This post is brought to you by Wild Inc. #4 Go Johnny, Go by Jack Mackenzie. Harry Calhoun and the amazing Morrigan Wild are back! Harry goes back to his home town of Toronto, trying to move past Wild Incorporated. Home with his family, he thinks he’s found new love and a new job, but Wild Incorporated is not done with him yet. Harry finds himself in the thick of a deadly mystery that threatens to open Morrigan Wild’s closely held secrets about her father, her old gang, her Fortress of Solitude and a mysterious man who is supposed to be long dead!
Imagine my surprise while spinning through some old Shadow Comics when I see an Edd Cartier illustration. Immediately I stop and see what is going on. The story “Armageddon” is a favorite Fredric Brown short-short. You know the one about a kid named Herbie who stops the Devil from ending the world. It’s a classic but what’s it doing in a comic book?
A little investigation and I see that the early Shadow Comics poached several Pulp pieces. This isn’t entirely surprising as the Pulp stories used belong to Street & Smith as does Shadow Comics. So they were recycling old stories. They did the same thing in S&S’s Doc Savage Comics too. These stories appeared earlier in Pulp magazines, usually at the back where shorter pieces can be found. Sometimes the author got a credit, sometimes not. You can be sure they never got paid anything for these reprints. Pulp publishers usually bought all rights.
Let’s back up for a second and just remember that these stories weren’t placed in comic books to improve the reading ability of children. They were put there so the comics would qualify for the second class mailing rate. This rate was calculated by weight so the publisher saved on the mailing of newspapers and magazines. For the comics to be considered “magazines” they had to have some prose content. Thus the often unread text story. Street & Smith needed them, but didn’t want to pay some typewriter monkey to bang them out. So….
The first issue of Shadow Comics (January 1940) featured the anonymous “Twirling Digits” but no story appeared again until Issue #4, June 1940 with Norman A. Daniel’s “Murder in Uniform” reprinted from The Shadow, February 15, 1940. So from the back pages of The Shadow four months later to the back of a comic book.
Issue #5, July 1940 used “Time and Place” by Milton Lowe from The Shadow, October 1 1939.
Noember 1940’s #7 had “The Hole Card” by Malcolm Rainsford. This story might have come from Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, December 1, 1934 by Lloyd Eric Reeve?
Issue #9, March 1941 gave us “Profile of a Ghost” by Jack Storm (a house name, maybe Norman A. Daniels) was taken from The Shadow August 15, 1940.
Issue #10, May 1941 reprinted “Grease Job” by William G. Bogart was taken from The Shadow November 1, 1940.
Issue #11, July 1941 featured “Smuggled Death” by Norman A. Daniels. I could not find any Pulp version of this story so Daniels may have written it for the comic. He did occasionally write comic material. It could also be another story published in a Pulp under a different title. (You go find it.)
Issue #12, September 1941 had “No Return Trip” (No byline) by William G. Bogart taken from The Shadow, March 15 1939.
Issue #13, November 1941 breaks the chain of Shadow reprints with that “Armageddon”(No byline) by Fredric Brown i mentioned at the beginning. It appeared in Unknown, August 1941.
Issue #14, January 1942 went back to the Western mags with “Necktie Party” (No byline), likely “Necktie Party” from Wild West Weekly, March 23, 1940 by Harlan Graves.
Issue #15, March 1942 wad the lat with “Joshua” by R. Creighton Buck fromUnknown, June 1941. With Issue 16 (May 1942) the text feature became an in-house article, either about The Shadow Radio show or on fingerprints or other detective-related subjects. The Pulp stories were done.
Let’s backtrack a little now and see what turned up in Doc Savage Comics.
Issue #1, April 1940 gave Doc his own short-lived mag, having started in Shadow Comics. “Scarlet Giveaway” by Jack Storm (house name) first appeared in Doc Savage Magazine, October 1939.
Issue #4, May 1941 had “Troller Twins” (No byline) by Norman A. Daniels which first appeared in Doc Savage, July 1940.
Issue #6, May 1941 used “The Haters” from Unknown, October 1940 by Donald A. Wollheim and Robert A. W. Lowdnes.
With #7 March 1942 the editors began reprinting Doc Savage Improvement articles from the magazine and the stories ended for good.
Conclusion
Comic text stories as a rule are pretty dull (the exception being the Jon Jarl space stories of Otto Binder and some of Donald Bayne Hobart and Charles S. Strong’s tales). For a short while these Street & Smith readers had a slightly better grade of storytelling. It surprises me this didn’t become the norm, stealing from your own Pulps to feed the comics. It didn’t. Perhaps because the publishers believed the children who bought the comics deserved their own kind of stories. Or they simply didn’t care. as long as they go that second class rate…
Check out the Wild Inc. Super-saga…
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