In Funnybooks: The Improbably Glories of the Best American Comic Books, Michael Barrier argues, “What really matters about comic books, especially old comics like the ones from the 1940s and 1950s that are the principal subjects of this book, is whether they repay reading today, and not just by elderly people who want to bath in nostalgia. Funnybooks: The Improbably Glories of the Best American Comic Books is my answer to that question, and my answer is, of course, yes. A qualified yes, to be sure, since most comic books, from any period, have very little to recommend them” (pg. xiii). So begins Barrier’s love letter to Dell-Western comics and the people that worked for it. He continues, “It seems never to have occurred to anyone that the best comic-book stories might reveal themselves fully only through many rereadings, and that they might be – in that respect, at least – more like paintings or music than prose fiction” (pg. 5). Finally, he argues, “What distinguished the ‘very good ones’ from their peers was not so much the nature of their audience as it was the skill with which they managed to respond simultaneously to its requirements and their own hearts’ imperatives” (pg. 13). As such, his analysis primarily focuses on a combination of technique and the personal lives of the writers, artists, and businesspeople at Dell-Western.
Barrier writes, “Because he recognized and nurtured those talents [that were better than his], [Oskar] Lebeck became one of the very few comic-book editors of real importance, and his comic books among the very few that published stories of lasting value” (pg. 25-26). Addressing Dell’s response to the genre that defined comic books, Barrier writes, “A few years after Superman’s debut, costumed superheroes were at the center of the comic-book world, and everything else – including the Dell titles – was on the periphery. Most of the Dell characters originated elsewhere, in other media, and were adapted to comic books; the reverse was true of the superheroes. Dell dropped its few superheroes in the early 1940s, and in subsequent years the Dell titles were conspicuously removed from many other such fashions that swept through the comic-book world” (pg. 51). Of the business itself, Barrier writes, “It was always the cost and availability of paper, not the cost of producing the stories that filled them, that had the greatest impact on comic books’ page count and frequency of publication” (pg. 88).
In one of his examinations of an artists’ work, Barrier writes, “To page through the Dell comic books of the early and mid-1940s is to be reminded that even in those years [Walt] Kelly drew much better than most of his colleagues. His stories, with their Disney-bred draftsmanship, stand out in the midst of work that is more labored than his, or stodgier looking, or both” (pg. 209). He writes of Jesse Marsh and Gaylord Dubois’s departure from other jungle books of the era, “In the Dell Tarzan, though, thanks to Marsh’s matter-of-fact illustrations of Tarzan’s fundamentally bizarre adventures in an invented Africa – adventures filled with talking apes, lost civilizations, and strange races – it was as if everything excessive had been scraped away In DuBois’s scripts, the Burroughs books’ virtues remained, but thanks to Marsh they were clothed now in eminently sane drawings” (pg. 220). Barrier even argues that Dell came out ahead of the Comic Book Code, writing, “Dell was one of three publishers that refused to adhere to the code, the others being EC and Gilberton, publisher of what had been called Classic Comics but were now the more respectable-sounding Classics Illustrated. Dell’s complaint was that the code was not strict enough” (pg. 313). To this end, “the slogan ‘Dell Comics Are Good Comics’ began appearing at the bottom of the first page of each Dell comic book in the late summer of 1954,” followed later with a pledge to parents (pg. 313).
Barrier links Dell’s demise to its practice of licensing characters. He writes, “There was never much chance that readers would be swept up by the ‘Mickey Mouse’ stories as they were by the Marvel stories” (pg. 337). Barrier continues, “The Gold Key comic books’ mild prosperity in the mid-1960s was short-lived. Western lost other longtime characters – the Hanna-Barbera characters, King Features stalwarts like the Phantom and Popeye the Sailor – as licensors sought better deals in a shrunken comic-book market and even in some cases launched self-publishing efforts” (pg. 347). Further, “Dell’s demise as a comic-book publisher preceded Western’s by more than ten years; the last Dell comic books were published in 1973. Eventually both Western and Dell were absorbed into the Bertelsmann media empire, whose most important publishing brand was Random House” (pg. 348).
Barrier concludes, “Ultimately, though, such graphic novels [as Art Spiegelman’s or Robert Crumb’s] are separated from the Dell comic books of Western Printing’s heyday by much more than a few decades. The cartoonist of the mid-twentieth century, if he caught sight of the possibilities in his medium and wanted to realize them, almost always had to work undercover, concealing his ambitions in comic books that appeared to be as trivial and disposable as those from the competition” (pg. 351). ( )