloodied man thrown from a speeding car and yet
another had a guy about to hack a woman with a cleaver while there were five
dead men "hanging" from a tree limb nearby. It is not difficult to understand
why this title was so popular, but it is difficult to understand why comic
publishers took so long, five years, to cash in on the crime title's
success. |
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So here it was, 1946/47 and suddenly a whole assortment of crime
comics were coming out. True Crime, True Western Crime, Women Outlaws, War
Against Crime and Crimes By Women. EC publisher Bill Gaines was converting
titles like International Comics into Crime Patrol, and crime comics were all
over the place, and they were a smash, and the companies profits soared
again. |
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Another genre that began to flourish was horror comics. In
1948, ACG had come out with Adventures into the Unknown, and the previous year
Avon Publishing, a paperback publisher looking for new revenues, would jump in
with the short lived Eerie Comics.
But something that all comics enjoined was an artistic
instead of literate contribution to comic books. It would later be called good
girl art, and some of the main features of this art were the way the women were
depicted. Large breasts called headlights were adopted. Women were dressed as
scantily as the editors would allow showing as much cleavage as possible, and
the rear view of a woman bent over was a very common sight. WOW I say!
Unfortunately, though this could not have come at a better
time for the comic companies, it also could not have come at a worse
time. |
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Sometime around this same time, as the story is related to me by
noted comic author an historian Greg Theakston, comic publisher and publisher
of the popular Betty pages magazine; at a family outing a mother who was
looking for her son found him hiding and reading a comic book. The irritated
mother looked at the comic and saw..half naked women, large breasts and who
knows what else and went to her husband with the offending publication. It was
a fretful moment, the woman's husband was a United States Senator. The comic
book was reportedly Lil Abner. I guess she had never seen Daisy May before.
After the party, the senator spoke with his fellow senators and
before long a panel had been convened to study the effects of comic books on
American society, in particular the effects they had on children.
Still, comics were selling faster than ever and in 1950 new
changes were coming to the field. The emblem of that change was EC. |
next: EC and the horror
explosion. |
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