Popular Comics #6
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freePopular Comics #6 (July 1936) earns its place in Golden Age history chiefly as the debut vehicle for Sheldon Mayer's Scribbly the Boy Cartoonist — recognized by scholars such as Art Spiegelman as arguably the first autobiographical strip about a cartoonist in American comics. That single one-page filler, smuggled into a book otherwise composed entirely of newspaper-strip reprints, would eventually migrate to All-American Comics and spawn the Golden Age Red Tornado, making this issue a quiet origin point for a character lineage that reaches into DC continuity. Beyond Scribbly, the issue also packages a rich cross-section of the medium's reprint era: Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates (with the Dragon Lady, Pat Ryan, Terry Lee, and Connie in a forced-labor-camp arc), and Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie, all color-printed for a dime — a format that demonstrated to the industry that the comic-book anthology could sustain an audience across genres simultaneously.
In "null," young Skippy finds himself on the receiving end of some rough play from his stick ball teammates, but he’s oddly cheerful—counting his small victory in scoring fewer than a hundred runs in the first inning. With a grin, he bets that if things keep going this way, the others won’t even make it past the second inning.
In "Broken Tongs," Northrup stumbles upon a long pair of tongs in the City Dump and sets off with high hopes—planning to use them to carefully pick out one candy at a time from a bag. But when the tongs refuse to work, his practical solution quickly turns into a comically determined effort as he grabs a hammer and starts pounding on them.
In "null," a young boy named Beansy stumbles upon the word "curiosity" in a book and asks Skippy what it means. Skippy, with a mischievous grin, claims it means trouble and dares him to follow along. As they walk past a fence with a sign warning not to look inside, Beansy can't resist—turning back to peek, only to be drenched in a sudden splash of wet mud.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Popular Comics launched in February 1936 as Dell's first durable modern comic book, packaged and edited at the McClure Syndicate offices by M.C. Gaines, with the teenage Sheldon Mayer assisting by cutting and pasting Sunday newspaper strips into comic-book page layouts. It was Mayer himself who, during that production work, slipped his original Scribbly strip into issue #6 — a direct result of his day-to-day immersion in the book's assembly. The strips reprinted throughout the series were drawn primarily from Chicago Tribune/New York News Syndicate properties, giving Dell access to some of the era's most-read strips without commissioning original material.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First comic-book appearance of Scribbly the Boy Cartoonist, created by Sheldon Mayer — debuting as a one-page original feature in an otherwise all-reprint anthology (July 1936).
- Scribbly was a semi-autobiographical character: Mayer based the aspiring boy cartoonist partly on himself, having begun cartooning professionally in his teens.
- The issue's Terry and the Pirates segment (art and story by Milton Caniff) depicts Pat Ryan, Terry Lee, and Connie being drugged by the Dragon Lady and imprisoned in her forced-labor camp until rival pirates intervene.
- Dick Tracy content reprints Chester Gould's Sunday strips from the Famon gang storyline; the series as a whole was one of the earliest comic-book homes for Gould's detective strip.
- Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray also appears, continuing the anthology's practice of collecting the era's most-read newspaper strips under one cover.
- Edited by comics pioneers M.C. Gaines and Sheldon Mayer at the McClure Syndicate, with strips sourced primarily from the Chicago Tribune/New York News Syndicate.
- Scribbly continued in Popular Comics #6–9 before expanding to Dell's The Funnies (#2–29) and then transferring to All-American Comics (1939), where Mayer introduced the supporting character Ma Hunkel, who became the Golden Age Red Tornado.
- Popular Comics ran 145 issues (February 1936 – September 1948), with production duties passing from the McClure Syndicate to Western Publishing in 1939.
Cast · 6 characters
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↩ Reprints Skippy's Own Book of Comics #[nn] (1934)
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