Fiction house anyone? 26 26

[Tsp99]

Love the Fights.  That #4 is pretty!

[Zolnerowich]

2 hours ago, Straw-Man said:

close second.

What a great set you've compiled! My favorite is the #5, but they're all so cool.

[Straw-Man]

1 hour ago, Tsp99 said:

Love the Fights.  That #4 is pretty!

thanks, buddy-boy!

[Electron]

5 hours ago, Straw-Man said:

my fave.

 

5 hours ago, Straw-Man said:

my fave.

Love it! I have a hard time choosing between 4 and 5 for a favorite.

[Straw-Man]

another bright-colors-f.h.-pickup---haven't seen this issue much.

[Scrooge]

3 hours ago, Straw-Man said:

haven't seen this issue much

I agree (though I posted mine 8 days ago ) It's typically missing from the long runs of Wings that sits in dealers' boxes.

Really sharp copy 

Edited October 20, 2017 by Scrooge

[Sqeggs]

9 hours ago, Straw-Man said:

another bright-colors-f.h.-pickup---haven't seen this issue much.

Bombing the Capitol? Now they've gone too far!  Or, maybe not .... 

Actually, I don't think there were too many examples of covers showing the Germans or Japanese attacking DC.  I can only think of a couple of others. 

[Dreamtoreal1]

Love the cover

[Dreamtoreal1]

an another beauty

[Straw-Man]

[Ricksneatstuff]

Well, I got my Baker Page I’ve been looking for. Some assist from Kamen I believe. Story is attributed in Art of Glamour.  

Fight 53 Page 8

Edited October 30, 2017 by Ricksneatstuff

[Sqeggs]

16 hours ago, Ricksneatstuff said:

Well, I got my Baker Page I’ve been looking for. Some assist from Kamen I believe. Story is attributed in Art of Glamour.  

Fight 53 Page 8

Excellent!

[Zolnerowich]

On 10/29/2017 at 3:04 AM, Ricksneatstuff said:

Well, I got my Baker Page I’ve been looking for. Some assist from Kamen I believe. Story is attributed in Art of Glamour.  

Fight 53 Page 8

Plenty of Baker girls in this OA to satisfy the most discerning Bakerite! Congrats!

[Ricksneatstuff]

[kelholt]

35 minutes ago, Ricksneatstuff said:

 

Extremely tough book to locate.

Great early Zolnerowich cover 

Edited November 2, 2017 by kelholt
Misspelling

[Sqeggs]

Bought raw on the boards as a 5.0.  Either people aren't bothering to slab these late Jumbos or they are genuinely scarce -- only four copies of this one on the census.

 

[Zolnerowich]

Hi all you Fiction House devotees! Time to bump this thread.

In response to one of my posts on the "1939 comics & history show and tell" thread, a boardie asked me to to provide additional information about those good old days of comics in 1939. I think I took things too seriously, and on a bit of a tangent, but since this thread is the most appropriate place for droning on and on about the early days of Fiction House, I'm re-posting here. Note, I could have gotten things wrong, so feel free to point out any errors, or better yet, add your own tidbits of knowledge. Or just skip this post!

--------------------

I'd like to share a bit about the early days of the Eisner-Iger shop, specifically about something I always found confusing -- the first comic book published by Fiction House was Jumbo Comics #1 (on sale July 12, 1938), but as per Grand Comics Database, almost all of the stories in that issue were reprints from various issues in 1937 and early 1938 from a publication titled "Wags [UK] (Editors Press Service, 1937 series)," well before Jumbo Comics #1. So what's up with that? Well...

Iger hired a young Eisner (age 19) in 1936 to be his production manager for a comic title ("Wow, What a Magazine!"), which was produced at minimal expense in the back of a New York City sweatshop. This racket folded after a couple issues, but then not long after, Eisner reached out to Iger, proposing they go into business together, in which they would create new comics material for magazine publishers. At that point in time, Iger had established one influential connection, Mr. Joshua B. Powers, who claimed to have been a former secret agent but was now taking advantage of his foreign contacts to set up new publishing deals overseas.  Powers purchased the rights of comic strips such as Mutt and Jeff and Tracy, packaging them for distribution in Great Britain, Australia, and South America, and assembled these into the magazine "Wags." Things were going swimmingly for Powers and his comics operation until he had a falling out with one of his partners, leaving Powers without access to British comic strip material. Powers now needed to find original, cheap comic strips, and somehow or other, it was the Eisner-Iger team who was contracted to supply Powers with new stories and art. The Eisner-Iger original work appeared in Wags [UK] from about April 1937 to November 1938, and artists in the Eisner-Iger stable who provided material for Wags [UK] included such soon-to-be influential artists as Bernard Baily, Briefer, Lou Fine, Bob Kane, Jack Kirby, and Mort Meskin, and Eisner of course.

So then fast forward to 1939 (perhaps late 1938), when Iger comes calling at the office of Thurman T. Scott, the publisher of Fiction House, which specialized in pulp magazines, including Fight Stories, Wings, Jungle Stories, and Planet Stories (notice any trend here...?). Thurman T. Scott obviously liked what Iger had to offer, and decided to try his hand at the comics. The first of these was Jumbo Comics (note: there was no 'Jumbo Stories' pulp title) under the imprint, Real Adventures Publishing Company, on sale July 12, 1938 (cover date Sept. 1938). It's not clear to me whether Scott was aware that his new Jumbo Comics contained about 90% recycled material from Wags [UK]. Across the first 8 issues of Jumbo Comics (Sept. 1938 to June-July 1939), the only original material to be found in Jumbo Comics was mostly 0.5-page or 1-page filler stories and text. It is clear that by the time the Eisner-Iger shop was getting Jumbo Comics #8 ready for Fiction House, the shop had basically run out of their Wags [UK] material, and had to dip into another continent to pad out the issue, using Wags [Australia] material. I've read elsewhere that one reason for all of the artist pseudonyms (for example, Will Eisner might be "Will Eisner" or "Willis B. Rensie" or "Erwin" or "Carl Heck" or "Major Thorpe," many of which might be attached to a different story in the same issue of Jumbo Comics) was to leave the impression that the Eisner-Iger shop had a deep pool of talented artists and story tellers who could generate endless amounts of "new" material.

Interestingly, the first issue of Jumbo Comics that contained all new material, without anything lifted from Wags [UK] or Wags [Australia] , was issue #11. And with issue #12, the Fiction House symbol icon first appeared on the cover. In late 1939 Everett M. "Busy" Arnold, the publisher of Quality Comics, which also had been publishing reprinted material, hired Eisner to produce, write, and draw his own feature (The Spirit) as a comic book insert in the newspapers. Eisner paid off Iger for his half of the studio, and was able to bring some artists with him to Quality Comics, including Lou Fine, where they and other excellent artists (including Jack Cole) built up new material for their line of comic books.

I think this early history of Fiction House and Jumbo Comics really illustrates the realities of the Eisner-Iger shop in its earliest days: these two gentleman (though mostly Eisner) had an eye for amazing talent, and they sparked a paradigm shift in the comic medium, despite the fact that their shop was obviously understaffed and stretched very thin. 

(Much of the above paraphrased and collated from Men of Tomorrow, Gerard Jones 2004; The Lou Fine Comics Treasury 1991; Grand Comics Database)

 

 

[Tsp99]

Very interesting, thanks for posting this here as well.

[skypinkblu]

I was just reading one of the Spirit Archives yesterday and they tell a similar story, only it was written by Eisner in 2000, he's referring to 1939 and it's all about how he went to work for what was to become Quality Comics, writing "The Spirit".  He mentions that there were 4 issues of Wow, but also how he worked on comics promoting training for the armed forces.

I can't scan it, but I'll see if I can take a photo and post it, it's a few pages.

[Dr. Love]

Thanks for the writeup, Zolne!  Along those lines, moving off topic into the area Sharon mentions

It was Iger who paid off Eisner for his 50% - $20,000.  You know what that kind of money meant in those days.  Not bad for a kid who three years earlier, at the age of 19, pitched Iger on the idea of opening a studio.  Iger said ok  if Eisner would put up the money, and Eisner said sure.  He had $15 to his name, and his father was good for another $15.  That was enough to cover two months rent on a 10' X 10' room in a building at 43rd and Madison.  Eisner was never short of guts and vision.

In his deal with Busy Arnold, a barely 23 year old Eisner exhibited business acumen far beyond his age and insisted on the right to own his own creations should their agreement dissolve.  As compared to all the rest, who in a million years never even would have asked.  He was always moving ahead into uncharted territory, creatively and financially.  Into comics as a wage earner.  Moving up to business owner, supplying material.  Out of comics and into newspaper syndication.  Out of syndication into the Army, offering to supply small cartoons to a military base newspaper and then leveraging that years later into becoming a single source supplier for decades to the US military for training material, serving his country and making a good living at the same time, using his God given talent no longer for entertaining boys but for imparting information to adults in a powerful and meaningful way.