Popular Comics #117

History

Popular Comics debuted in February 1936 as the first of Dell Publishing's three foundational anthology titles, initially packaged and edited by M.C. Gaines at the McClure Syndicate offices and following the newspaper-strip-reprint format Gaines had pioneered with Famous Funnies. Dell handed production duties to Western Publishing (Western Printing and Lithographing Company of Racine, Wisconsin) in 1939, and by 1944 the two companies had formalized their arrangement with Dell financing and Western providing editorial and printing work — meaning #117 was almost certainly produced under that Western Publishing infrastructure. The series drew its strip content primarily from the Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate, assembling creators like Milton Caniff, Zack Mosley, and Bill Holman into a single monthly package that no single newspaper could match.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published by Dell in late 1945 (approximately November, based on sequential numbering from confirmed adjacent issues dated August–December 1945), produced under Western Publishing's editorial and printing operation.
• Felix the Cat content in this issue was drawn by Otto Messmer — the character's principal artistic steward — though formally credited to Pat Sullivan's studio; Felix appeared in Popular Comics from April 1944 through December 1947 before graduating to his own Dell series.
• Smilin' Jack, the aviation-adventure strip by Zack Mosley and distributed by the Chicago Tribune–NY News Syndicate, appears here during the transitional post-WWII period when its wartime spy-and-aerial-combat plots were giving way to new story directions.
• Smokey Stover, Bill Holman's surreal fireman comedy strip (Chicago Tribune–NY News Syndicate), appears alongside its cat topper Spooky — both characters indexed separately, reflecting the topper-strip format in which a secondary silent strip ran beneath the main feature in the original Sunday papers.
• Terry Lee and the supporting cast from Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates are featured; by late 1945 Caniff was in the final months of his tenure on the strip before departing in 1946 to create Steve Canyon.
• Polly Perkins and Sam'l Perkins are characters from Cliff Sterrett's Polly and Her Pals, one of the most graphically innovative strips of the 20th century, which ran from 1912 to 1958 and was syndicated by King Features.
• Toots Hawkins and Casper Hawkins are from Jimmy Murphy's Toots and Casper, a King Features Syndicate domestic-comedy strip running since 1918; the 'Bim Gump' listed is a character from Sidney Smith's The Gumps, another Chicago Tribune–NY News Syndicate institution.
• The issue is a standard 48-page, full-color anthology with a 10-cent cover price, consistent with the format Dell and Western maintained for Popular Comics throughout the mid-1940s.

Cast · 13 characters

Full credits

Key issues in Popular Comics