The Funnies #38
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeThe Funnies #38 (December 1939) is a noteworthy late-Golden Age anthology that captures two of Dell's most ambitious licensed properties running in full stride simultaneously: the ongoing Oz comics adaptation featuring Dorothy Gale, Toto, the Scarecrow, and the patchwork character Scraps, and the authorized Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation of A Princess of Mars, in which John Carter and his Martian ally Kantos Kan are pitted against monstrous foes in the gladiatorial arenas of Warhoon. Coming at the tail end of the same year MGM's Wizard of Oz film reached theaters, the issue places beloved Oz characters in an original comics storyline drawn from the deeper Baum canon — well beyond the single novel most readers knew — representing an early attempt to leverage comics as a vehicle for expanding a literary franchise. The issue also marks a mature phase of John Coleman Burroughs's stewardship of his father's Martian hero in comics, a run that preceded by two years the better-known John Carter of Mars Sunday newspaper strip.
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The Funnies (1936 series) was packaged by M.C. Gaines and editor Sheldon Mayer for Dell under a McClure Syndicate arrangement, running 64 issues from October 1936 through May 1942. By the time of issue #38, Gaines had already departed to help establish All-American Publications, and Dell had transferred production duties to Western Publishing in 1939; the book's editorial identity had consequently shifted away from newspaper-strip reprints toward original licensed content, including the John Carter of Mars adaptation, which had debuted in issue #30. Jim Gary drew the opening John Carter installments, but John Coleman Burroughs — son of Edgar Rice Burroughs — took over art duties with issue #34 and continued through the run's conclusion; by #38 he was also providing the cover. The Oz strip, illustrated by Walt Spouse, drew on Baum's wider Oz book series rather than any single source novel, weaving in characters such as Scraps (the Patchwork Girl) who had never appeared in the 1939 MGM film.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published December 1939 by Dell; 64 pages, full color — part of the 64-issue Funnies run (October 1936 – May 1942).
- Cover and interior John Carter art by John Coleman Burroughs, son of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who took over the strip's art duties beginning with issue #34 (August 1939).
- The John Carter of Mars feature in this issue continues the authorized comics adaptation of A Princess of Mars, with John Carter and Kantos Kan facing monstrous adversaries in the gladiatorial games of Warhoon — a direct adaptation of plot events from the Burroughs novel.
- Kantos Kan, the Heliumite warrior who becomes one of John Carter's key allies in the Barsoom novels, appears alongside Carter in the Warhoon arena sequence in this issue.
- The Oz feature (art by Walt Spouse) stars Dorothy Gale, Toto, the Scarecrow, and Scraps (the Patchwork Girl), drawing on Baum's broader Oz canon well beyond The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; the storyline involves Ojo's imprisonment for picking a six-leaf clover, a plot drawn from The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913).
- John Carter's first-ever comic book appearance was The Funnies #30 (April/May 1939); by issue #38, the Burroughs adaptation was mid-story in its serialization of A Princess of Mars.
- The series was originally packaged by M.C. Gaines and Sheldon Mayer; Gaines departed Dell in 1939 to co-found All-American Publications, and production of The Funnies transferred to Western Publishing that same year.
- Other continuing features in issue #38 include Roy Crane's Captain Easy, V.T. Hamlin's Alley Oop, Al McWilliams's The Crime Busters, and Hugh Harman's Bosko cartoon adaptation.
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