[macsnafu]

Comic books have long had text stories of 1 or 2 pages, especially in the early days before letters pages were common, but it's not often that comics have had longer prose stories like this. And this is surprisingly early!

Link to the book: *** Link No Longer Exists: Captain Marvel Story Book 1 ***

[positronic1]

Comic books have long had text stories of 1 or 2 pages, especially in the early days before letters pages were common, but it's not often that comics have had longer prose stories like this. And this is surprisingly early!

Fawcett published all kinds of magazines, including pulp fiction magazines. With the established popularity of Captain Marvel as a character, Fawcett tried exploiting him in as many different types of print publications as possible. The CM Story Book was a fiction magazine, and there were Dime Action Books (Fawcett's answer to Big Little Books) and coloring books as well as "Mighty Midget" pocket comics. The trend was generally the opposite way -- to adapt pulp fiction magazine characters TO comic books, as pulp fiction magazine sales generally tended to dwindle from their peak of popularity in the 1920s, while comic book sales continued to go UP. Adventure-type comic stories really started by adapting Tarzan and Buck Rogers from the pulp magazine stories they first appeared in, but Flash Gordon and Sheena also tried to buck that trend by moving the opposite way into their own pulp fiction magazines (neither of them was successful either). Generally speaking, most comic books only carried text features by dint of the fact that a minimal number of pages of text were required by the U.S. Post Office in order for the comic book to qualify for the 2nd Class mailing permit needed to offer subscriptions.