‘American Movie Comic Books: 1930s-1970s: From the Silver Screen to the Printed Page’ (review)

Written by Peter Bosch
Published by TwoMorrows

A few years back, writer Peter Bosch wrote a book about television shows adapted into comic books. I never read it. Never even saw it. Thankfully, I did get to see his logical follow-up, a book about movies and movie stars adapted into comic books.

American Movie Comic Books (1930s-1970s) From the Silver Screen to the Printed Page is the unwieldy, if perfectly descriptive title of his new one.

Coming as it does from TwoMorrows, its nearly 200 pages are attractively laid out, with a nice mixture of text and generally color illustrations.

The sections, too, are sequential, with a chapter each for the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. There’s a little at the beginning about earlier precedents and a chapter at the end about later examples.

For me, the standout fact is seeing just exactly how many movie adaptations there have been in comic books over the years.

Growing up, movie adaptations—and TV adaptations as well—were usually published by Gold Key or Dell Comics, two publishers I considered secondary to DC and Marvel. I pretty much ignored the movie books back then.

Little by little, though, I was becoming a major film buff as well as a comics collector, and I started paying more attention. I believe the first film comics I bought would have been Gold Key’s Yellow Submarine, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Beneath the Planet of the Apes, all of which also contained folded pull-out posters, which may have influenced my decision. As both Dell and Gold Key slowly died over the course of the next decade, Marvel—and to a lesser extent, DC—took up the movie adaptations. I particularly enjoyed Marvel’s take on the five original Planet of the Apes movies as well as Logan’s Run.

They’re all here, of course, and hundreds of others besides.

If you aren’t familiar with it, Dell once had a series technically entitled Four Color Comics. It was unique in numerous ways. For one thing it ran over 1300 issues! For another, there were numbers never published and the ones that were, weren’t necessarily published sequentially. Although fairly well documented these days, it was a bear for collectors to deal with for many years.

Four Color Comics had everything! Some issues were based on cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Andy Panda, Felix the Cat), others were based on newspaper strips (Flash Gordon, Smilin’ Jack, Popeye, Tillie the Toiler), some on radio series (The Lone Ranger, Mr. District Attorney, Challenge of the Yukon) and later, television shows, but a large portion of Four Color issues were film adaptations.

Bosch covers them all, with the majority of his coverage being of the Four Color titles—both big name movies and forgotten ones alike. Nearly every one gets at least one photo—a page or a cover—as well as a plot summary and a paragraph (or two) about the artists, any backstory, and a lot of discussion as to likenesses of actors (or the lack thereof).

Each section also has a number of biographical sidebars dealing with the artists and writers who did most of the movie-related comics, people like Dan Spiegle, Jack Sparling, Paul S. Newman, Jesse Marsh, and Alberto Giolitti. There are also some for better known artists such as Frazetta, Kirby, Al Williamson, and Curt Swan but to me, the coverage for the lesser-known folks who don’t usually get covered at all is a highlight of the book.

All, in all, this is the type of book you can kick back with and just enjoy skimming through, picking out movies to find and watch online, or even now-public domain comics that can now be downloaded online. For film buffs and comic book fans, it’s an area that’s never been much covered until American Movie Comic Books (1930s-1970s), and I say it was well worth the wait. I gotta go find a copy of that TV volume now!

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