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Pictures of old Comic stands
Drusilla lives!:
Well here's some more comments (and numbers) from that Nicky Wright book...
--- Quote ---... Sales of the 143 titles on the newsstands in 1942 were rising at an unprecedented rate with 15 million comics being sold every month. With sales to a captive market overseas (hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen), circulation rates kept going up, up and up.
Fiction House good girl comics were just the thing our boys needed over there. The company's "Big Six of the Comics," as Fiction House promoted itself, had combined sales totaling 737,000 a month by September 1942. Just like movie star actresses such as Betty Grable, Sheena was lording it in the barrack rooms across Britian and the Far East. Senorita Rio traveled in many a soldier's kit...
Compared to Superman's 1,100,000 bi-monthly sale, Fiction House's 737,000 for six titles is quite small. This figure was to nearly double in the next couple of years, thanks partly to the vastly increased number of U.S. forces stationed around the globe. At the time these figures were issued, Parents Magazine's "True Comics," "Real Hero Comics" and "Calling All Girls" were chalking up 750,000 a month, Quality's nine titles, including "Police Comics," sold 1,100,000 monthly, Marvel's ten comics sold 1,250,000 while Street & Smith who published "The Shadow," "Doc Savage" and "Supersnipe," and five other comic books, chalked up monthly sales of 1,285,000. Nevertheless, Harry Donenfeld's National Comics outsold everybody else with sales of 1,375,000. Except Fawcett. By July 1943, Fawcett's 14 comics had a combined circulation of over 7,400,000. And "Captain Marvel Adventures" passed Superman to become the biggest selling comic of all time. ...
--- End quote ---
... the bold highlights on that Fawcett data was my touch, just incredible numbers IMO. Now you know why DC wanted to crush Fawcett and in particular Captain Marvel... what a shocking phenom that Captain Marvel character was IMO. And yet today he is mostly forgotten... SHAZAM!!!!!
Yoc:
I wouldn't call it overly shocking DL.
Crime Does Not Pay becoming a number 1 book after years of Superman/Capt Marvel and Dell books being #1 is more of a shock to me. Capt Marvel was another of the hero books started by Superman.
---
You might not be a fan of the SOTI book but the 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency talked a lot about comic distribution, numbers and methods that I would think you might find interesting. I sure did even if it does take time to read all of it.
Here is the main link which gives a short synopsis of each person's testimony:
http://www.thecomicbooks.com/1954senatetranscripts.html
You can find some circulation numbers in the testimony of Monroe Froehlich, Jr., Business Manager of Magazine Management Co. (Marvel Comics). Here's the link:
http://www.thecomicbooks.com/froehlich.html
You will also see some distribution numbers in the testimony of Mrs. Helen Meyer, Vice president of Dell here:
http://www.thecomicbooks.com/meyermurphy.html
Harold Chamberlain, Circulation director the Independent News Co. (DC) where he talks about killing off specific titles like "Frankenstein," "Out of the Night," "Forbidden Worlds," and "Clutching Hand". He takes credit for forcing Prize into making Frankenstein a humour comic.
http://www.thecomicbooks.com/chamberlain.html
George B. Davis, President of Kable News Co. (EC's distributer) also quotes some numbers for his own company -
http://www.thecomicbooks.com/davis.html
-Yoc
Drusilla lives!:
And now that I think about it (after reviewing that Nicky Wright book), it was WWII that briefly spurred the growth of comic sales to unrealistic/unsustainable levels.
Anyway, my (very brief) current take on the early history of comics (at least from a financial/distribution/demographic POV) is...
(1930-1940)
- Pulp magazine publishers in the mid-to-late 1930s needed to find a new print medium to expand into... one which would be more "visual" based to counter the coming age of electronic media. Don't forget, radio was big, but prototype televisions were being developed in the 30s, and their potential was clear... what they (as well as the movies) offered the public was a new (visual) way of consuming/telling stories (the sequential visual narrative). Thus, with this in mind and seeing the success of funny page reprint titles such as Eastern's "Famous Funnies," many of them began producing comic books... if not as a replacement to their pulps, at least as a supplement to them. And in my opinion, this is reflected in the style and tone of many of these early comics... in concept, at his core, Superman was a (science fiction) pulp character really... as was the early Batman (in essence a crime pulp character).
- This new format caught on with children (for various reasons) instead of what (IMO) its original intended audience was... adults. And by 1940 the vast majority of comic books purchased seem to be purchased by children and not adults... which raised concerns in various circles about content... hence, the birth of the Werthams of the world.
(1941-45)
- The U.S. enters WWII. There is a further surge in sales... this time among adults (military service personnel)... which, btw, was never to be seen again.
(1945-50)
- By late 1945, with the war over, sales (at least among adults) declined to pre-war levels... wanting to keep that audience the comic industry reinvented itself somewhat (as did the movie industry before it)... by introducing new titles and genres that they hoped would interest them. In particular, romance and later horror. Crime comics (which always paid... despite what Lev Gleason stated on his comic) were also re-imagined (to be more like their pulp predecessors... although, Gleason's book was always so IMO), as were the jungle comics. Unfortunately, this usually meant they became more violent and sexualized... particularly in the hands of such people as Victor Fox.
- As early as 1948 you already had too many comics... some of which of questionable content for their real audience (children). Unfortunately, these very same titles were "high profile" ones... and hence, were easy targets for crusaders of various stripes.
(1950-56)
- In the early 50s, with another boom in comics due to the horror genre (and a larger population of children, and both older adolescents and college bound twenty somethings who might have read comics in their earlier youth), the stands were eventually glutted with titles that many newsstand retailers had no interest or time in contending with.
- Unfortunately, it seems the majority of adults of that era didn't embrace the comic book medium and (IMO) at best, viewed it as a novelty of the war years (or of their youth). Which is very unfortunate, for (again IMO) some of these comics were extremely well done... consisting of superb art and very well written, creative stories. Which I think would have held (and appealed to) the imagination of a large number of these older readers. There was also unfortunately a lot of pandering "copy-cat" trash being published as well... more than the market could bear... and which gave further fuel to the self-appointed "do-gooders" of the world.
Thus IMO...
-The "implosion" of the mid 50s was inevitable.
Drusilla lives!:
--- Quote from: Yoc on July 22, 2010, 01:18:11 PM ---I wouldn't call it overly shocking DL.
Crime Does Not Pay becoming a number 1 book after years of Superman/Capt Marvel and Dell books being #1 is more of a shock to me. Capt Marvel was another of the hero books started by Superman.
---
You might not be a fan of the SOTI book but the 1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency talked a lot about comic distribution, numbers and methods that I would think you might find interesting. I sure did even if it does take time to read all of it.
Here is the main link which gives a short synopsis of each person's testimony:
http://www.thecomicbooks.com/1954senatetranscripts.html
You can find some circulation numbers in the testimony of Monroe Froehlich, Jr., Business Manager of Magazine Management Co. (Marvel Comics). Here's the link:
http://www.thecomicbooks.com/froehlich.html
You will also see some distribution numbers in the testimony of Mrs. Helen Meyer, Vice president of Dell here:
http://www.thecomicbooks.com/meyermurphy.html
Harold Chamberlain, Circulation director the Independent News Co. (DC) where he talks about killing off specific titles like "Frankenstein," "Out of the Night," "Forbidden Worlds," and "Clutching Hand". He takes credit for forcing Prize into making Frankenstein a humour comic.
http://www.thecomicbooks.com/chamberlain.html
George B. Davis, President of Kable News Co. (EC's distributer) also quotes some numbers for his own company -
http://www.thecomicbooks.com/davis.html
-Yoc
--- End quote ---
Thanks for these links Yoc, I'll take a look at them when I get a chance. I actually think I remember reading that hearing info awhile back when we were discussing EC and Wertham on the other site.
Yes, if I recall correctly, at the 1954 hearing Dell was said to have been the largest comics publisher of the era... with success coming from the Disney characters like Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. Now how that fits with Wright's comments I'm not sure... perhaps that was in the post-war (late 40s) period.
John C:
There are no magazines or magazine racks in the picture, but some of you might (ahem) vaguely recognize the subject matter as having something of an (cough, cough) influence on certain comic books of the day:
http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j270/JohnnyGunn/GSI_NY_Worlds_Fair_Perisphere.jpg
This is from a series of pictures produced, well, at the end of the '30s, by the Farm Security Administration, armed with spankin' brand-new Kodachrome film. So that's a real color image of what seems to be the Golden Age's most famous landmark. (Heh--not that I'd probably recognize it as such, had Roy Thomas not used it so prominently and slightly-but-intentionally-anachronistically in All-Star Squadron.)
This picture surfaced with many others here:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/12/7/04913/9030
which someone passed on to me after I brought up the earlier Albert Kahn pictures using the first industrial color, rather than commercial, film (http://citynoise.org/article/10598) and the still earlier Prokudin-Gorskii multiple-plate color exposures (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/), though they aren't quite as relevant to the topic at hand, so forget I mentioned them...
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