Eastern Color Press' Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics (Eastern Color Printing, 1933)

Famous Funnies #1 (July 1934). Cover art by Jon Mayes.

One of comics' most famous covers: The Avengers #4, art by Jack Kirby and George Roussos.

Cover of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns #1, dated 1985

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An American comic book is a small magazine originating in the United States containing a narrative in the comics form. Standard size is 6 5/8" x 10 1/4." more...

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Since the invention of the comic book format in the 1930s, the United States has been the leading producer with only the British comic (during the inter-war period and up until the 1970s) and Japanese manga as close competitors in terms of quantity.

Comic book sales declined with the spread of television and mass market paperback books after World War II, but regained popularity in the late 1950s and the 1960s as comic books' audience expanded to include college students who favored the naturalistic, "superheroes in the real world" trend initiated by Stan Lee at Marvel Comics. As well, the 1960s saw the advent of the underground comics. Later, the influence of Japanese manga and the recognition of the comic medium among academics, literary critics and art museums helped solidify comics as a serious artform with established traditions, stylistic conventions, and artistic evolution.

History

Proto-comic books

The creation of the modern American comic book came in stages. Comic strips had been collected in hardcover book form as early as 1930 in Europe, when the Belgian comic strip Tintin was first collected in an "album" titled "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets". A year earlier, however, Dell Publishing, founded by George T. Delacorte Jr. in 1921, published The Funnies, described by the Library of Congress as "a short-lived newspaper tabloid insert". (This is not to be confused with Dell's later same-name comic book, which began publication in 1936.) Historian Ron Goulart describes the 16-page, four-color periodical "more a Sunday comic section without the rest of the newspaper than a true comic book. But it did offer all original material and was sold on newsstands". It ran 36 issues, published Saturdays through Oct. 16, 1930.

In 1933, salesperson Maxwell Gaines and sales manager Harry I. Wildenberg, and owner George Janosik of the Waterbury, Connecticut company Eastern Color Printing — which among other thing printed Sunday-paper comic strip sections — produced Funnies on Parade. Like The Funnies but only eight pages this was a newsprint magazine. Rather than using original material, however, it reprinted in color several comic strips licenced from the McNaught and McClure Syndicate. These included such highly popular strips as cartoonist Al Smith's Mutt and Jeff, Ham Fisher's Joe Palooka, and Percy Crosby's Skippy. This periodical, however, was neither sold nor available on newsstands, but rather sent free as a promotional item to consumers who mailed in coupons clipped from Proctor & Gamble soap and toiletries products. Ten-thousand copies were made. The promotion proved a success, and Eastern Color that year produced similar periodicals for Canada Dry soft drinks, Kinney Shoes, Wheatena cereal and others, with print runs of from 100,000 to 250,000.