Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and ninety-ninth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.
As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for part one of this installment's legends. Click here for part two of this installment's legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
Sheldon Mayer's Scribbly character debuted at Dell Comics and he just took it with him to another comic book company.
True
To recap from the first legend of this week's installment, an interesting aspect of the early days of the comic book industry is that there really weren't many people out there who knew what they were doing. A big part of that was that it was SO difficult at first to make any money in comics. Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was one of the most forward thinking people in the entire history of comic books and all he got for his troubles was so much debt that he ended up having his own company taken from him right before Superman debuted in Action Comics #1 in 1938. Up until that point, most of the money in comic books had been in the world of reprinting established comic strips (original comics WERE starting to make money, don't get me wrong, they just weren't nearly as successful as the reprinted comic books). Doing original stuff was seen as, in effect, a cover band at a bar saying, "We're going to play some of our own stuff tonight," in other words - almost always a REALLY bad idea. In effect, "Oh, you think you're going to come up with something better than Dick Tracy?" "Oh, you're just going to do a better comic than Joe Palooka? Good for you."
The success of Superman changed everything, as people realized that there WAS money in original characters in comic books. One of those people who realized this was Max Charles Gaines, one of the most important figures in comic book history, as it was Gaines who first pushed the idea of comic books period. Gaines, though, was thinking REPRINTED comic books and through his work at the McClure Syndicate and at Dell Comics, Gaines worked in the world of newspaper comic strips and then turning those comic strips into comic books.
Throughout this period, Gaines employed Sheldon Mayer, who actually started working for Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and was thus involved in the very first original comic books there were. Again, though, the money wasn't there, so Mayer went to work in the world of reprinted comics. Here's a photo of Mayer from the Golden Age of Comics...
Mayer's main duty for Gaines at Dell was taking the newspaper comic strips and cutting and pasting them so that they would fit into the comic book format. However, there wasn't always enough comic strips to fill in all of the pages of the comics, so Mayer was allowed to do short comics to fill in the gaps.
Thus, in 1936's Popular Comics #8 (about a half of a year before Detective Comics #1 came out), Mayer debuted his kid cartoonist character, Scribbly (who was obviously based on Mayer)...
Okay, so, as noted, Superman then debuted (Mayer and Gaines, actually, played a major role in the introduction of Superman, as they had rejected it at the syndicate MANY times, but Mayer loved it, so he kept saying that they SHOULD make it as a newspaper comic strip. Gaines disagreed, but Mayer kept talking it up that Gaines recommended it to National Comics for 1938's Action Comics #1) and everything changed.
Gaines used his comic strip syndicate connections and a deal with National Comics' Jack Liebowitz to launch All-American Comics, which published as sort of a part of National Comics at first. Gaines brought Mayer with him and sure enough, in the midst of All-American Comics #2 (a mixture of popular reprints that Gaines gained the licensed rights to, and original content), Mayer brought Scribbly with him to All-American Comics...
The feature continued for the next five years, with a comical superhero, Red Tornado, becoming a major part of the feature, as well.
In 1948 (All-American Comics was now part of National Comics as Gaines sold off to form his own educational comic book company, Educational Comics. Gaines died soon after founding the company and his son, William took EC Comics in a WHOLE other direction), Mayer then brought Scribbly back, only aged up so that he could be a teen humor/romance comic lead like Archie Andrews...
The comic ran until 1951. Mayer worked at National (then DC) for many years, primarily on the little kids series that he created, Sugar and Spike.
In the latest Movie Legends Revealed - Why did Karate Kid Part III replace John Kreese with Terry Silver when the movie was about Kreese's revenge?
OK, that's it for this installment!
Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!
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