Star Comics #7

History

Star Comics launched with a February 1937 cover date as one of two titles self-published by Harry 'A' Chesler, the New York studio operator who had previously supplied content to National Allied Publications and the Comics Magazine Company. Chesler sold both Star Comics and its companion title Star Ranger to Ultem Publications, a short-lived company owned by Irving W. Ullman and Frank Z. Temerson, who also acquired the Comics Magazine Company's Funny Pages and Funny Picture Stories around mid-1937. Ultem retained Chesler as editor and packager, meaning the same studio talent — including Fred Guardineer, Charles Biro, H. C. Kiefer, Ken Fitch, and Rafael Astarita — continued producing the book's contents under the new corporate banner. By early 1938, Ultem itself was acquired by Centaur Publications, which carried Star Comics forward through issue #16.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published November 1937 by Ultem Publications (cover credit); the series had launched February 1937 under Harry 'A' Chesler's own imprint before Ultem took over.
• Cover and interior humor strips by Charles Biro — years before he created Crime Does Not Pay (1942) and co-created Steel Sterling and Airboy — making this an early professional appearance for one of the Golden Age's most consequential creators.
• The Dan Hastings science-fiction serial, drawn by Fred Guardineer and scripted with Ken Fitch, runs through this issue, climaxing the aerial battle against the alien Eutopas; Chesler also marketed Dan Hastings as a syndicated newspaper strip through his own Harry Chesler Syndicate.
• Additional interior contributors include Fred Guardineer, Jack Romer, Dick Ryan, Fred Schwab, H. C. Kiefer, Ken Fitch, Rafael Astarita, Clem Gretter, Frank Frollo, and W. C. Brigham — a cross-section of the Chesler studio's working talent pool.
• The issue is a 64-page, full-color anthology priced at ten cents, typical of the era's first-generation comic-book format.
• Content is explicitly multi-genre: science fiction (Dan Hastings), humor shorts (Jingle Jingle, Shinanigans), educational/historical strips (biographies of Robert Fulton, David and Goliath, phrases from Shakespeare, King Arthur adventures), and ongoing comedy strips — reflecting the 'something for everyone' anthology strategy of early comic books.
• The classic newspaper-strip character Foxy Grandpa appears in this issue, representing the era's common practice of blending original comic-book material with reprinted or adapted newspaper-strip properties.
• Ultem Publications was itself a transitory company: it operated roughly September 1937 through January 1938 before Centaur Publications absorbed it, meaning Star Comics #7 falls squarely within Ultem's brief but historically significant window of activity.

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