Hillman Periodicals

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Alex L. Hillman's line of magazines also included People Today (August 11, 1954)

Hillman Periodicals was a publishing firm founded in 1938 by Alex L. Hillman, a onetime New York book publisher. In 1928 he published Southern Mill Hills by Lois MacDonald.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hillman competed with Bernarr Macfadden and Fawcett Publications by publishing comics, true confessions magazines (Real Story, Real Confessions, Real Romances) and crime magazines (Crime Detective, Real Detective, Crime Confessions).

In 1944, Hillman made a bid for a classier product by launching a new digest-sized slick magazine, Pageant, with an initial print run of 500,000 copies. To get the paper, Hillman decided to fold his detective magazines and his comics, which together brought in a $250,000 annual profit. He returned to comics in 1946, resuming some titles from the earlier series.

Like many comic book publishers of the day, Hillman's WWII titles included costumed superheroes. As trends in the comic book market changed, the focus shifted more to crime/detective stories and Westerns. Hillman's more successful comic books included the aviator-adventurer Airboy in Air Fighters Comics and Airboy Comics, plus Crime Detective Comics, Real Clue Crime Stories, Dead-Eye Western Comics and Western Fighters.

Hillman ceased publishing comic books in 1953. During the 1950s, Hillman also published Homeland and People Today, while also distributing Freeman, a journal of right-wing opinion. Amid a 1953 battle for control of directors and editors, Hillman announced his resignation as the Freeman treasurer because "it has been almost impossible for the past six months to run the magazine." The following year, Hillman said he was thinking about launching a "conservative Republican" morning newspaper in Washington. Hillman sold Pageant to Macfadden in April 1961, and the magazine continued to run until 1977.

Hillman was also a noted art collector who initially developed an interest in art collecting when he was a book publisher and commissioned artists to illustrate new editions of the classics. He began his collection with such American painters as Raphael Soyer and Preston Dickenson, and it expanded to Impressionism and other paintings in the collection of the Alex Hillman Family Foundation, a private foundation in Manhattan. Gary A. Reynolds, curator of the Alex Hillman Family Foundation, died July 23, 1990 at the age of 40.