1941 Notes--Text Pieces

If you read enough pre-Silver Age comic books, you're going to see these:

Ah, the text pieces. Stuck right in the middle of all the pretty pictures and colors, just sitting there, begging not to be read.

What was up with those?

Well, in order to qualify for cheaper postal rates, any magazine (comics included) had to include at least 2 pages of non-advertising typeset text. Why? Ask Ben Franklin!

I have no idea how many comics were actually mailed back in 1941, or how much of a difference those postal rates would have made. But obviously, the answer is pretty substantial, because every publisher did them, without fail.

Sometimes the actually involved characters from the comic...just as often not, though. If you were lucky, the piece would be in the same genre as the comic (although in 1941, when most everything was an anthology, that mattered less).

Who wrote them? Fawcett basically had one guy in charge of theirs--you can see that both of the above were authored by "Larac (or La Rac) Semrof." which is just Carl Formes spelled backwards with an extra A thrown in.

It's hard to tell because of all the pen names, but other companies seemingly made anyone sitting around the office write some. That was Stan Lee's first published work--the text piece in Captain America Comics #3, starring Cap himself!

As you can imagine, these obligatory pieces often weren't good--turgid prose at best, unreadable at worst (Still better than Bendis' Oral History of the Avengers, though...). Frankly, even I rarely bother to read them, and I read EVERYTHING in a comic book.

Maybe that's a good project for someone--gather and publish an archive of the best of the text pieces. That could be interesting, and surely most of them are public domain by now.

By the Silver Age, the companies realized that they didn't have to pay writers to do this--letters pages and Bullpen Bulletins were enough to satisfy the post office. Fans would give them their text requirements--for free!! And so, farewell to the text pieces.

Of course, by running letters columns, the comic companies created the delusion amongst fans that their opinion mattered, and thus was created the fan entitlement that has destroyed the comic industry...or so some would have you believe...