Let's Discuss Hillman

[Poztron]

I've been enjoying the Hillman spotlight here on DCM over the past weeks, with more to come. I find Hillman intriguing for a number of reasons.

First, based on longevity, it must have been a successful publisher, yet it has received short shrift from comics fans, AFIK. Back in the comics fandom of the '60s, which is the era I know best (thus dating myself terribly), it was all about EC, DC, Marvel/Timely, MLJ (to a limited extent), and Carl Barks. Fox and Lev Gleason got some discussion, but often in unfavorable terms. I can't recall Hillman comics being discussed much at all.

Second, Hillman maintained a consistent level of reasonable quality and a pretty consistent "house look," especially compared to some publishers like Ace or Avon, who strike me as having bounced all over the place in terms of approaches to covers, story lettering, art styles, etc.  This speaks to a certain kind of "vision" on the part of Hillman. (EC, of course, was probably the King of a consistent vision, with the same artists, logo styles, cover designs, etc. employed for all of its peak years.)

Third, in reading various Airboy stories I've been struck by what a cypher Airboy seems to be. Even his plane, Birdie (with the flapping wings), displays more personality than Airboy. (Maybe this lack of charisma is what condemned the character - and by association, Hillman - to the margins.)

Anyone have further thoughts on Hillman?

[JonTheScanner]

I recall some fandom discussion of the Heap in the 60s, but that's about all.

[darkmark (RIP)]

You shoulda been around for Eclipse's Airboy revival!

[Yoc]

The Heap gets praise for influencing a couple other 'muck monsters' from the 70s.  When I read some I was struck by how similar he was especially to the Marvel Man-Thing.

[narfstar]

By the time fandom was big so were superheroes. Hillman did not publish superheroes for long and they were not very memorable. Lets face it you are not going to get a lotta good press on Boy King, even though the character was interesting and different. He was their big star superhero and was only on 8 covers in nine issues. Nightmare was pretty cool but they removed his cool costume early. Of course they should have been number one with Microface Victory and Miracle Comics only had 4 issues each. So it is easy to see why they did not get big fan press. Not sure why Airboy was not a bigger hit though.

[Poztron]

Good point, narfstar, re superheroes and fandom. My experience of comics fandom was that from Jerry Bails and Alter-Ego from the git go, superheroes were the predominant focus. '62-'63 DC was only beginning to pull itself somewhat out of the Weisinger universe and launching a few revivals and/or new superheroes (the Atom, Flash, etc.) and Marvel hadn't gotten ramped up quite yet with its superheroes, so a lot of the emphasis was on Golden Age superheroes. I enjoyed superheroes well enough, but by the late '60s I was pretty burnt out on the genre, so I shifted over to SF fandom.

However, I've got a crank theory (unsupported by any empirical evidence) that a lot of the smaller publishers did not have good distribution for much of the country. Manhattan had those big honking newsstands all over the place on street corners, but I think for much of the U.S. comics were mainly found in drugstore racks, which could only hold so much.  It's my guess that in much of the country, all that got distributed were the biggest publishers (Atlas/DC/Fawcett/Dell/Archie/Harvey/Classics Illustrated) so those were the books that people were nostalgic for. If they never saw Hillman titles, they wouldn't have even been aware of them, much less nostalgic for them.

One of the benefits of DCM and CBPlus is that we can now acquaint ourselves with all the publishers we were never familiar with previously. Gaining a global overview of the whole field has been invaluable.

[narfstar]

Does anyone know of any mom and pop rural drug store owners from the 40's that are still alive? I wonder what they would say about getting Prize, Lev Gleason and Hillman books.