Print

[jimmm kelly]

A couple of things I've been paying attention to lately . . . actually things I noticed when I was younger, but I'm starting to pay attention to them again.

One thing is the profile pages, such as those on Hollywood stars. Sometimes they are about well-known actors like Mickey Rooney or Cary Grant, but often I will find an actor I either didn't know or had forgotten. Sometimes the artists on these pages are unidentified, but their style of art is often photo-realistc.

When I was younger, I noticed these pages back when DC did the FAMOUS FIRST EDITIONS--where I believe most of the art was done by Jack Burnley. But even before that I remember seeing similar art by Burnley for the sports papers that my brother bought when we were kids.

Well, okay, this kind of feature might be something that a lot of other readers notice--but I also have a renewed interest in something that maybe most people would overlook. This is the part at the top of the page where it will often give the name of the comic book or the feature.

When I first started buying comics, this part had already been cut from most comics. I'd see it on the DC 80 PAGE GIANTS, but on the new comics it was gone. I assume that this part was chopped to give more space for the art on the pages. But I always wonder why they put that text at the top of the page in the first place. When I got back issues, I found it a curiosity and a signature of the comic's age. I considered it old fashioned as opposed to the more efficient use of the page in the new comics I was buying.

Since then I've usually overlooked this aspect of the page, but recently I was scanning a page from an early '60s issue of THE FLASH and I realized that the font for "THE FLASH" has speed lines on it just like the title logo for THE FLASH. That got me looking at the tops of the pages for other comics and seeing what kinds of differences there were between titles as well as between publishers. Even when the text is a standard font, it's interesting to note the font used by a particular publisher as opposed to another.

Looking at the comics on CB+ I notice that some old publishers apparently didn't put this text at the top of the page--or else scanners are simply chopping off that bit when they scan the page. I could see why some early publishers might have put this text on the page to compensate for the fact that the reprinted dailies or Sundays didn't quite fit the standard comic book page--or maybe it was a convention that they borrowed from some Sunday sections.

I'm sure some of the comic historians around here have a better explanation for the existence of this top of page text and its absence from other comics.

[crashryan]

Comics with missing cover titles are relics of the way comics, and many other magazines, used to be sold in the USA. Today the retailer (e.g. a comic shop) pays the distributor up front for the comics s/he sells. Back in comics' heyday they were sold on consignment. A retailer (newsstand, drugstore) received a certain number of comics from the distributor. Their wholesale price would be charged to the retailer's account. After a certain period of time, the retailer returned unsold comics to the distributor. Their cost was credited back to the retailer. The retailer only paid for comics he sold. Sending back huge bundles of unsold comics proved an expensive hassle, so distributors allowed retailers to strip the cover titles from unsold books and return only these strips to receive their credit. The  retailer was then supposed to destroy the stripped comics. In practice many retailers sold them to pick up a few ill-gotten bucks. This scam was common enough that in some 1950s comics (paperbacks, too) you'll find announcements saying that if you're reading a stripped book you've bought stolen goods, and urging readers not to buy stripped copies.

The question of the top-of-the-page titles is interesting. I always figured they were inspired by the layout of novels, which used to run the book title and sometimes the chapter titles on the top of each page. Perhaps companies like DC felt top titles worked as a subliminal promotional tool. Instead of titles some companies put exciting captions ("Commit a crime and the world is made of glass!") on story pages. I suppose the idea was to attract a kid who was flipping through the comic at the newsstand. I notice the British story papers used this technique a lot. I presume publishers did away with page toppers because they were just another thing to worry about when assembling an issue, and they figured they wouldn't lose anything by dumping them.

[jimmm kelly]

I know that the covers were torn off for returns, but it never came into my head that there was a connection between that and the text titles at the top of old comics--even though I used to identify some of the old comics in our house by the text at the top of the page. My father was a postman and it was common to rip off the covers and return them for undeliverable comics and magazines. A lot of the comics in our house were missing covers.

I've been looking at REG'LAR FELLERS HEROIC COMICS  No. 7--which features the debut of Man O'Metal--and this comic is a great example for both of the things I've been taliking about. It has Star Flashes by Charles Bruno--a profile page on Hollywood stars of the day. And the story pages have distinctive title logos at the top for each feature. Published by Eastern Color, I think the intent is to make the original features look like the newspaper strips reprinted in the same issue.

[SuperScrounge]

I think Star Flashes was a newspaper comic/filler reprinted in the comic book.

There seemed to be quite a few of these celebrity trivia things in old newspapers which would be used as filler in comic books. Unfortunately my list of such confirmed titles is on a computer which is currently dead at the moment.