King Comics #34
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeKing Comics #34 (January 1939) is a representative entry in one of the most historically important comic anthology series of the Golden Age — a monthly title that gave tens of thousands of American newsstand readers their only comic-book access to the full roster of King Features Syndicate's newspaper-strip universe under one cover. The series served as a proving ground for the anthology format itself, bundling science-fiction adventure (Flash Gordon), humor (Thimble Theatre / Popeye, John Sappo), fantasy (Mandrake the Magician), aviation drama (Barney Baxter), and westerns (King of the Royal Mounted) at a dime apiece, demonstrating that wildly genre-diverse properties could coexist in a single periodical and sustain a loyal readership. That editorial model directly influenced how later publishers structured their own anthology and team-up books throughout the 1940s.
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David McKay Publications launched King Comics in April 1936 as a vehicle to reprint King Features Syndicate newspaper strips reformatted and colored for the comic-book page — part of McKay's early recognition, starting in 1935 with single-character Popeye and Henry collections, that the new medium had commercial legs. The series was edited throughout its run by Ruth Plumly Thompson, who used the house pseudonym 'Jo King' in the indicia; covers during this era were penciled and inked by Joe Musial. Issue #34 carried strip material written and drawn by an unusually large stable of contributors including Alex Raymond and Don Moore (Flash Gordon), E. C. Segar (Thimble Theatre / Sappo), Lee Falk and Phil Davis (Mandrake), and Frank Miller, among many others, with copyrights held by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published January 1939 by David McKay Company; cover pencils and inks by Joe Musial; edited by Ruth Plumly Thompson under the pen name 'Jo King.'
- Priced at ten cents; the series ran from April 1936 through late 1949 (issues #1–155 under David McKay, with a brief Standard Comics continuation to #159).
- Flash Gordon segment — scripted by Don Moore and drawn by Alex Raymond — appears here; GCD notes Moore was co-creator and author of the strip from its very beginning, though Raymond long received sole credit.
- Thimble Theatre segment (reprinting E. C. Segar's Sunday pages) features Popeye, Olive Oyl, J. Wellington Wimpy, Swee'Pea, and Poopdeck Pappy; surrounding issues confirm Segar was personally producing this material until his death in October 1938, making issues in this period some of the last to carry his original work.
- John Sappo segment, also by E. C. Segar, showcases his secondary strip that ran as a topper to Thimble Theatre — one of the rarer Segar features and notably absent from many later reprints.
- Mandrake the Magician segment by Lee Falk and Phil Davis concludes a storyline described in surrounding issues as a worldwide treasure hunt; Flash Gordon segment features Flash holding a 'council of war in an outlaw's underground meeting hall,' consistent with Alex Raymond's Ming-era adventure arcs of late 1938.
- The series as a whole is an anthology of licensed newspaper reprints — no original comic-book stories were produced for it — making it a primary archival source for Golden Age newspaper strip continuity that predates dedicated reprint collections by decades.
- Additional features confirmed in the GCD index for this issue include Brick Bradford (William Ritt / Clarence Gray), Barney Baxter in the Air (Frank Miller), King of the Royal Mounted (Charles Flanders / Romer Grey), Little Annie Rooney, Henry (Carl Anderson), Ted Towers, Bringing Up Father (George McManus), The Little King (Otto Soglow), and Scott's Scrapbook.
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