The 1930’s was the start of the Golden Age of comics. This was when the seed of everything we know in comics today were first planted. There are several key events and characters from the 30’s that shaped the formation of modern comics. In 1933 Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics (Eastern Color Printing) was released. It was the first publication to resemble what we know today as a comic book, by including a cover and full color interior pages. Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics was given away or sold (we don’t actually know) at Woolworth’s department store. It was followed by Famous Funnies #1 in 1934 which was a large size format with 68 pages and sold for 10 cents each. Keep in mind the average persons’ take-home pay was less than $25/week and in the depression a dime could buy a meal. Even with its high cost, the first issue still sold over 180 thousand copies.

New Fun Comics, later More Fun Comics, (National Allied Publications, which would later become DC) was published in 1935 and was the first comic that contained all new material. This title would later see the first appearances of such characters as Doctor Fate, The Spectre, Green Arrow, Aquaman and Superboy. New (More) Fun was the very first DC comic, and set in motion the comics industry we know today.

The most significant event of the 1930’s could be summed up as ‘the undies on the outside’. In the year between the cover dates of June 1938 and May 1939, the two most important characters in the history of comics first appeared. Obvious? Yes, but the importance of Superman and Batman to comics and many other mediums cannot be overemphasized. At the time of their first appearances, they were both hits. When Superman crossed over from comic books to comic strips, his appeal went from just kids reading the books to entire families reading his adventures in the daily newspaper. Once radio started featuring Superman’s adventures, the pop culture explosion began. Batman was every bit as big a hit when he started. There is nothing in modern popular culture that compares to the phenomenon of Superman/Batman. It is unlikely that if these characters (or something equally game-changing) were created today they would have the impact they did in the 1930’s. However to be fair, nothing even close to this revolutionary has been created in any medium for a very long time.

With the possible exception of Mickey Mouse, whose star has faded considerably in recent decades, Superman and Batman are the only icons that cross over all cultural, ethnic and social divides to be instantly recognizable. The money made from these two characters in print, film and merchandising is in the billions. The DC comics empire and a large part of the Warner Brothers film studio would be very different today if not for these two guys in tights. As for the comics medium, it is very likely that without the advent of the super-hero there would be no comic book industry today. There were many publishers that started up in the 1930’s, of them DC (then called National Allied) and Marvel (then called Timely) were just small islands in the publishing ocean that they shared with Dell, Centaur, McKay, Eastern Color, Fawcett (more on them in a bit) and many others. Of the companies active in comics publishing in the 30’s only Marvel and DC exist as comics publishers today. Most of the rest went out of business entirely, stopped making comics or were absorbed by other companies.