Famous Funnies

[Imaginos666]

I'm looking for background on Famous Funnies, specifically in regards to how they selected the subjects for their comics. I'm working on a story concerning a particular recipient of the Medal of Honor who was profiled in issue 207 and I'm curious to see if anyone knows how these stories were selected (or more to the point: if you know someone who might.)

Here's the issue (and story) in question, and even someone with vague knowledge of how these stories were selected will be helpful. The soldier in this story, Noah O'Dell Knight, was not exactly a well-known figure.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v231/Imaginos/famous207.jpg

[Rob Allen]

Well, this Famous Funnies series was the descendant of the very first comic book to be printed in the now-standard floppy format - Famous Funnies - A Carnival of Comics came out in 1933, and the series started the following year. It was published by Eastern Color Printing, who also printed comics for many other publishers until the 1960s. Famous Funnies was all or mostly reprints of newspaper comic strips, or stories of characters licensed from newspaper comics.

The issue you're interested in is #207. Up until #206, the star of the book seems to have been Tom Terriss, the Vagabond Adventurer. He disappears from the cover as of #207, and starting with #209, Buck Rogers was the cover feature.

I haven't been able to find any indication of who the editor was. The Who's Who has a couple of artists with Famous Funnies work listed, but no writers or editors. I would guess that one of these scenarios is likely:

a) there was a newspaper strip about real-life military heroes and Famous Funnies reprinted it like they did with so many other strips.

b) the editor found some biographies of medal winners and figured they would make good comics stories, and assigned a writer and artist.

Do you know if this was part of a series? Did they profile a different Medal of Honor winner in every issue?

[Imaginos666]

Our files have some old photostats of the original comics pages, probably copied sometime in the mid 1980s, that show this story was illustrated for the standard comic-size page. So I'm thinking this was not a reprint. Also, there is no indication that the story, which is about 5 pages long, is part of a series.



The photostats are pretty dark, and there are no credits published on these pages. I've only got copies of the pages relevant to this story, though.

Sorry about taking so long to respond ... and thanks for the help!