Famous Funnies #102
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeFamous Funnies #102 (January 1943) is a snapshot of the American comic book at full wartime pitch — a monthly anthology from the series widely regarded by historians as the first true American comic book, now in its ninth year of continuous publication and packed with newspaper-strip talent collectively unavailable anywhere else under one cover. Its cover, depicting caricatured Axis leaders, stands as a documented example of how Eastern Color's flagship title used its platform to reflect the national mood at the height of World War II. The issue also continues the run of Invisible Scarlet O'Neil — one of the earliest superheroines in the medium — whose reprinted adventures were, according to scholarship, intertwined with wartime Office of War Information efforts to promote women's participation in the war effort. As a mid-run number in a 218-issue series that launched an entire medium, #102 shows the anthology model at its most mature: balancing science fiction, adventure, aviation, humor, and wartime propaganda in a single 10-cent package.
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Famous Funnies was founded by Eastern Color Printing and debuted as a monthly periodical in July 1934, growing out of earlier promotional one-shots assembled largely through the efforts of Max Gaines and Harry Wildenberg. By issue #102 the series had settled into a reliable formula of reformatted newspaper strip reprints — daily and Sunday pages with publication dates removed — combined with activity pages and short text stories, all produced under the Famous Funnies Inc. imprint. The enormous stable of contributing cartoonists listed on #102 reflects the licensing infrastructure Eastern Color had built over nearly a decade, drawing strips from multiple major syndicates simultaneously. The series was profitable enough by its early issues to fund Eastern Color's continued publishing operations, and by the early 1940s was shipping hundreds of thousands of copies monthly through the American News Company network.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published January 1943 by Eastern Color Printing under the Famous Funnies Inc. imprint, cover-priced at 10 cents.
- The cover features caricatured cartoon depictions of the Axis powers of World War II, making it a period document of wartime comic-book propaganda imagery.
- Interior content includes a 6-page Buck Rogers story (based on Philip Francis Nowlan's character, drawn in the Dick Calkins tradition by Rick Yager), a 6-page Fearless Flint story credited to Harry Peter — the same H.G. Peter who co-created Wonder Woman — a 5-page Scorchy Smith installment, a 5-page Dickie Dare segment, a 4-page Invisible Scarlet O'Neil story, a 5-page Connie story by Frank Godwin, and multiple shorter strips including Napoleon, Oaky Doaks, Skyroads, Roy Powers Eagle Scout, Big Chief Wahoo, and Olly of the Movies.
- Invisible Scarlet O'Neil — created by Russell Stamm, a former Chester Gould assistant, for the Chicago Daily Times in 1940 — was one of the earliest superheroines in American comics; her strip ran in Famous Funnies from its comic-book debut through issue #167 (1948).
- The Dickie Dare strip reprinted here was originally created by Milton Caniff in 1933, his first syndicated strip before he launched Terry and the Pirates; by 1943 it was being drawn by Coulton Waugh.
- Scorchy Smith, the aviation-adventure strip also reprinted in this issue, had a celebrated run under Noel Sickles and Bert Christman before passing to Frank Robbins around this period; it was later collected by IDW Publishing.
- The contributing artist roster for #102 includes, among others, Dick Calkins, Russell Stamm, Frank Godwin, Harry Peter, Coulton Waugh, Allen Saunders, Clifford McBride, Ralph Briggs Fuller, and Bill Woggon — a cross-section of mid-Golden Age newspaper strip talent.
- Famous Funnies ran 218 issues from July 1934 to July 1955, and is considered by popular culture historians to be the first true ongoing American comic book; #102 appears at roughly the series' midpoint by issue count.
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