Enjoy this 1966 cartoon pitting Batman against Dracula! It was created by Sid Harris (S. Harris) and published in issue #2 (of 3) of the short-lived nostalgia magazine P.S.
Insights
How Some of the 20th Century’s Most Notable Cartoonists Got Their Starts
Tom Heintjes at Hogan’s Alley kindly put my 2019 article on a popular early cartooning contest for young people online for free. For more than a decade, the magazine Open Road for Boys gave aspiring artists a chance to share their “solutions” to a problem cartoon. At the head of this post, you can see…
Banning Comics: It’s 1948 Again
I am a former high school librarian. For more than twenty years I have taught graduate students who plan to work with young people in public and school libraries. I am also a historian who studies the intersection of comics, young readers, and libraries in the US during the mid-20th century. Unsurprisingly the recent surge…
A Look at DC’s Executive Compensation c. 1968
In late March 1968, National Periodical Publications (aka DC) merged with Kinney Service Corporation, a company best known for its parking lots, funeral homes, and cleaning services. This was not a cash sale but an exchange of approximately 1.4 million shares comprising Common and Series B Kinney shares to National’s owners (e.g. the four individuals…
Jane Krom Grammer: A Golden-Age Comic Book Artist Finally Receives Credit for Her Work
When Barrie Schindler was young, her mother Jane Krom Grammer mentioned to her that she had drawn art for comic books. Jane kept a package filled with several issues of Supersnipe Comics from the mid-1940s and pointed to the Dotty stories in them. But Jane’s name didn’t appear anywhere on the art and there were…