Eastern Color Printing Company was the company that reinvisioned the formation of the comic book industry
An unemployed Jewish novelty salesman named Maxwell C. Gaines (Max Ginzberg) had a brilliant idea: he enjoyed reading old comic strips like
Joe Palooka,
Mutt and Jeff,
Hairbreadth Harry
maybe the rest of America would too.
pioneering figure in the creation of the modern comic book. In 1933, when Gaines devised the first four-color, saddle-stitched newsprint pamphlet, a precursor to the color-comics format that became the standard for the American comic book industry.
Gaines and his colleague Harry L. Wildenberg soon published in February 1934 Famous Funnies #1, Series 1, the first American retail comic book.
side note: we already talked about a comic book format, everything before this book should not be concidered a “comic Book” due to the content and book making style.
to all so called comic historians send the hate mail to me
this text below is from here
Harry I. Wildenberg, among his duties were to come up with ideas to keep the color presses going. He suggested the idea of a comic book used for advertising to Gulf Oil Company, one of his clients.
They liked the idea and hired a few artists to create Gulf Comic Weekly among them were Stan Schendel who did The Uncovered Wagon, Victor (last name unknown) did Curly and the Kids and Svess (last name unknown) doing Smileage. These were one full page, full color comic pictures. The entire comic was 4 pages long and had a format of 10 ½ by 15. The comic was given away at Gulf Gas Stations making them probably the first comic book published and distributed outside of the newspaper market. The comic was advertised on radio (telling people to go to Gulf Gas stations to get them) on April 30th 1933.
Much to everybodys surprise, the comics proved an very effective draw to the gas stations. People were quickly coming in and snatching them all up. Gulf decided to print out 3 million copies a week had the name changed to Comics Funnies Weekly. The series remained in tabloid sized and lasted 422 issues, ending on May 23, 1941.
A few weeks after coming up with the tabloid sized comic book, Wildenberg came up with the idea of doing a comic book. He said he got it when reading a tabloid sized comic strip page, folded it in half, then in half again. He noticed it was a convenient size for reading comics. He also thought publishing it with 32 or 64 pages would be a good size.
Wildenberg wasn’t the first to use this format though. From 1880′s to 1910′s the size was popular for reprinted comic pages. Pulp Dime Novels were already using that size and the Ledger Syndicate was also using 7 by 9 format for their Sunday newspaper comic strip inserts.
Convinced his idea would be popular Wildenberg secured the rights from many major Syndicates for to reprint their various comic strips. Among them, Associated, Bell, Fisher, McNaught and Public Ledger Syndicate. He had an artist make up a few hand make comics for demonstration purposes and then has his sales staff go around to all of Eastern Color’s biggest advertisers.
The first to respond (by telegram) was Procter and Gamble, asking for a million 32 page color comic book.
The comic published in the spring of 1933, was called Funnies on Parade. Most remarkable about was it set a format standard, 8″ x 11″ . All 1 million copies were given away in a few weeks. The comic came with coupons for Proctor & Gamble products.
to be continued
side note: Harry I. Wildenberg said he couldn’t understand how anybody could read them. All he cared about is they had commercial potential and used that to keep the printers running.
Tags: comicbooks