Feature Book #12 [1]
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeFeature Book #12 holds a foundational place in comics history as the opening entry in David McKay's Blondie Feature Book run — a series that multiple sources credit as the first American comic book line to dedicate complete individual issues to a single character. Published in 1938, the same year Columbia Pictures launched the Blondie film series, the issue arrived at the peak of the property's cultural reach, cementing the Bumstead household — Blondie, Dagwood, the toddler Baby Dumpling, and the family dog Daisy — as fixtures of American domestic life. By gathering Chic Young's newspaper strips into a self-contained comic-book package, McKay helped establish the reprint anthology format that would define the early Golden Age. The issue also marks the entry of Baby Dumpling (later renamed Alexander) into the comic-book medium, a character whose April 15, 1934 newspaper debut had already transformed Blondie from a 'flapper' gag strip into one of the country's most widely read family comics.
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Chic Young launched the Blondie newspaper strip on September 8, 1930, through King Features Syndicate, after leaving his previous strip Dumb Dora and negotiating ownership of his new creation. The strip did not find its identity until Blondie and Dagwood married on February 17, 1933 and Dagwood was disinherited, shifting the feature from a 'pretty girl' format to a domestic comedy grounded in middle-class suburban life. David McKay Publications — already a pioneering comic-book house responsible for early Mickey Mouse comics and anthology titles like King Comics and Ace Comics — began packaging Blondie strips as single-character Feature Books in 1938, with Issue #12 opening that run; McKay's son Alexander oversaw much of the house's comics output during this era. Young had taken a year's hiatus in 1937 following the death of his son, leaving the strip temporarily in the hands of assistant Jim Raymond, meaning that some of the strips collected in the earliest Feature Books may reflect Raymond's draftsmanship under Young's byline.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published in 1938 by David McKay Publications; first issue in the Blondie Feature Books run, which continued through issue #46 in 1947.
- David McKay's Feature Book series has been described by comic-book retailers and historians as the first American comic book line to dedicate complete individual issues to a single character.
- All story and cover content is by Chic Young (Murat Bernard Young, 1901–1973), creator of the Blondie newspaper strip, first syndicated by King Features on September 8, 1930.
- The issue collects King Features newspaper strip reprints and features the core Bumstead cast: Blondie, Dagwood, Baby Dumpling (Alexander), and the family dog Daisy.
- Baby Dumpling — the Bumsteads' son, later given the full name Alexander Hamilton Bumstead — first appeared in the newspaper strip on April 15, 1934; his inclusion here represents one of his earliest comic-book-format appearances.
- 1938 was also the year Columbia Pictures launched its Blondie B-movie series (starring Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake), making this comic book a tie-in-era publication at the height of the property's cross-media expansion.
- Chic Young's assistants during this period included Alex Raymond (later creator of Flash Gordon) and Jim Raymond (Alex's brother), who ghosted the strip during Young's 1937–1938 European hiatus; strips from that transitional period may appear in the earliest Feature Books.
- The Blondie Feature Book numbering begins at #12 because the series shared a numbering sequence with David McKay's broader Feature Book line, which covered multiple licensed properties before Blondie joined it.
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