Dell Comics was the comic book publishing arm of Dell Publishing, which got its start in pulp magazines. It published comics from 1929 to 1973. At its peak, it was the most prominent and successful American company in the medium.
Its first title was The Funnies which was the first comic book to feature original material, but since it was published in the tabloid format as opposed to the standard one, it is normally not recognized as such.
The company formed a partnership in 1938 with Western Publishing, in which Dell would finance and distribute publications that Western would produce. While this diverged from the regular practice in the medium of one company handling finance and production and outsourcing distribution, it was a highly successful enterprise with titles selling in the millions.
From 1939 to 1962, Dell's most notable and prolific title was the anthology Four Color. Published several times a month, the title (which primarily consisted of standalone issues featuring various licensed properties) saw more than 1,300 issues published in its 23-year history. It often served as a try-out title (much like DC's Showcase) and thus the launching pad for many long-running series.
In 1948, Dell refused an invitation of membership in the nascent Association of Comics Magazine Publishers. The association had been formed to pre-empt government intervention in the face of mounting public criticism of comic books. Dell vice-president Helen Meyer told Congress that Dell had opted out of the association because they didn't want their less controversial offerings to serve as "an umbrella for the crime comic publishers". [1] When the Comics Code was formed in 1954 in reaction to Wertham'sSeduction of the Innocent, Dell again refused to join and instead began publishing in its comics a Pledge to Parents that promised their editorial process "eliminates, rather than regulates, objectional material" and concluded with the now classic credo Dell Comics Are Good Comics. [2]
Bart Beaty in his book Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture describes a concerted campaign by Dell against publication of Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent to the extent of recruiting several of the companies that it licensed characters from (including Warner Brother Cartoons, the Lone Ranger Inc. and Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.) to send letters of protest to publisher Stanley Rinehart.[1]
Dell in this period even burnished its image by taking out full-page ads in the Saturday Evening Post in late 1952 and early 1953 that emphasized the wholesomeness of its comics.[3]
From mid-1950 to Spring 1959 Dell promoted subscriptions to its non-Disney titles with what it called the Dell Comics Club. Membership was automatic with any one year subscription to such titles and came with a certificate of membership plus a group portrait of the most prominent non-Disney characters published by Dell. Dell also offered various subscription premiums during the 1940s and 1950s (in some cases these were prints of covers or other character artwork and in one instance a cel from a Warner Brothers cartoon) and offered the option of an illustrated note or card be sent to the recipients of a gift subscription for birthdays or Christmas.[4] Multi-year subscriptions were also available (in the case of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, at one point in the 1940s subscriptions for up to 5 years were offered).[5][6]
The end of Four Color in 1962 coincided with the end of the partnership with Western, which took most of its licensed properties and its original material and created its own imprint, Gold Key Comics.
![[2]](http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b125/kammion/dellgood.jpg){kind=link}
![[3]](http://www.freewebs.com/dellcomics/mag_ad.jpg){kind=link}