History of Comic Books
...e very bad daily life they had to go through back then. In 1933 the Eastern Color press was thinking of a way to better use their printing equipment and came up with the first actual multi-page comic book. First comic books were reprints of Sunday comics called “Funnies on Parade” and was given away for free. The next year Eastern Press printed a comic book called “Famous Funnies” which were sold in 10 cents throughout stores. This book was highly successful and Eastern began printing a monthly edition. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster came up with “the Superman of Metropolis” after being inspired by a novel titled “Gladiator” with super-human like attributes and powers. There was a highly favorable response to this comic so they kept on making new ones. They got a deal with the president at DC comics. This comic appeared in May 1938 and was a big success that was continued for a long time. By 1941 there were many super-heroes. One in particular “Captain Marvel” sold over 2 million copies a month. This comic even made some political points, one main one was a picture of Captain America punching Hitler. As the war ended so did the prime era of super-heroes. Funny animals became popular; Walt Disney’s Comics were quite popular in the early 40’s. The teen comic Archie was also very successful. Around the late 40’s horror comics started to flourish, ACG came out with “Adventures of the Unknown.” The year before Avon Publishing came out with Eerie comics, but those didn’t last for very long. It became popular to depict with very large breasts then called “headlights”, often times the rear view of women were shown when they were bent over. A certain recollection of this was a senator’s young boy caught looking at a comic called “Betty” that was very revealing. This did not go over very well with the mother and the senator himself. Fiction comics started becoming popular in the early fifties. This is also the time the war against comics had broken out. “Readers Digest” told of a report by a paranoid psychologist saying that these comics caused these boys to rob, rape, bully, and have bad grades. A comic book by Wertham that was published had examples of sex and violence in comics titled “Seduction of the Innocent.” All of this ended up in many schools and PTA groups having comic book burnings in many cities. Comics were banned in many cities and some store owners refused to put out any other comics besides Bugs Bunny, Archie, and Walt Disney’s comics. At some places even superman would not be put onto sales racks. All of this war against comics sent them basically down the drain which they would not ever hardly recover from. Some writers gave up on publishing. Mainly only DC and Atlas (which would later become Marvel) still published titles. Comics were almost down for forever by 1955. There was a Comics Code Authority that put regulations on many things, many publishers had to change a lot. 2-piece bathing suits couldn’t be ...