Super Comics #1
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeSuper Comics #1 stands as the inaugural issue of one of the earliest and longest-running Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate reprint anthology titles, bringing Milton Caniff's groundbreaking adventure strip Terry and the Pirates — and its cast of Terry Lee, Pat Ryan, Connie, and the Dragon Lady — to a national comic-book readership at the very dawn of the Golden Age. At a moment when comic books were still proving they could sustain an audience, the series demonstrated that newspaper-strip reprints could anchor a monthly anthology format that would run continuously through 1949. For readers who had no access to the papers carrying the Tribune syndicate strips, Super Comics was their first encounter in comic-book form with Caniff's cinematic storytelling, which contemporaries and later historians alike credit with establishing much of the visual and narrative grammar of adventure comics.
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Super Comics was produced by Western Printing and Lithographing Company — operating here under the Whitman Publishing Co. imprint — and distributed by Dell as part of the new Dell–Western partnership that formally took shape in 1938. Editor Oskar Lebeck assembled the book from licensed Chicago Tribune–NY News Syndicate material, reprinting Sunday strips from multiple Tribune properties simultaneously. The Terry and the Pirates pages in the first four issues drew exclusively from Sunday installments; beginning with issue #5 the daily strips were added alongside the Sundays, reflecting editorial decisions to give readers more complete story coverage.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Super Comics #1 was published in May 1938 by Western Printing and Lithographing Company (Whitman Publishing Co. imprint), distributed by Dell, and edited by Oskar Lebeck.
- The issue was a 68-page, full-color anthology of Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate licensed newspaper-strip reprints, priced at 10 cents.
- Terry Lee, Pat Ryan, Connie (George Webster Confucius), and the Dragon Lady all appear as part of the reprinted Terry and the Pirates feature — written and drawn by Milton Caniff — which had been running in newspapers since October 22, 1934.
- The first four issues of Super Comics reprinted only Terry and the Pirates Sunday strips; beginning with issue #5 the daily strip installments were added as well.
- Other strips in the anthology included Dick Tracy (Chester Gould), Little Orphan Annie (Harold Gray), Gasoline Alley (Frank King), Moon Mullins, Winnie Winkle, and others licensed from the Chicago Tribune–NY News Syndicate.
- Terry and the Pirates was one of the most widely read adventure strips of its era, reaching some 31 million newspaper subscribers between 1934 and 1946.
- The Dragon Lady — introduced in the newspaper strip in 1934 as a ruthless pirate leader modeled loosely on the real historical figure Lai Choi San — is reprinted in Super Comics as a fully established character, shifting from villain to wartime resistance fighter over Caniff's run.
- Super Comics ran for the entirety of its 1938–1949 lifespan as a core Dell–Western product, making it one of the more durable anthology titles of the early Golden Age.
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