The Adventures of Bob Hope #1

History

With superhero sales softening as 1950 approached, National Periodical Publications negotiated licenses to publish comics based on celebrities including Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, and Alan Ladd, betting that radio and film stardom would translate to newsstand traffic. Issue #1 was written by Cal Howard — a veteran animation writer who had worked at Warner Bros. and later supplied scripts to DC's entire stable of humor-celebrity books — and drawn by Owen Fitzgerald, a former Disney and Fleischer animator whose 'bigfoot' cartoon style translated naturally to Hope's exaggerated screen persona. The book was edited by Whitney Ellsworth, DC's longtime Hollywood liaison, giving it a polished, studio-adjacent sensibility from the outset. Because the stories were produced under a licensing agreement, DC never owned the Bob Hope character itself, though original creations introduced later in the run — such as the superhero Super-Hip — did become DC intellectual property.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Cover-dated February–March 1950; published by National Periodical Publications (DC Comics); cover price 10 cents; 54 pages, full color.
• First issue of a series that ran continuously for 109 issues through February–March 1968 — an 18-year run.
• Written by Cal Howard (uncredited in the issue), drawn and inked by Owen Fitzgerald; edited by Whitney Ellsworth. Story credits did not appear in the book; Cal Howard attribution comes from later scholarship.
• Features a photograph cover using a film still of Bob Hope — a format maintained through the first four issues before switching to illustrated covers.
• Contains a 'Batman and Robin Stand Up for Sportsmanship!' one-page public-service announcement scripted by Jack Schiff, penciled by Win Mortimer, and inked by Stan Kaye, in which Batman defends an African-American athlete.
• Includes a two-page 'Introducing Doris Day' celebrity profile illustrated by Bob Oksner, and a biography of actress Rhonda Fleming — Hope's co-star in the 1949 film The Great Lover — establishing the Hollywood tie-in filler format used throughout the run.
• The fictional Bob Hope character depicted here is based on the cowardly, wiseguy persona Hope played across his Road picture films; the DC Multiverse later assigned this series' stories to Earth-Twelve (per Absolute Crisis on Infinite Earths, 2006).
• Because it was a licensed title, DC Comics does not own the Bob Hope stories or character; however, original characters created later in the run — including nephew Super-Hip (first appearing in issue #95) and talking dog Harvard Harvard III — are owned by DC.

Full credits

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