Comical comics
Comical comics |
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Page 18 of 34  Panel from / Love Lucy (Dell, 1955). Art/script: Anon. One of the many TV show adaptations. As the strip characters' fame grew, so the reprint book market went through a mini boom. In the 1920s, one publisher in particular became dominant: Cupples and Leon, famed for their books in a 10-by-1o-inch format. In the early 1930s, they were superseded by Whitman Publishing, who produced square books in a smaller format, with single comics panels on the right-hand page and text on the left; these were skilfully marketed as 'The Big Little Book Series', and proved to be immensely popular. The characters even became the focus for a series of 'bootleg' comics which parodied their antics by adding graphic sex. These remarkable items were the so-called 'Dirty Comics', or 'Tijuana Bibles', which flourished, albeit in a very marginalized sense, between the late 1920s and the late 1940s: eight-pages long, in black-and-white, they were sold 'under the counter'. Blondie, Popeye and many others were portrayed engaged in all manner of hardcore situations, typically accompanied by hilarious (in-character) dialogue. The publishers were anonymous, as were the artists, thus pre-empting any chance of legal action. These comics' alternative nature has meant that they have been regarded by some historians as the forerunners of the 1960s underground comix movement. The Dirty Comics aside, the transition to publications of original material was not a smooth one. There were a number of false starts, most notably the launch of The Funnies (Dell) in 1929, a tabloid comic of original strips based on the British model: it failed because people were reluctant to pay for something they considered should come free with their newspaper. The secret to success, it seemed, lay in the question of format: in 1934, a breakthrough was made in this respect with the launch of a reprint comic entitled Famous Funnies (Eastern Color). Masterminded by one Max C Gaines, this book was sized at a quarter the format of a Sunday page (roughly 10'x x 7 inches), with a high percentage of colour reproduction and a cover price of ten cents. It was as close to the modern American comic book as it was possible to get, and proved to be an unexpectedly healthy seller. |