Previously in Tony Isabella’s Bloggy Thing...
New Fun #1 [February 1935], promoted as “The Big Comic Magazine,” was the first DC Comics publication. That 10" by 15" launch issue was 36 pages (including covers) and published by National Allied Publications, Inc. The president of the company was former career soldier and pulp magazine writer Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and the editor was Lloyd Jacquet. The official name of the company changed to National Periodical Publications, but DC Comics was the name most knew it by and that name would become official in the 1970s.
DC Comics recently published a handsome oversized hardback reprint edition of New Fun #1, which contains the entire first issue plus a selection of educational material. I have written three blogs on that edition. Going page-by-page, those three columns discussed the introductory material, the front cover, the inside front cover and pages 1-28 of the issue. You can read those earlier installments here and here and here.
We commence with “Fun Films” by Adolphe Barreaux. The idea behind this feature was to take the panels of the story and turn them into a movie. The directions:
Cut out stage and make slits on the screen. Then cut out films on dotted line. Paste end to end and run through screen.
Tad, a young boy who lives near the New York harbor, is playing on the docks. He sees and follows a couple of pirates to their pirate ship. Something in the hold of the ship catches his interest, but, as he looks down into the hold, he falls in.
As I wrote in the first installment of this look at New Fun #1, Barreaux is arguably the first Black creator to have appeared in a comic book. He had a long and interesting career. He created “Sally the Sleuth,” who appeared in spicy pulp fiction magazines and had a habit of losing her clothes in the pursuit of criminals. Barreaux ran a comics art shop, contributed to many comics and pulp magazines and was an editor at Trojan Magazine and at a branch of Fawcett Publications.
“Bubby and Beevil” make their debut on page 30. Written and drawn by Dick Loederer, whose “Caveman Capers” I praised in my previous New Fun column, this strip has two very opposite lead characters. Bubby is a nice guy who loves to help people. Beevil is a sinister little creep who lives to mess up Bubby’s good deeds. They seem to be supernatural creatures of some sort.
In this first strip, Bubby gets up, does his exercise and looks for his next good deed. A nice young boy falls sleep while doing his homework. Bubby completes it for him. Beevil pours ink all over the homework while a horrified Bubby watches from the window.
I like this strip. I could even see updating it for 2020. I had a bit of success when I did that with Everett True back in the day. Maybe I should give it a shot.
Note: Beevil also makes an appearance in a house ad that runs along the bottom of page 31. The gloomy gnome is being, well, gloomy when a stray wind blows a copy of New Fun into his hands. He reads the comic and laughs out loud.
Page 31 introduces Pelion and Ossa by John Lindermayer. Pelion is a young penguin, Ossa is a young bear and they live in the Arctic. The kids are named after mountains in Greece. After a frigid mishap with a sled, they seek shelter and warmth in an cabin. The cabin is empty, but, in the final panel, they look through a window and see someone flying toward the cabin. “Who can it be?” asks the final caption. We’re still a few years away from the first appearance of Superman, so I’m gonna guess Santa Claus.
Lindermayer drew the “Oswald the Rabbit” comic strips that ran at the bottom of several comic strips in the earlier pages of New Fun #1. He also worked for several comic-book shops.
[NOTE: I guessed wrong. I sneaked a look at the second Pelion and Ossa from issue #2. The house belong to a Mr. Walrus. However, the second strip doesn’t mention anything about him flying through the air. I wonder if there was a change of plans for the strip after the first issue was completed.]
2023: Super-Police by Ken Fitch (writer) and Clem Gretter (artist) debuts on the last interior page of New Fun #1. Rex, obviously the hero of the series, and Professor Shanley take off in Shanley’s new invention, a stratoplane-submarine called the Hi-Lo. They’re going to the Galapagos Islands to investigate five missing U.S. ships. As they leave, they are boarded by two unwanted passengers: Shanley’s daughter Joan and the cab driver who brought her to the airfield. Despite its science fiction premise and decent writing and art by Fitch and Gretter - they would be all over the Golden Age of Comic Books - this strip is dull. Hopefully, it got more interesting in subsequent installments.
The inside back cover is a full-page advertisement for the Ideal Aeroplane and Model Company, sellers of model airplane and ships. The prices range from 50 cents to six dollars. In 2020, allowing for inflation, that range would be from $9.49 to $113.83. I doubt many kids of 1935 had that kind of disposable income.
The back cover ad is a comic-strip advertisement starring “Tom Mix and His Ralston Straight Shooters” by an unknown writer and artist. One of the straight shooters saves the day by using a “Zyp Gun” to send a message to Mix. That’s followed by the cowboy hero telling readers how Ralston wheat cereal keeps his young friends strong and healthy. The back cover also contains a coupon. If a reader sent in a Ralston box top, they would get a Zyp Gun “exactly like the one Jimmy used to save your life.” Such a deal.
This “Famous 1st Edition” has additional material after the New Fun #1 reprint. “The Major Who Made Comics” is a wonderful short bio of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson by Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, his granddaughter. The writers and artists of the material in the first issue get mini-bios in another text piece. To conclude this great presentation, editor Benjamin Le Clear has a short piece about the preparation of this volume and the other “Famous First Edition” tabloid books of the 1970s. Le Clear is also the manager of the DC Comics Library Archives. I visited the DC offices a few years back and the company’s library is amazing.
That’s a wrap on our four-part discussion of this important first for DC Comics. I hope you enjoyed it.
I’ll be back with more bloggy fun as soon as possible. Until then, stay safe, stay sane and be kind to one another.
© 2020 Tony Isabella
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