#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.

1305: Lone Ranger #18 (1974)

The ads in this one are basically the ads of my youth: 100 Piece Toy Soldier Set ("packed in this footlocker!"), Roach Studios iron-in transfers, 204 Revolutionary War Soldiers ("only $2.25"), and, of course, the back page ad for Daisy air rifles. The basic Gold Key line-up for a long, long time in the 1970s.

One of the most interesting things about this comic is that it contains two stories and both of them are reprints from the 1950s - specifically from Dell's Lone Rangercomic of that period. So much of the material that was published under the Gold Key banner is reprints that aren't actually marked as such within the comic book itself. Presumably, the feeling was that, over the course of twenty years, the readership of the Lone Ranger had completely changed generationally, and so who would even know the difference? In contradistinction to companies like Marvel and DC that were rabidly marking their reprints as "Collector's Item Classics!!!", Gold Key (and others) just quietly asked their customers to look the other way.

Interestingly, both of the stories in this issues have a certain 1950s feel, which is exactly the phenomenon that we hope to be able to categorize. Gold Key felt old-fashioned in the 1970s because they were old-fashioned, which certainly couldn't have much helped the longevity of the brand. They would stop distributing seven years after this comic book was published.

While the topic of comics reprints and consecration has been a big topic for a while (see several of the chapters in the newly released anthology Comics Memory, for example), reprints that aren't announced as reprints are one of the massively understudied hallmarks of the 1960s and 1970s.