#0226: Terry and the Pirates [Popped Wheat Giveaway] (1947)

This is one of the most confusing books that we have in the corpus.

First of all, the whole "Promotional" section of The Overstreet Price Guide is a little bit confusing to begin with. Let's just stick with the Terry and the Pirates section. There are two entries, one for comic books published by Dell (1939-1953) and one for comic books published by Libby's Radio Premium (1941). The Dell section includes nine different titles, some of which seem, at first glance, to possibly be the same. For instance, they list a "Buster Brown Shoes giveaway (1938)" and a "Shoe Store giveaway" also from 1938. My first reaction was to wonder if those aren't the same thing? But since they are listed with different page counts, so probably they were different things.

This book, which got randomly selected into our corpus, is listed by Overstreet as "Popped Wheat Giveaway (1938) - Strip reprints in full color; Caniff-a". Well, that's what this is - a sixteen-page comic book reprinting Terry and the Pirates in color by Caniff with an ad for Popped Wheat on the back cover. So, good. Right?

Not so fast. The GCD lists this comic book as having been published in 1947 - not 1938 - alongside a whole host of other Popped Wheat giveaways. This has a great deal of credence, because, well, those books are advertised on the back of this one. Further, the GCD notes that this wasn't published by Dell, but by a company called Sig Feuchtwanger. Interestingly, the entry itself indicates that there is no publisher listed, but Sig Feuchtwanger is clearly indicated in our copy.

So, not Dell. But is it 1938? Well, the copy we have has a 1938 copyright in the indicia. But that is likely because the reprinted strips are from 1938 (and 1939). Given that this comic book contains comic strips from January 1939, it seems impossible to believe that it was published in 1938.

So, we have accepted the dating of this as 1947 and agree with the GCD, but we bought our copy from MyComicShop, who list it as appearing in 1938 (they have a couple for sale here, cheap!). Thus, we disagree with two of our three data sources on this one.

The confusion extends elsewhere. AbeBooks lists two copies for sale, one dated 1938 and one dated 1947 even though they are clearly the same comic book.

Anyway, this is just a taste of the kind of hand-sorting of the data that was necessary to construct our Sampling Frame. There were literally hundreds of comics like this that needed to be reconciled across our three data sources, very few of which then made it into the final corpus. When people used to sometimes ask me why this sampling process was taking so long and why didn't I just leave it all to the RAs, my mind would flash to comics like this one.

0070: Four Color #12 (1942)

In our study, Dell's long-running series Four Color has created more than a few problems. On the conceptual level alone, there is some debate as to whether Four Color is actually a series of 1331 issues or is better understood as a series of one-shots. That is not a minor issue for us, because if we do characterize it as a series of one-shots, that completely changes our picture of the creation and cancellation of titles in the early part of the industry. In practice, I have found that some dealers keep all their Four Colors together and others break them up, so that this issue might be filed under B while the previous issue (featuring Smitty) would be under S. We have tended to treat Four Color as a single series to date, but we are open to arguments that we shouldn't be.

This particular issue of Four Color, the earliest one in the corpus, raises a whole host of other problems - good problems, the types of problems that this project is precisely designed to capture. 

Lets' just talk about the most obvious one: Four Color #12 is a "graphic novel". 

Four Color #12 was released in 1942 to coincide with the release of Walt Disney's fifth animated feature, Bambi. The comic is entirely based on the film, from the modelling of the characters to the plot. It is sixty-eight pages in total (including covers) and sixty-four of those pages consist of a single story. While there is no consensus on the minimum page count of graphic novels (Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers is probably the shortest book that is regularly termed a "graphic novel"), it is clear that many "graphic novels" were forty-eight pages, as, for example, Marvel's self-declared Graphic Novels in the early-1980s. By any reasonable standard, then, Four Color #12 is a graphic novel. Of course, there are no reasonable standards for that particular term.

A few other items of note: No creator credits, of course. There is no advertising in the comic at all, neither external nor internal, and very little information other than the indicia. The vast majority of the pages are standard six-panel grids, but there are some interesting exceptions later in the book, particularly during the forest fire. It is a strikingly legible book, very easy to follow, which is a function of the intended audience to be sure. 

One final interesting note is that the copy that we have differs from both versions that are reported in the The Grand Comic Book Database. Their indexed copy gives the title "Four Color Comic" and the number (12) under the Ten Cent price, but ours does not. The GCD has another cover that is like ours, but which costs 15¢ where ours cost a dime.