Anybody have any pre-SOTI books? 2 2

[sfcityduck]

Steve,

Good news!  You've got more targets to collect.  Where are all the newspaper articles? 

Have you got a clippings file?

Near and dear to your heart, for example, there are some really interesting articles on The Nightingale.

[SOTIcollector]

11 hours ago, adamstrange said:

This is an absolutely killer thread because of all your posts, SOTI Collector!

Thanks so much!  I've had fun going back through these things that spend most of their lives in boxes.  Stay tuned!  Coming up is the one that I call the "Secret Origin of the Comic Book." 

[SOTIcollector]

11 hours ago, sfcityduck said:

Steve,

Good news!  You've got more targets to collect.  Where are all the newspaper articles? 

Have you got a clippings file?

Near and dear to your heart, for example, there are some really interesting articles on The Nightingale.

I have a very small number of clippings, but I'm always looking for more.  They are just so darned hard to come by.

I do recall reading some articles about The Nightingale, seemingly based on press releases sent out by the publisher, but I don't own any originals of those articles.

[SOTIcollector]

Just now, SOTIcollector said:

I have a very small number of clippings, but I'm always looking for more.  They are just so darned hard to come by.

I do recall reading some articles about The Nightingale, seemingly based on press releases sent out by the publisher, but I don't own any originals of those articles.

Yet.

[SOTIcollector]

As promised, here's "The Secret Origin of the Comic Book."

The year is 1933.  It’s been more than three years since the stock market crashed, plunging the nation into the Great Depression.   Your name is Charles Maxwell Gaines.  You’ve been a school principal, a munitions factory worker, a teacher, a haberdasher.  With unemployment at a staggering twenty-five per cent, you’re thankful to have a job.  [It’s 1933, so “percent” is still two words.]   You’re particularly thankful to have THIS job, as a salesperson for the Eastern Color Printing, a firm that prints the colorful Sunday funnies sections for dozens of newspapers.  Full-color Sunday funnies are now the standard among newspapers, because Eastern made them so. This is a company that’s going places, and you’re excited to be going with them.  Or perhaps taking them along.

On this new career path, you’re eager to hit on the one big thing that will make you successful.  You’ve been brainstorming with your new boss, Harry Wildenberg, trying to come up with a promotional gimmick for one of the company’s clients, Procter & Gamble.  You have dreams.  You’ll make it big one day, if you can just conjure up the right idea. 

One afternoon, you’re waiting outside your new boss’s office to see him.  “Sing, Sing, Sing” plays on speakers in the background.  [Never mind that it’s 1933, and the song wouldn’t be written until 1935.  It’s the 1930’s, and there must be music to establish that it’s the 1930’s, so “Sing, Sing, Sing” is playing.  Isn’t that song required in every scene from the 1930’s?]  

You casually thumb through Wildenberg’s copy of Fortune magazine.  Although times are tight now, you dream that someday you’ll be sufficiently well-off to buy your own copy of this pricey monthly publication.  In a day when the average person’s salary is $38 a week and a loaf of bread costs eight cents, you can only dream of being able to afford this magazine, because a single issue of Fortune would set you back an entire dollar.  This particular issue has a lengthy article about the business of newspaper comic strips, which piques your interest because of your new career path.  The article discusses in depth how the syndicates make money and how some creators make LOTS of money from comics.  Some cartoonists rake in more than one hundred thousand dollars per year, and support lifestyles that would be the envy of any Hollywood star. 

Toward the end of the article, you sit up and take notice.  It informs you that advertisers have recently taken a liking to comics.  You learn that back in the dark ages of 1928, advertisers would have rejected the idea of placing their ads alongside the newspapers’ funny pages.  It was beneath them.  But now, with the Great Depression in full swing, advertisers had found that, decorum be damned, they would advertise in the comics if it brought them the results they were looking for.  They would even be willing to use the comic strip format to hawk their wares from custom-drawn comics strips within the comic sections of newspapers, and pay a record-breaking sum of seventeen thousand dollars per page to do it. This is eclipses previous record-high prices for a published advertising page ($11,500 in the Saturday Evening Post and $12,500 in Ladies’ Home Journal).   Over the course of the past five years, you learn, newspaper comics have evolved to become some of the world’s most prized advertising space.  

And it hits you.  That’s it!  That’s the spark you were looking for.  Comics and advertising!  That’s how you’ll make your mark.  That’s the golden ticket that will soon allow you to plunk down an entire dollar for just one magazine, or buy anything else you darned well please.  You’ll make booklets of comics, and sell them as premiums to advertisers.  You excitedly storm into your boss’s office and tell him about your epiphany.  Skeptical at first, your Sales Manager warms to the idea.

You and Wildenberg propose the idea to Procter & Gamble, who orders copies of “Funnies on Parade” as a mail-in premium.  Soon, other advertisers such as Canada Dry soft drinks, Kinney Shoes and Wheatena have bought your comic books.  Gulf Oil is paying Eastern to produce original material for “Gulf Funny Weekly”, a weekly publication available only at Gulf service stations.  You stick a price on some of your premium books and offer them to newsstands in New York City.  A quick sellout shows you that the public is not just willing, but eager, to pay ten cents for your pamphlets that present four-color reprints of newspaper comic strips.  The modern newsstand comic book is born, and you just invented it.  Within a few more years, comic books will be a multi-milliion dollar business, all because you read that article in Fortune magazine that connected comic books and advertisers.

***********************************************************************************************

Okay, much of that story above is complete and utter fiction made up by me.  For something much closer to the truth, start with the Wikipedia entries for Max Gaines and Eastern Color.  And if you haven’t done so already, for God’s sake, get a copy of David Hajdu’s The Ten Cent Plague and read it, cover-to-cover.

In particular, I took some known facts about Max Gaines, mixed in the fact that the April, 1933 Fortune magazine has a fascinating article about the newspaper comic industry that was published about the time the comic book was invented, blended it with my recent enjoyment of the second-person storytelling in the podcast “Imagined Life”, and… voila!  A mostly made-up story about the origin of the comic book.  But unlike your average “what if” story, this one is actually possible.  It’s entirely possible that Gaines or, more likely Wildenberg, was familiar with the article in Fortune.  Wildenberg could have even been contacted by the reporter who wrote the article.  It’s possible that this article is the reason the entire comic book industry exists.  And then again, it’s possible that in 1933,everybody in the world who was associated with newspapers and comic strips was aware of the success of newspaper comics strips, and therefore this article and the invention of the comic book were both inevitable but separate fruits that sprouted from a single seed.  We’ll probably never know.  

Needless to say,I was intrigued enough by the possibility of this article being the “secret origin of the comic book” that I just had to add one to my collection.

I know, I know.  Pics or it didn't happen.

Edited December 15, 2018 by SOTIcollector

[SOTIcollector]

More from Fortune, April, 1933

 

Edited December 15, 2018 by SOTIcollector

[SOTIcollector]

I came across another one.  And @sfcityduck, how's this for an obscure newspaper article?

Choate prep school's paper, December 8, 1951.  Check out "Modern Literature Plagues 20th Century Kiddies".  I love the picture of "A Christmas for Shacktown."

 

[generic user]

On ‎12‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 12:06 PM, SOTIcollector said:

Thanks so much!  I've had fun going back through these things that spend most of their lives in boxes.  Stay tuned!  Coming up is the one that I call the "Secret Origin of the Comic Book." 

I tremendously enjoyed this thread.  Thanks for sharing.

[SOTIcollector]

21 hours ago, generic user said:

I tremendously enjoyed this thread.  Thanks for sharing.

Glad you liked it.  Waiting in the wings to post when I get some time:  pre-SOTI comics.   The comic book industry wasn't going to take these attacks lying down.

[SOTIcollector]

And now, here's how some of the comics responded. 

Let's start with Marvel's responses to Wertham's 1948 Saturday Review of Literature article.  For months, most Marvel books contained one of these editorials.

 

[SOTIcollector]

In August, 1948, Fiction House responded by naming one of their villains "Dr. Wertham."  In the end, he's destroyed by a cat.

[SOTIcollector]

In January, Li'l Abner's Al Capp responded with this.

 

[SOTIcollector]

To be continued in 2019...

[goldust40]

Just read through this thread - a wonderful bit of work and some great archivism! Fascinating articles and finds.

[SOTIcollector]

On 12/21/2018 at 11:56 PM, SOTIcollector said:

In August, 1948, Fiction House responded by naming one of their villains "Dr. Wertham."  In the end, he's destroyed by a cat.

I guess I should have known that my post would be automatically edited, to remove a problematic word.  I wrote that he's destroyed by a p**** cat, but I guess that doesn't fly in these parts.

[Cat-Man_America]

On 1/6/2019 at 9:30 PM, SOTIcollector said:

I guess I should have known that my post would be automatically edited, to remove a problematic word.  I wrote that he's destroyed by a p**** cat, but I guess that doesn't fly in these parts.

That prophylactic zipper should keep it under wraps. 

[SOTIcollector]

Here's a recent score in the pre-SOTI department, although this one predates SOTI by only about a month.  SOTI was released in April, 1954; this report was dated March, 1954.

The NY State Legislature had a committee that was studying comic books, and that committee published reports in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, and 1957.  [I have no idea why they published nothing in 1953.  Anybody know or have any theories?]

My website has a page on the NY Legislative Committee, including a link to the full text of this 1954 document.

Seduction of the Innocent website - New York Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comic Books

 

[SOTIcollector]

And here's a teaser for another item coming up.  Why was there such a proliferation of crime comics in 1948?  The origin story is coming up.  Stay tuned!

[pmpknface]

1 hour ago, SOTIcollector said:

Here's a recent score in the pre-SOTI department, although this one predates SOTI by only about a month.  SOTI was released in April, 1954; this report was dated March, 1954.

The NY State Legislature had a committee that was studying comic books, and that committee published reports in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, and 1957.  [I have no idea why they published nothing in 1953.  Anybody know or have any theories?]

My website has a page on the NY Legislative Committee, including a link to the full text of this 1954 document.

Seduction of the Innocent website - New York Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comic Books

 

I so want a copy of this.....

[IngelsFan]

2 hours ago, SOTIcollector said:

Here's a recent score in the pre-SOTI department, although this one predates SOTI by only about a month.  SOTI was released in April, 1954; this report was dated March, 1954.

The NY State Legislature had a committee that was studying comic books, and that committee published reports in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, and 1957.  [I have no idea why they published nothing in 1953.  Anybody know or have any theories?]

My website has a page on the NY Legislative Committee, including a link to the full text of this 1954 document.

Seduction of the Innocent website - New York Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comic Books

 

Getting my hands on one of these is a grail for me. Thanks for sharing!