The First Comic Book Letters Page

The Last
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If you were a comic book reader at any time throughout the 1960s through the 1990s, each issue of whatever title you happened to be reading carrying a letters page in which members of the readership could write in and share their opinions about the stories they were consuming were a regular find. Not only did letters pages fulfill the need for a certain number of text-based pages in every issue so as to qualify for second class postal rates for subscriptions, but when used effectively, they also created a sense of brand loyalty between the readers and the magazine. While letters pages became widespread as the late 1950s transitioned into the 1960s, they had been used prior to that. In fact, most Pulp Magazines, the antecedents to comic books, routinely ran letters pages as a part of their content. But I wondered what the earliest comic book I could locate that carried a letters page might be. And I believe I’ve got it here.

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TARGET COMICS began publishing in 1939 under the auspices of Novelty Press. Initially, it was a typical anthology series of the era with a variety of features, none of them especially noteworthy (well, except for Stardust the Super-Wizard, who first showed up a few issues in. His hallucinatory adventures under the pen of Fletcher Hanks are still studied to this day.) Ten issues into the run, having seen the ascent of costumed super heroes ruling the pages of rival publications, TARGET COMICS went ahead and created their own super-doer, The Target. The Target, along with two junior partners referred to as the Targeteers, wore bulletproof costumes and battled the underworld in the manner of Batman, and lasted as a feature for some time. Around this same time, the magazine inaugurated what I believe was the first letters page in comics, in TARGET COMICS #11, cover-dated December 1940. You can see it reproduced above. Assuming the letters that are run on this first page are genuine, and weren’t just created whole cloth by the editors themselves, this is evidence that comic book publishers were already getting mail from fans, even though there was no expectation that those letters would be printed anywhere. And that, as a way of guaranteeing that they’d have enough material to continue the feature, the editors offered a dollar for each letter published. As the cost of a copy of TARGET COMICS was only ten cents to begin with, it was a pretty good return on investment for prospective letter-writers.

If anyone knows of any comic book letters page that saw print earlier than this, please let me know.

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8 thoughts on “The First Comic Book Letters Page”

  1. The two letters suggesting content changes struck me as potentially fake — a way to get readers to write in and tell the editors what they want to see. Though if Clarence Pool is real, boy, was he misreading the national taste when he suggested that superheroes were already out of date in 1940.

    But there was a 12-year-old Donald Luftig living in the Bronx in 1940, so it could be the letters are real, or at least that one is.

    Luftig moved to New Jersey, and worked for WNBC, retiring in 1990 as their director of local news. But in addition, there’s a Donald Luftig who wrote at least one text story for Fawcett Comics in 1946, when the Luftig of that lettercol would have been 18.

    This could mean that Luftig’s fandom lasted a while, or that the Luftig family knew someone in the comics biz, which might suggest that the letters were solicited.

    [There was a George Stumpp the 3rd in the NYC area as well, and he could have been going by “Jr.,” because that’s traditional when the first of that name is deceased. But he was likely not a kid, since his father was 59 in 1940. And there were at least a couple of Edward Foxes in the Chicago area in 1940, one 11, one 14.]

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  2. Kurt Busiek, investigative reporter. 😉 It was actually interesting to read about who may have actually written those. Thank you.

    Just from the letters, “Clarence Poole’s” sounds written by a concerned (grumpy) parent, disapproving the more fantastical characters. “George Stump” seemed like a disgruntled writer. 😉 “Six or 8 pages each month are hardly enough to build a complete plot!”

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    1. I’d seen the target before, in the 1980’s comic book price guides. But just wanted to reiterate the design similarities to Matt Wagner’s “The Arialist”. Maybe deliberately done by Matt. And in black & white, his version was dramatically cool.

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  4. New Fun Comics #2, March 1935 (the second comic book published by the company that would become DC Comics) had a page, “Fun Mail,” that featured comments from readers. Here are the first three paragraphs from that first “Fun Mail” page. The ellipses in the paragraph are as they appear in the original, and any transcription errors are mine.

    “What a whale of a lot of letters came piling in and are still piling in! And what a whale of a lot of fun we are having reading the letters written to FUN! It’s impossible to answer them all and we’re just picking a few at random.

    “There’s Gilbert A. Meyer of Milwaukee, ‘Yippee, Congraulations on some new and really funny cartoons!’ writes Gilbert, and follows it up with some sound suggestions, some of which we are adopting in this issue. Good for you, Gilbert! . . . And here’s Chester Crockett of Decatur, Ill. ‘There is absolutely no magazine on the newsstand that can compete with FUN!’ Thank you, Chester, and we’ll try to work in your suggestion of a picture of some sport celebrity. We certainly do like to receive suggestions . . . And Mike Martinez from Detroit, Mich., who says ‘I like FUN Magazine because it has good stories and thrilling action pictures.’ Mike wants some more mystery stories, and we certainly will try to get them…

    “And Jean Foote, of Long Beach, Cal., says ‘I like FUN because it is different. Some magazines with comics in them are old and have been used before (I mean, the comics).’ Thank you, Jean, and we will keep on giving you new, original and unused comics . . . From far away Wyoming writes Lyle Glen Steinhume, ‘Altogether I think your magazine is just what American Youth needs and will appreciate!’ Lyle wants a department of things to build, also a game and entertainment department which is a blamed good idea and it will be along in succeeding issues.”

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  7. Pingback: The First Comic Book Letters Page Redux – The Tom Brevoort Experience

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