Kamden Spies wants to know…
While I know a lot about comics, I don’t know a lot about the magazine distribution end of the industry. Throughout comics history, lots of titles transition from one to another. For example, a title like Wacky Duck at Timely in 1947 ended with issue #7 but its numbering continued as Justice, a crime comic. Moon Girl, A Romance at E.C. became Weird Fantasy. Why are titles of the books changed instead of cancelling them and starting the numbering from scratch? Also did this make a difference to the subscribers of these titles?
Once upon a time, comic books sold a fair amount of their press runs via mail subscriptions. Most charged the same price — $1.20 for twelve issues of a comic that sold for a dime on newsstands — and some of those offers came with a bonus prize of some sort, especially on Dell Comics. Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories sold a huge number of copies that way.
Such deals were possible because the post office offered a discount rate for magazines. They called it Second Class Mail but now it’s called Periodicals. To qualify for Second Class Mail, comic book publishers had to do certain things…like there was some odd ruling that your publication wasn’t a magazine unless it had at least one page of text in it. That’s why comics of that era all had one-page text stories in them…and that requirement was later filled with a letters page since it cost less to print letters than to pay someone to write a text story. At times, a comic didn’t qualify as a magazine if it was all full of one feature so that was why, for example, the Uncle Scrooge comic book always featured a short story of Gyro Gearloose.
And the publisher had to pay a deposit for each publication that had Second Class mailing privileges. The problem with that was that if you canceled a comic, you’d have to wait a few months for the postal folks to refund your deposit. So some publishers tried to sneak a new magazine in under an old deposit. They’d continued the numbering and claim that, in one of the examples you cite, Justice wasn’t a new comic but rather a continuation of Wacky Duck.
(To answer a question someone will ask if I don’t say this here: Nowadays, we know that a #1 issue will often sell especially well because some folks will buy extra copies in the expectation that those issues will be more valuable someday. But back then, there was no such speculation and a #1 issue often sold less because if was a first issue. Some retailers were hesitant to give a new comic adequate display on their racks. So continuing the numbering of a canceled comic as a different book also helped get around that obstacle.)
The tale of Moon Girl was even more convoluted than you describe. It started as Moon Girl and the Prince. Then they made the slight change to calling it just Moon Girl. Then they decided that maybe a crime comic would sell better so they renamed it Moon Girl Fights Crime. Then they decided that maybe a love comic would sell better so they dumped Moon Girl completely and called their new love comic A Moon…A Girl…Romance. Each time, they tried to trick the post office into viewing the new book as a modification of an old one so no new deposit was required.
Finally, they decided to drop that one and start a new book called Weird Fantasy but they kept the numbering going in the hope that the post office wouldn’t notice. In this case, they did…and a new deposit was required. Sometimes, they got away with it and sometimes, they didn’t.
I don’t know how often subscribers complained. I guess it depended on how much they liked or didn’t like the new comic they were suddenly receiving. I know when I was a kid, a relative offered to buy me a subscription to any Dell comic. I selected Looney Tunes but due to some processing error, I began receiving Tom & Jerry. I didn’t mind much. If they’d sent me issues of Annie Oakley then, I might have minded.
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