| Former type | Comic publisher |
|---|---|
| Industry | Comics |
| Founded | 1941 |
| Founder(s) | Alfred Harvey |
| Defunct | 1994 |
| Headquarters | New York City |
| Key people | Alfred Harvey Robert B. Harvey Leon Harvey Alan Harvey Jeffrey Montgomery |
| Divisions | Thrill Adventure Harvey Thriller |
Harvey Comics (also known as Harvey World Famous Comics, Harvey Publications, Harvey Comics Entertainment, Harvey Hits, Harvey Illustrated Humor, and Harvey Picture Magazines) was an American comic book publisher, founded in New York City by Alfred Harvey in 1941, after buying out the small publisher Brookwood Publications. His brothers Robert B. Harvey and Leon Harvey joined soon after. The company soon got into licensed characters, which by the 1950s, became the bulk of their output. Their most prolific artist was Warren Kremer.
Harvey's mascot is "Joker," a harlequin jack-in-the-box character reminiscent of the mascot/logo for Paramount Pictures/Famous Studios' Noveltoons series of animated cartoons of the 1940s-1960s.
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Harvey Comics started out as a conventional comic book publisher. It published comic books that featured a combination of characters it inherited from Brookwood Publications, licensed characters such as the Green Hornet and Joe Palooka and its own original characters.
But the company ultimately became best-known for characters it published from in comics from 1950s onward, particularly those it licensed from the animation company Famous Studios, a division of Paramount Pictures, in the late-1940s and early 1950s. These include Casper the Friendly Ghost, Baby Huey, Herman and Katnip, and Little Audrey. Harvey also licensed popular characters from newspaper comic strips, such as Mutt and Jeff and Sad Sack. In addition, Harvey also developed such original properties as Richie Rich, Little Dot and Little Lotta.
While the company tried to diversify the comics it published, with brief forays in the 1950s and 1960s into superhero, suspense, horror, western and other forms in such imprints as Harvey Thriller and Thrill Adventure, children's comics were the bulk of its output.
In 1959, Harvey purchased the entire Famous line (including character rights and rights to the cartoon shorts). The Famous cartoons were repackaged and distributed to television as Harveytoons, and Harvey continued production on new comics and a handful of new cartoons produced for television. Casper the Friendly Ghost, who had been Famous' most popular original character, now became Harvey's top draw. Associated characters such as Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost, The Ghostly Trio, Casper's horse Nightmare, Hot Stuff the Little Devil, and Wendy the Good Little Witch were added to the Harvey line.
Due to a declining children's comics market, Harvey ceased publishing in 1982[1] and founder Alfred Harvey retired.
In the summer of 1984, Steve Geppi (owner of Diamond Comic Distributors and Geppi's Comic World) paid $50,000 for, among other properties, Harvey's entire archive of original art from the Harvey comic Sad Sack. Geppi made this agreement with Steve Harvey, who at the time was President of Harvey Publications, Inc., as well as President of Sad Sack, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvey Publications, Inc.[2]
Meanwhile, with Harvey no longer publishing, Marvel Comics showed interest in licensing some of Harvey's properties. When nothing came of it, in 1985 the Marvel imprint Star Comics published a title called Royal Roy. Harvey sued Star for copyright infringement, claiming that Roy was a blatant copy of Richie Rich.[3] (Veteran Harvey writer/artist Lennie Herman had created Royal Roy for Star Comics. Herman died in 1983[4] before the first issue of Royal Roy was published.) The Royal Roy comic ended after six issues and the lawsuit was dropped.
In 1986 Harvey resumed publication[5] under the leadership of Alan Harvey (Alfred's oldest son),[1] focusing on a few core titles, digests, and reprints.
In 1987 Harvey sued Columbia Pictures, for $50 million, claiming that the iconic Ghostbusters logo used in the blockbuster 1984 film was too reminiscent of Fatso from the Casper series. The court ruled in Columbia's favor,[6] due to Harvey's failure to renew the copyrights on early Casper stories and the "limited ways to draw a figure of a cartoon ghost."
In 1989 Harvey was sold to Jeffrey Montgomery's HMH Communications, located in Santa Monica, California. It was renamed Harvey Comics Entertainment (HCE), publishing reprints in the early-1990s as Harvey Classics. (In 1993 they also created two imprints, Nemesis Comics and Ultracomics, which they used to publish Ultraman comics, as well as a couple of other titles.) HCE ceased publishing in 1994.
Meanwhile, however, Montgomery was distributing Harvey's animated catalogue in every market, and sold 20% of the company to MCA Inc., parent company of Universal Studios. (Universal licensed the characters for use in its theme parks.) Montgomery also optioned Richie Rich and Casper for two feature films: Richie Rich premiered in 1994, and Casper in 1995.[1]
Montgomery also struck a publishing and distribution deal with Marvel Comics, which led Marvel to publish Casper titles, including an adaptation of the 1995 live-action Casper movie. Two issues of an ongoing Casper title were published in May 1997, followed by the short-lived Casper and Friends Magazine (May–July 1997).
Montgomery was ousted from HCE in 1997, and in 2001,[7] the company sold its Harvey properties — and rights to the Harvey name — to Classic Media, which currently licenses characters from the Harvey library. (HCE then changed its name to Sunland Entertainment.)[8]
The rights to Sad Sack, Black Cat, and certain other Harvey characters are still owned by Alan Harvey, and have been published under the names of Lorne-Harvey Publications and Re-Collections.[1] In late 2000, Alan Harvey sued Steve Geppi over his 1984 acquisition of the Sad Sack original art,[9] charging that Geppi had plundered Harvey's warehouses.[10] Geppi countersued, claiming that he had legal title to the original art.[2] The suit was settled in late 2002; at the time of the settlement, the New York Supreme Court had dismissed Harvey's claims against Geppi. The settlement agreement allowed Geppi to keep the art, with no money changing hands.[11][12]
In 2007, Dark Horse Comics published a few volumes of Harvey Comics Classics, featuring the Harvey Girls, Baby Huey, Hot Stuff, Richie Rich, and Casper. In 2010, the company began publishing Harvey Comics Treasuries.
For years, the TV distribution rights to the Harveytoons library were licensed to Worldvision Enterprises. Worldvision would hold distribution rights to many earlier Famous Studios cartoons (plus most of the cartoons by Fleischer Studios) for a short time, until being absorbed by the television division of Paramount Pictures, which originally distributed the cartoons.
Universal Studios, which owns the pre-1950 Paramount sound features, once held video rights to the Harvey-owned cartoons. Classic Media then obtained the animated catalog.