Movie Comics #2
Movie Comics #2 holds a genuinely obscure but documentable distinction: it is the earliest known comic book in which Simon Templar, 'The Saint,' appears, predating the character's widely cited 1942 debut in Silver Streak Comics by three full years. That earlier Silver Streak appearance featured original stories scripted by creator Leslie Charteris himself, which is why it typically earns the 'first comic' credit — but Movie Comics #2 got there first, presenting Templar in an early proto-fotonovel format adapted directly from RKO's 1939 film The Saint Strikes Back. Beyond the Saint connection, the issue is a snapshot of a genuinely experimental publishing format: a mainstream comic book assembled almost entirely from colorized, airbrushed movie photo stills, a technique that would not resurface commercially at scale until the 'fotonovel' paperback craze of the late 1970s. The simultaneous presence of John Ford's landmark film Stagecoach as another adaptation makes this issue an unusually dense artifact of the moment when Golden Age comics and classical Hollywood were briefly, directly intertwined.
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Movie Comics was launched in April 1939 by All-American Publications — the Max Gaines–led company closely affiliated with what would become DC Comics — as an attempt to leverage Hollywood's popularity by condensing current films into comic-panel format using colorized photo stills rather than drawn art. Sheldon Mayer, who served as editorial assistant to Gaines, contributed cover work on issue #2 alongside artists Jack Adler and Emery Gondor, who handled the airbrushing and inking corrections that transformed raw movie stills into legible sequential panels. The series ran only six issues before cancellation in September 1939; its spiritual successor, National Comics' Feature Films Magazine, continued the film-adaptation concept but switched to original illustration.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Cover date: May 1939; published by All-American Publications / National Periodical Publications, an early component of what became DC Comics.
- Contains a photo-still comic adaptation of the 1939 RKO film The Saint Strikes Back, making this the earliest known comic book appearance of Simon Templar / The Saint.
- The Saint Strikes Back was the second Saint film and the first to star George Sanders as Templar, directed by John Farrow from a screenplay by John Twist.
- Also adapts John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) — scripted for the page from Dudley Nichols's screenplay — placing two culturally significant 1939 films in the same issue.
- Art production method: Jack Adler and Emery Gondor airbrushed and lettered directly over colorized movie photo stills, a proto-fotonovel technique decades ahead of its commercial revival.
- Cover features a colorized photo of actor Andy Devine (from Stagecoach), with drawn head corrections contributed by Sheldon Mayer, Jack Adler, and Emery Gondor.
- The series ran exactly six issues (April–September 1939); it was followed by Feature Films Magazine, which used original art instead of photo stills.
- Simon Templar was created by Leslie Charteris, debuting in the 1928 novel Meet the Tiger; by the time of this comic, the character had already appeared in two RKO films and was at the height of his popular-culture profile.