Eastern Color Printing - Company History

Company History

In March 1924, a newspaper in Waterbury, Connecticut purchased a Goss International single-width press to use in printing Sunday color newspaper comics sections. The Knickerbocker Press of Albany, New York, and the Springfield Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts, approached the Republican about using the press to print their own color comics supplements. The Springfield Union soon afterward did as well. The Eastern Color Printing Company, incorporated in August 1928 with William B. Pape as its vice president and principal executive officer, acquired the press and replaced it with a Goss four-deck press. The company acquired additional presses in 1929 and 1931. During this time period, Eastern, headquartered at 61 Leavenworth Street in Waterbury, established itself in the pulp magazine industry by being one of the few firms to print color covers for the pulps.

From 1928 to 1930, Eastern published 36 issues of a tabloid-format comics periodical, The Funnies, with original comic pages in color, for Dell Publishing. This title was the first four-color comic newsstand publication. Dell, owned by George Delacorte, would later be closely associated with other landmark Eastern Color Printing publications.

Around 1929, Eastern became the first major institution to perfect an engraving process that allowed for the addition of color to black-and-white comics, proving a boon to newspaper syndicates just beginning to introduce full-page Sunday comics sections. From 1929 through 1932, Sunday comic pages were printed in both black-and-white and color. By 1932, Eastern Color Printing was printing comic sections for a score of newspapers, and by the following year, color for newspapers' Sunday comics section and black-and-white for the daily strips becomes the industry standard.

In 1933, Eastern's 45-year-old sales manager Harry I. Wildenberg reinvented the comic-book format when he saw the increasing popularity of newspaper comic strips and determined comics could be a successful medium for advertising. Sales offices at this time were located in New York City, New York (alternately listed at 40 or 50 Church Street in different sources).

In April 1933, Gulf Oil Company approved Wildenberg's idea and hired artists to create an original, promotional giveaway, Gulf Comic Weekly. Printed by Eastern, the comic measured 10 ½ x 15 inches and was advertised on national radio. Each of its four pages contained a full-color single-page comic strip. The tabloid proved a hit at Gulf service stations. It was retitled Gulf Funny Weekly. Distribution rose to three million copies a week. The series ran as a tabloid until 1939 before adopting the standard comic-book format of the time; it ran a total 422 issues through May 23, 1941. Eastern also published another four-page tabloid, for Standard Oil, titled Standard Oil Comics.

In early 1933, Eastern also began producing small comic broadsides for the Ledger syndicate of Philadelphia, printing Sunday color comics from 7" x 9" plates. Wildenberg and his coworkers realized that two such plates would fit on a tabloid-sized page, and later that year, Wildenberg created the first modern-format comic book when idly folding a newspaper into halves and then into quarters and finding that a convenient book size. In Spring 1933, Eastern printed one million copies of the first modern-format comic book, the 32-page Funnies on Parade, as a promotion for Procter & Gamble.

The names of those associated with the project read as a who's-who of early publishers in what comics historians and fans call the Platinum Age and Golden Age of Comic Books: Max Gaines (founder of EC Comics), Leverett Gleason (publisher of Comic House and other titles, and creator of the Golden Age Daredevil), and many other future industry creators are all brought in to work under Wildenberg's supervision.

By late 1933, Eastern was publishing more giveaways: Famous Funnies: a Carnival of Comics, A Century of Comics, and Skippy’s Own Book of Comics. The latter was the first modern-format comic book about a single character.

1934

Eastern prints Shell Globe, for distribution at 13,000 Shell gas stations. The series features cartoonist Bud Fisher’s popular characters Mutt and Jeff. The characters of Shell Globe are marketed wildly, through miniature figurines, posters, radio announcements, billboards, play masks, and window stickers.

Interest from advertisers tapers off a bit when advertisers doubt that children would be willing to pay money for comic strip reprints. Eastern Color Printing president George Janosik forms a 50/50 joint venture with Dell publisher George Delacorte to publish and market a comic book for retail sales. As a test to see if the public would be willing to pay for comic books, Famous Funnies: Series One, distributed locally, is published and sold for 10 cents each and sells out quickly. 40,000 copies of Famous Funnies: Series One are distributed in chain stores, featuring reprints from the newspaper reprints featured in Eastern’s earlier books. The comic book sells out completely.

1934 - May

Eastern employee Harold Moore proposes a monthly comic book series. Famous Funnies #1 appears with a July cover date. The title loses money at first, and George Delacorte sells his interest back to Eastern. Famous Funnies #2 marks the start of original material produced specifically for the book, and #3 begins a run of Buck Rogers features.

Mid-1934

Famous Funnies turns a profit beginning with issue #7. It gains popularity quickly, and the title lasts about 20 years. The success of Famous Funnies soon leads to the title being sold on newsstands alongside slicker magazines, and inspires at least five other competitors to begin publishing their own comic books. Eastern begins to experiment with modifying the newspaper reprints to be more suitable to the comic book format. Lettering, reduced in reproduction to the point of illegibility, is reworked for the size of the comic book page. Adventure strips, reprinted in several weeks’ worth of strips at a time, is trimmed of panels providing a recap of previous events, contributing to a concise and more smoothly flowing version of the story.

1935

Eastern executive Max Gaines leaves Eastern Color Printing to work for Dell Comics. In 1945, Gaines sells all of his comic book properties to Dell with the exception of two. These two titles (Picture Stories from the Bible and Picture Stories from World History) are launched under a new publishing venture in 1946 under the name of EC. Although the EC initials stood for both Educational Comics and Entertaining Comics, it has been speculated that the initials were also a tribute to the first comic book company Gaines worked for, Eastern Color . In 1947, Max Gaines dies in a boating accident, and EC is taken over by his son William M. Gaines, who focused production on crime, horror and science fiction. EC was a primary target for Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, and the focus of the senate hearing that followed; the end result was that eventually EC cancelled all of its publications except for Mad.

1936 - October

In May 1936, J. Edgar Hoover contacts cartoonist Rex Collier and proposes a comic strip based on true stories of FBI Agents. Collier’s strip, "War on Crime", is reprinted in the October issue (#27) of Famous Funnies — the first "true crime" story in comic books.

1936 - December

Eastern publishes the first issue of The John Hix Scrapbook, reprinting McNaught’s syndicated strip "Strange as It Seems", a "Ripley’s Believe It or Not"-style collection of illustrated cartoons describing odd historical facts and scientific phenomena. In 1937, Eastern releases a second volume under the name The Second Strange as It Seems Scrapbook.

1937 - May

Famous Funnies #32 features the first appearance of the Phantom Magician as a supporting character in the comic strip, “The Adventures of Patsy.” The Phantom Magician is an early costumed hero pre-dating Superman.

1937 - July

Famous Funnies #39 begins reprints of newspaper comic strip Eagle Scout Roy Powers. Penned by artist Paul Powell, himself a former Boy Scout, this strip becomes the official symbol of the Boy Scouts of America and is instrumental in the promotion of its Eagle Scout rank. Roy Powers runs as a regular feature in Famous Funnies for ten years.

Having filled up the maximum floor space at their old American press-room at Printers Court, Eastern constructs a separate and new plant on Commercial Street. The new plant includes two new Scott presses.

1939 - September

Famous Funnies #62 features early work by artist Jack Kirby under the pen name Lance Kirby.