Anyone know anything about 1938 political comic "Gagging the Dictators" by Ace?

[gravitywave]

Hello all, I'm new to this forum, I've been encouraged (by Yoc) to post info about this item for your comments.

I have a copy of a comic book called "Gagging The Dictators - the comedy of terrors", published in New York in 1938 by Ace Magazines. It is a collection of political cartoons from around the world all poking fun at the dictators of the time, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. It has 50 B&W pages, with one to four cartoons per page and also text. It has a colour cover and blue-and-white full page illustrations on the inside covers.

Most of the cartoons have source credits to other papers - too many to give an exhaustive list, but for example Detroit News, Chicago News, and many other US newspapers plus European papers like Humanité (Paris), London Daily Herald, Glasgow Record, Birmingham Mail, Krokodil (Moscow), Kladderadatsch (Berlin), Simplicissimus (Munich). There are a few uncredited pictures too which may presumably be original artwork for this issue, I'm not sure.

I'd like to find out more about the item, and would appreciate any knowledge you might have to offer or leads which I could follow up. Thanks.

And here are a few images:

[Yoc]

Tweaked the title to encourage more readers.
Google only mentions this comic once in a reference to a book on Amazon.

[Roygbiv666]

There's also a copy in this Historical Association:
http://www.etsu.edu/cass/archives/Collections/afindaid/a578.html

but don't see any other info about the book.

Google also popped up this weird match, but I don't read the language:
http://resources3.kb.nl/010860000/pdf/DDD_010864025.pdf

gravitywave may be the only source of information ...

Tweaked the title to encourage more readers.
Google only mentions this comic once in a reference to a book on Amazon.

[paw broon]

The newspaper is from  Batavia, nowadays Jakarta, and is in Dutch but it will take me a while to get even the gist of it.  The article on page 2 begins by saying it's one of the best books from Ace and the subject is the 3 great dictators, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin and goes on to list some of the jokes about them.  Still struggling to find any other refs.

[JVJ (RIP)]

In case some of you haven't discovered this:

Go to Google and click the downward triangle at "More" and select "Translate"

Copy the source text, in this case whichever part of the newspaper you want to translate.
Select "Detect Language" and paste the text into the Translate box.

Google will tell you which language it thinks it is and give you a rough (and it can be very ROUGH) translation.

FWIW.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[Yoc]

thanks Jim.
gravitywave is generously working on getting DCM a complete scan.

[gravitywave]

Perhaps "slowly" would be more accurate than "generously"   I'll do my best.

Thanks for the interest, folks. I saw the Dutch article - it appears to be a review in that paper (Bataaviaasche Nieuwsblad) of this book, review dated 29 December 1938. It includes some quotes and descriptions of the cartoons (some in English) but I don't think it's going to tell us much more.

The other printed reference, which Yoc briefly mentioned above, is a cultural studies text -- Benjamin Alpers "Dictators, Democracy and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s", first published 1965 apparently but now reissued, extracts here http://tinyurl.com/bmfhqdh

A couple of questions for you - the web sources I've looked at, for example the listing on the DCM home page, commonly show the starting date for Ace as 1940. But this book is from 1938. Are there other Ace issues from before 1940? Also it doesn't have the Ace logo. Was that adopted later?

[tilliban]

Though my avatar flamboyantly brandishes the lovable ACE logo, there's not much I can add to the discussion.
Seems no one ever cared for early Ace books and comics.

I can read Dutch fluently. The newspaper article just retells some jokes to be found in the book.
A lenghty one about Hitler and his finance minister Schacht in search of cups for left-handed people in a jewish store, one about Görings numerous medals he even wears at night attached to his pyjamas, one about Il Duce and one about Stalin (punch lines are in English) and a last one about queuing in Russia (the gag being that there's two queues - one for normal citizens and one for privileged citizens). Ha.
So that was no help at all.

All we know is that Aaron A. Wyn founded ACE MAGAZINES in the early 1930s and published pulps. In the 40s he went for comic books as well.
But he must have published normal books as well.
"Gagging the Dictators" must have been a one-shot love project. As it is NO comic book it won't pop up on our radar let alone the usual comic book databases.

When I did my website about Ace horror books from the 50s, I found ZILCH information about the company. They just ran along with the rest of the pack. They never pioneered in anything, so they didn't reach "celebrity" status.

It's good to know they maybe DID - by publishing "Gagging the Dictators".
We'd be honoured to have a scan up here at DCM.

[SuperScrounge]

Not much, but I did find a couple of lines about it in a Walter Winchell column (Rochester Democrat And Chronicle - October 23, 1938)

"Gagging The Dictators" is something new, but what an easy way to make a living! The best is a sketch from the Portland Oregonian. It shows Adolf, the house painter, inspecting the Kaiser's old slogan, "Me and Gott." and remarking: "How wordy!"