Back in this post, I mentioned Captain Marvel — the original one, the one from 1939, the one who appeared in a burst of lightning when a kid named Billy Batson said “Shazam!” I mentioned he first appeared in “the second issue (actually, the first) of Whiz Comics.” Several of you wrote to ask me how this is humanly or even mathematically possible. How can the second issue be the first?
This playing-around with numbers was made possible by what they called “ashcan issues.” An ashcan issue was a thin, cheaply-made comic book –actually more like a pamphlet — that was whipped up to secure a copyright, a trademark or even just a “nyah nyah, we got there first.” I can explain this more easily be referring to Eerie — a companion magazine to Creepy –both published by Warren Magazines.
Creepy started in 1964 and sold rather well — and why not? Its early issues were quite good. In 1966, Jim Warren (the publisher) decided to issue a new magazine and the title Eerie was chosen. They were just putting together the first issue of that when they heard that a rival publisher, Myron Fass, was coming out with the same kind of magazine and his would be named Eerie. So to secure his claim on the title, Warren had his staff whip up a little all-black-and-white issue and he had 200 copies printed and then they were sold by just a few newsstands around New York or circulated among wholesalers and retailers.
It contained material that had not yet been printed in any Warren publication but would be soon. It got on the stands before the Myron Fass Eerie so he had to change the name of his publication. And that’s all you have to know about ashcans except that their tiny press runs made them very rare and therefore very expensive. Eerie #1 was also very easy to forge and someone did, printing up fake copies and selling them for a nice piece of change.
And you should also know that some of them create confusions. The first issue of Warren’s Eerie I saw and purchased off a newsstand was #2 and I wondered how I had missed seeing or buying #1. I searched old bookstores for it before I found out that there was no #1 — or at least no #1 that I was likely to ever come across and I never did.
Fawcett Publishing started Captain Marvel (then named Captain Lightning) in an ashcan called Thrill Comics #1. They then changed the name of the character and the name of his comic book. So that’s how Whiz Comics #2 could easily be #1. (“Ashcans,” by the way, were not what the called them then. That term came later.
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