Ace Comics #24
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeAce Comics #24 is a working-class snapshot of how America's newsstand readers first experienced newspaper-strip adventure in comic-book form during the run-up to the Golden Age. It carries an installment of Lee Falk and Ray Moore's The Phantom — then just over a year into its landmark 140-issue run in the title — appearing at a point when the strip was still being presented as a modest four-page insert buried in the middle of the book, years before it migrated to a cover-feature slot. The issue also packages under one cover an extraordinary cross-section of King Features' creative talent, from George Herriman's surrealist Krazy Kat to Alex Raymond's jungle-adventure Jungle Jim, demonstrating the anthology-reprint model that David McKay had pioneered and that would directly influence the structure of original-material comic books throughout the decade.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Ace Comics was launched by David McKay Publications in April 1937, building on the publisher's earlier King Comics formula of collecting King Features Syndicate newspaper strips into a single periodical. Issue #24, cover-dated March 1939, was edited by Ruth Plumly Thompson — the celebrated author who had continued L. Frank Baum's Oz book series — who shaped the editorial voice and text features throughout the title's early run. The strips were reprinted under license from King Features, and PhantomWiki documents that the Phantom pages were often heavily cropped and re-lettered from their original newspaper layouts to fit the comic-book page format.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Cover date: March 1939; published by David McKay Publications as part of the long-running Ace Comics anthology series (Vol. 1, #24), which ran from April 1937 to October 1949 for 151 total issues.
- The Phantom strip — script by Lee Falk, art by Ray Moore — appears as a serialized installment of the daily newspaper continuity; at this stage in the run (#24 of 151), the Phantom occupied only four pages per issue, a format that would not expand to eight pages until issue #38.
- Cover art is by Joe Musial, who also contributed the Teddy and Sitting Bull strip inside the issue.
- Ruth Plumly Thompson — the author who continued L. Frank Baum's Oz book series after Baum's death in 1919 — served as editor, contributing editorial pages throughout this era of the title.
- The issue is a 64-page, full-color anthology featuring strips by an all-star roster of King Features talent including Alex Raymond (Jungle Jim), George Herriman (Krazy Kat), Chic Young (Blondie), H.H. Knerr (Katzenjammer Kids), Billy DeBeck (Barney Google), Russ Westover (Tillie the Toiler), and Lyman Young (Tim Tyler's Luck).
- The Pussycat Princess strip — a fantasy feature originally created by Grace Drayton — appears inside, with this installment scripted by Ed Anthony and drawn by Ruth Carroll.
- The issue falls within the first 50 issues of the run, meaning it also includes Seein' Stars, Feg Murray's Hollywood celebrity strip that profiled cartoon caricatures of major film stars and ran only through issue #50.
- The Phantom stories reprinted in Ace Comics were serialized across multiple issues rather than presented as complete stories; PhantomWiki notes that the strips were frequently cropped, re-edited, and occasionally re-lettered from their original newspaper layout.
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