Comic Books
The company's comics include the first 3-D comic book, Three Dimension Comics #1 (Sept. 1953 oversize format, Oct. 1953 standard-size reprint), featuring the Terrytoons movie-cartoon character Mighty Mouse. According to Joe Kubert, co-creator with the brothers Norman Maurer and Leonard Maurer, it sold an exceptional 1.2 million copies at 25 cents apiece at a time when comics cost a dime. St. John also published the second 3-D comic, the aptly named 3-D Comics, the single issue of which incongruously billed itself as "World's First!"
Other St. John comic books included the first movie-comedian tie-in series, Abbott and Costello Comics; one of the first proto-graphic novels, the 25-cent "picture novel" It Rhymes with Lust (1950); and a five-issue series (Sept. 1953 – Oct. 1954), appearing under three titles, that introduced the enduring Kubert prehistoric hero Tor. In 1953, St. John took over a number of Ziff Davis comics titles, including the romance comics Cinderella Love and Romantic Love, the Western comic Kid Cowboy, and the jungle adventure title Wild Boy of the Congo.
St. John Publications utilized the first African-American comic-book artistin mainstream media, Matt Baker, who contributed to the ostensibly true-crime series Authentic Police Cases, the light humor comic Canteen Kate, the romance books Cinderella Love and Teen-Age Romances, and many others.
Read more about this topic: St. John Publications
Famous quotes containing the words comic and/or books:
“There is only one vice, which may be found in life with as strong features, and as high a colouring as needs be employed by any satyrist or comic poet; and that is AVARICE.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)