By the Numbers
During 1948, 107 new titles of crime comic books appeared
The difficulty in arriving at accurate figures about comic books is considerable. One must distinguish between comic books printed, published, sold and, of course, read. The last item, the pass-on circulation, is most important, for many comic books after having been sold once for ten cents are not only traded for others, but are also sold repeatedly at lower prices: eight cents, six cents, two cents and even one cent. Even in such sales large sums are involved because the total numbers are so staggering. There are clandestine and half-clandestine stores, and backrooms of stores, about which adults know very little, which do business in these cut-rate transactions. On the whole crime comic books are monthly publications rather than bi-monthly like some of the harmless ones like Super Duck or Terrytoon Comics. They tend to have the largest editions and they are the ones most widely traded.
Owing to the conditioning of children by the industry, crime comic books are more widely read than harmless comics. As the editor of one publishing house stated, "The sports line of comic books is the cleanest type of comic book in America. We are going to drop it." (It was not 'lucrative.")
One crime comic book announces on its cover that it is read by six million readers. It is interesting that this is one of the worst comic books, a veritable primer for teaching Junior juvenile delinquency. The Minister of Justice of the Dominion of Canada called this particular book "a shocking instance of abuse of freedom of the press."
At the time when the industry began to promulgate new codes - the first general one announced after my first public criticism of crime comics - the number of crime comic books began to increase tremendously, both absolutely and in relation to non-crime comics. From 1937 to 1947 only nineteen crime comic titles existed, sixteen of them obvious crime comics, three of them so-called Western comic books that actually featured crimes. But during 1948, 107 new titles of crime comic books appeared, 53 straight crime comics, 54 "Westerns" featuring crime.
It seems that the comic-book industry was in considerable conflict. On the one hand, they were not anxious for the public to know that the comic-book business and its influence was so enormous - though one publisher said in a revealing public statement, "When you get that big you just can't escape public attention!" On the other hand, since a sizable amount of advertising is carried in comic books, they like to use figures as large as possible. So while one could still find figures lower than my estimates, one could also find figures as high as 75 million a month (Advertising Age) or 80 million a month (Association of Comics Magazine Publishers).