Big Shot #57
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeBig Shot #57 (cover-dated June 1945) is one chapter in the longest continuous comic-book home Charlie Chan ever had — a run that stretched across more than seventy issues of Columbia's flagship anthology title, making it the primary venue through which Alfred Andriola's newspaper-strip detective reached comic-book readers throughout the Golden Age. As an anthology blending McNaught Syndicate strip reprints with original features, Big Shot was structurally unusual for its era, and the Charlie Chan installments within it represent the comic-book life of a character who had already crossed novels, films, and radio — a genuine multimedia phenomenon of the 1930s–40s. The issue also continues the pairing of Chan with his assistant Kirk Barrow rather than with Number One Son, reflecting a deliberate creative evolution in the strip that repositioned the lead as a globe-trotting action detective rather than a domestic family figure. That lineage — from Andriola's 1938 newspaper debut through the mid-1940s Columbia reprints — makes each issue in this run a preserved artifact of one of the more culturally contested characters of the Golden Age.
Big Shot #57 (1945) delivers a poignant, period-specific moment with a simple yet powerful image: a small boy hauling recycled paper in a wagon, captured in a real-world photo from the era. This wartime public service announcement, produced in collaboration with the War Advertising Council, War Production Board, and Office of War Information, underscores the collective effort of everyday citizens during a critical time. The cover, a striking piece by Mart Bailey, features bold, clean pencils and inks that lend urgency to the message.
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Columbia Comics Corporation was founded in 1940 as a partnership between editor/artist Vin Sullivan, the McNaught Syndicate, and the Frank Jay Markey Syndicate, with the explicit intent of packaging McNaught-owned newspaper-strip reprints alongside original superhero and adventure features in a single anthology title. The Charlie Chan material reprinted in Big Shot originated with Alfred Andriola, a former assistant to Milton Caniff, who launched the McNaught strip on October 24, 1938 — his first solo strip work — modeling the visual atmosphere closely on Caniff's Terry and the Pirates. After the strip was cancelled in May 1942 following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Columbia continued reprinting the backlog of Andriola dailies in Big Shot well into the mid-1940s, meaning that by the time issue #57 appeared, readers were encountering strips that Andriola had drawn several years earlier.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Big Shot #57 is cover-dated June 1945 and was published by Columbia Comics Corporation.
- The issue falls within the Charlie Chan run in Big Shot Comics, which according to multiple sources spanned roughly issues #1 through #78 (with some gaps), making it one of the longest single-title comic-book runs the character ever enjoyed.
- The Charlie Chan content in Big Shot consisted of reprints of Alfred Andriola's McNaught Syndicate daily newspaper strip, which originally launched October 24, 1938 and was cancelled on May 30, 1942 after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- Alfred Andriola — a Reuben Award-winning cartoonist later known for Kerry Drake — was the writer and artist of the Charlie Chan strip; he had previously worked as an assistant to Milton Caniff on Terry and the Pirates.
- Charlie Chan was created by novelist Earl Derr Biggers, who explicitly conceived the character as a benevolent Chinese-American detective offered as a counterpoint to Yellow Peril villain stereotypes prevalent in the era.
- By this point in the strip's continuity, 'Number One Son' had been written out of the stories — Andriola sent him away to study art — and Chan's primary partner was white assistant Kirk Barrow, a change scholars note was partly intended to give white readers a more familiar point-of-view character.
- Big Shot was an anthology that mixed McNaught Syndicate reprints (Charlie Chan, Joe Palooka, Dixie Dugan) with original Columbia features (Skyman by Ogden Whitney and Gardner Fox, The Face by Mart Bailey, Sparky Watts by Boody Rogers).
- The strip's Big Shot reprints predated later Charlie Chan comic-book series by years — Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Prize Comics version did not debut until 1948, and the DC television tie-in series did not appear until 1958.
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