The recent batch of Hello Buddies, with issue numbers rising into the 80s, started me wondering. Which American comics had the longest runs (i.e., the greatest number of issues)? I limit the question to American comics partly because they're what I know best and partly because the industries were so different in different countries. British comics, so many of which were weeklies, easily ran up many hundreds of issues before folding or being absorbed. In France and Italy many digest and striscie-format comics lasted 300-400 issues. I don't know what the situation was like in Mexico and South America.
Golden and Silver Age American comics, issued monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly, seem to have been much more driven by changes in pop culture tastes than European comics. Superheroes, westerns, romance and war comics came and went. Some genres, like crime and horror comics, simply went stayed went, until revived somewhat by the demise of the Comics Code. Usually the cancellation of a title meant the end of its run. However Charlton and some other publishers merely changed the masthead and continued numbering from an earlier title. Technically this isn't a "continuous run," but I won't argue.
One thing I've noticed is that superheroes, supposedly the centerpiece of American comic books, seldom outlasted genres like romance and war. The Archie comic family also lasted a long, long time. I also notice that only a tiny number of American comics lived on past the Golden Age. Detective, Action, and Adventure were anomalies. Funny that they were all DC's.
Today the comics market is at once so fragmented and so monolithic that I'll set an arbitrary end point for my query. Let's say 1980. So my question to you is: which American comics had the longest runs between 1935 and 1980?
This is a difficult question to answer, given that we haven't defined, very specifically, what a "run" entails. The listed end points of some of these "runs", are arbitrary, based on a mere slight wording change of the title, but that so-called changing point is NOT really significant, because the book's features changed little, or not at all at that point, and the publisher was the same, and the page count was the same, and the stars of ALL the feature stories were the same, and the print run probably had the same amount (in the case of "Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies" changing to merely "Looney Tunes". I'm not sure that I would deem the changeovers from "Terry-Toons" (leased to Timely) to "Terry-Toons" leased to St. John, to "Paul Terry's Comics" to "New Terry-Toons" leased to Pines, or to Dell. or then the changeover to Western's own Gold Key imprint even WITH a numbering change, designates the stopping of a "publishing run". The same goes for "Walt Disney's Comics and Stories" from its morphing from "Mickey Mouse Magazine" in 1940 to its transition from Western Publishing's lessor, Dell Comics to its publisher's own Gold Key imprint in 1963, to its temporary stoppage in 1982 and then to its 1986 resurrection published by Gladstone Comics, and through its runs of being published by Disney in-house, then Gladstone again, then Gemstone, then Boom, and currently IDW. It ran uninterrupted from "Mickey Mouse Magazine's start in 1935, through the end of "Walt Disney's Comics and Stories" 's Gold Key run in 1982, with Disney being the copyright holder, and thjat firm having contracted out publishing rights to Whitman Publishing Co. (which was the parent company of Western Publishing, who published it themselves, or through its subsidiary, KK Publications, or leased the franchise to Dell Comics, or published it again, themselves through its own Gold Key Comics subsidiary. A case might be made for Mickey Mouse Magazine and Walt Disney's Comics & Stories being different entities, but NOT for any of Whitman's changeovers between 1940 through 1982 (including their employment of Dell Comics as an imprint and distributor.
Unfortunately, I know nothing about Superhero comics. So, I am not sure about Superman and Batman's National/DC runs. But I would guess that Superman ran without stoppage, from its start in 1938 through 1980, and probably all the way to today (and Batman the same from its start (in 1939?).
Personally, I'm not sure that I would mark the "changeover" of Western Publishing's "The Funnies" to "New Funnies" at numbers 64 and 65 as the stop of one run, and the start of a different book's run, as little changed in the make-up of one book to the next, other than Walter Lantz overseeing production. Lantz already had some of his own features in the series starting with "The Funnies No. 61".
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Topic: Longest-Running American Comics? (Read 837 times)
