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<DIV>I was surprised to hear this as well. Here's some more text from Wizard
Special: The Beginning of the VALIANT Era which supports Dell's very
profitable status in the 40s at least.</DIV>
<DIV>----------------------------------------------------</DIV>
<DIV>Then, in 1938, Dell hired a company then known as Western Printing &
Lithography to package and print all-new comics for the Dell line. Western did
have some previous experience with comics. In 1935, it began publishing Mickey
Mouse Magazine. Although this promotional publication was in a magazine format,
it did contain some newspaper strip reprints.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>After moderate success with new material published first in comics format,
Dell pioneered another area that has become familiar territory in comic book
circles, that of licensing outside properties. The publisher struck a deal with
Walt Disney Studios, and in 1940, the first issue of Walt Disney's Comics and
Stories hit the newsstands. By the mid-1940s, Comics and Stories was selling in
excess of one million copies per issue, and Dell quickly followed this success
with other Disney titles. Western provided the material and printed all of these
comics for Dell.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Licensing was enormously profitable for Dell, and the company soon
exploited the concept to its fullest potential, by starting an anthology of
licensed projects in 1941. Dell's Four Color Comics, in addition to the proven
Walt Disney characters, included issues featuring characters from radio,
television, movies, and other animation studios, notably Walter Lantz (Woody
Woodpecker), King Features (Popeye), and Warner Brothers (Bugs Bunny). Along
with Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Four Color became a flagship of the Dell
line, eventually lasting for over 1,300 weekly issues.</DIV>
<DIV>-----------------------------------------------------------------------</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Kintoun<BR></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 6/14/2004 1:11:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time, <A
href="mailto:bangfish@cableone.net">bangfish@cableone.net</A> writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><FONT
face=Arial>>Dell was in serious financial straits by the late
1950s</FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>
<DIV>what's your source for this? Not saying that you're wrong, but it
goes against conventional wisdom. My understanding is that Dell was
still the number one selling comic publisher in the late 1950s (source:
interview with Irwin Donenfeld, publisher of DC comics), and one of the
leading publishers of magazines and paperbacks in the late 1950s.
(source was advance look at summary of an article in an upcoming or recently
out Alter-Ego quoting various newsources from the late 50s, when Dell broke
away from distributor ANC to do their own inhouse distribution, thus leading
to the collapse of ANC as a distributor.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>steven rowe</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>