Everett M. "Busy" Arnold - Quality and Connecticut

Quality and Connecticut

The enterprising Arnold, deducing that Depression-era audiences wanted established, familiar comic strips for their hard-earned dimes, rather than untried original material, formed the suitably titled Comic Favorites, Inc. in collaboration with three newspaper syndicates: the McNaught Syndicate, the Frank J. Markey Syndicate, and Iowa's Register and Tribune Syndicate. Hiring cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who had just begun the strip Lala Palooza, and Goldberg's assistant, Johnny Devlin, Arnold in mid-1937 began publishing Feature Funnies, which mixed color reprints of leading comic strips (including Joe Palooka, Mickey Finn and Dixie Dugan) with a smattering of new features. His first office was at 389 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.

The new material came from comics "packagers", small studios that sprang up to produce comics on demand for publishers looking to enter the emerging comic-book field. Initially, Arnold bought from the quirkily named Harry "A" Chesler shop and from Eisner & Iger, headed by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. He recalled in an interview for a 1972 history of comics,

...I believe the first feature I purchased from Eisner & Iger was 'Espionage' in 1938 for Feature Comics (then Feature Funnies), and in 1939 I started buying material from them for Smash Comics, but it wasn't until 1940, when they supplied most of the pages for my five new titles as well as some material for Police Comics, that I became op customer with Eisner and Iger... supplied all or most of the material for the first issues of Hit Comics, Crack Comics, Uncle Sam and Military Comics, but until paper restrictions sent sales sky high, these titles all sold very poorly. (If I hadn't been making big money on Feature and Smash Comics I would have gone broke.) So I dropped some of the Eisner and Iger material and tried to replace it with better features."

Arnold began developing an in-house staff, with George Brenner, writer-artist of comic books' first masked adventurer — the Comics Magazine Company's the Clock — among his first employees. In 1939, Arnold and the owners of the Register & Tribune Syndicate's parent company, brothers John Cowles, Sr. and Gardner Cowles, Jr.'s Cowles Media Company, bought out the McNaught and Markey interests. Arnold became 50% owner of the newly formed Comic Magazines, Inc., the corporate entity that would publish the Quality Comics line. That year Quality released Smash Comics #1 (Aug. 1939), the company's first comic book with exclusively new material.

By then, in February 1940, Arnold moved his offices from New York City to the Gurley Building in Stamford, Connecticut, with staffers by now including editor Ed Cronin, Gill Fox, Plastic Man creator Jack Cole, Tony DiPreta, and Zoltan Szenics. "Since it was a long round trip for Lou Fine (who was partially crippled) to make each day," Arnold said in the early 1970s, "I rented a studio for Lou in the Woodstock Tower in Tudor City, a large Manhattan high-rise complex". Quality Comics quickly grew to encompass such top-selling characters as Blackhawk, Doll Man, Plastic Man, Kid Eternity, and Uncle Sam, among others.

The name Quality Comics debuted on the cover of Crack Comics #5 (Sept. 1940; see at right). "Seemingly never an official publishing title," the Connecticut Historical Society noted, "the Quality Comics Group is a trademarked name (presumably taking its name from Stamford's nickname of 'the Quality City') encompassing Comic Favorites Inc., E.M. Arnold Publications, Smash Comics, and any other imprints owned by Arnold". A 1954 federal document noted that the Quality Romance Group, owned by Everett M. and Claire C. Arnold, with an office at 347 Madison Avenue, in New York City, published two titles as Arnold Publications, Inc., two titles as Comic Favorites, Inc., and 14 titles as Comic Magazines, Inc.