Dell Comics

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Dell Comics was the comic book publishing arm of Dell Publishing, which got its start in pulp magazines. It published comics from 1929 to 1973. At its peak, it was the most prominent and successful American company in the medium.

Its first title was The Funnies which was the first comic book to feature original material, but since it was published in the tabloid format as opposed to the standard one, it is normally not recognized as such.

The company formed a partnership in 1938 with Western Publishing, in which Dell would finance and distribute publications that Western would produce. While this diverged from the regular practice in the medium of one company handling finance and production and outsourcing distribution, it was a highly successful enterprise with titles selling in the millions.

Dell Comics was best known for its licensed material, most notably the animated characters from Walt Disney Productions, Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Walter Lantz Studio along with many movie and television properties such as Tarzan. Writer/artists Walt Kelly and Carl Barks are the most noted talents associated with the company. Other prolific scripters were Gaylord DuBois, Paul S. Newman, Don Arr Christensen, John Stanley, Bob Gregory and Carl Fallberg. Artists who worked on comics published by Dell included Fred Harman, Alex Toth, Russ Manning, Jesse Marsh, Paul Murry, Tony Strobl, Harvey Eisenberg, Ken Hultgren, Dick Moores, Jack Bradbury, Jack Manning, Bill Wright, Pete Alvarado, Dan Spiegle and John Buscema. Famed fantasy writer Charles Beaumont early in his career contributed a handful of stories for Dell's funny animal comics, all done in collaboration with William F. Nolan.

From 1939 to 1962, Dell's most notable and prolific title was the anthology Four Color. Published several times a month, the title (which primarily featured standalone issues featuring various licensed properties) saw more than 1,300 issues published in its 23-year history.

In 1948, Dell refused membership in the nascent Association of Comics Magazine Publishers. The association had been formed to pre-empt government intervention in the face of mounting public criticism of comic books. Dell vice-president Helen Meyer told congress that Dell had opted out of the association because they didn't want their less controversial offerings to serve as "an umbrella for the crime comic publishers". [1]

The end of Four Color in 1962 coincided with the end of the partnership with Western, which took most of its licensed properties and its original material and created its own imprint, Gold Key Comics.

Dell Comics lingered for another 11 years with licensed television and motion picture adaptations (including Mission: Impossible, Ben Casey, Burke's Law, Doctor Kildare, Beach Blanket Bingo) and a few generally poorly received original titles. Among the few long lasting series from this time include the teen-comic Thirteen Going on Eighteen (29 issues, written by John Stanley), Ghost Stories (37 issues, #1 only written by John Stanley), Combat (40 issues), Ponytail (20 issues), Kona Monarch of Monster Isle (20 issues), Toka the Jungle King (10 issues), and Naza Stone Age Warrior (9 issues). Dell additionally attempted to do superhero titles, including Nukla, Fab 4, Brain Boy, and a critically-ridiculed trio of titles based on the Universal Pictures monsters Frankenstein, Dracula and Werewolf that recast the characters as superheroes.