welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.



Friday, February 15, 2013

ATLANTIC CROSSING - PART ONE



In case anyone was wondering about absence of posts over the last couple of weeks, the reason is that I was away travelling overseas. By coincidence, my travels included two major comics cities of America so I thought I might very well spend some of my free time there doing what people don’t normally do and try to see some of the buildings that used to house major publishers of comic books in the USA. Today Google Street View offers anyone who cares a possibility to see everything online but I thought taking a glance first-hand would be more fun. In an ideal World some smart tour operator might put together a special tour for the niche market of comic book fans. And get a dozen or so nutters a year to sign up…

My first stop was in the fine city of New York that was home to more comic book publishers than any other place in the world. I saw a few places there.

Here is the front entrance and a couple of pictures of 330 West 42nd Street that housed executive offices of Marvel Comics in the very early days of the company from October 1939 until Summer 1942:


Ace Comics (renowned as the publisher of Ace Comics #11 with the first appearance of The Phantom, the first-ever costumed hero that led to the Golden Age of superheroes in comics, and publisher of titles like Baffling Mysteries, Super-Mystery Comics, Web of Mystery, etc., etc.) had their editorial and executive offices at 23 West 47th Street between August 1947 and June 1956. The building sits in the middle of what is now (and what has probably always been) the Diamond District in Midtown a few steps from Times Square: 


Between 1946 and July 1954 the famous Entertaining Comics, commonly known as EC Comics (publisher of Crime Suspenstories, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, Weird Fantasy, Mad magazine, etc.), had their editorial and executive offices at 225 Lafayette St. at the intersection with Spring, bordering Little Italy. I remember reading somewhere that the company was on the 7th floor. There is a subway station directly under the building and the posh corner entrance is to a 24-hour pharmacy. Chic interior of the pharmacy makes one think it used to be a lobby of a bank or maybe a small railway station hall. Today the building houses luxury $ 13,000 per month condominiums, some advertisements with photos can be found on the web if you google the address. Here are some pictures of the building that I took during my self-guided “tour”:

 
145 East 32nd Street became the second and permanent New York City home to Warren Publishing (Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, etc.) when the company relocated from Philadelphia in the sixties:


My next post will include images of some important locations of the underground comix scene in San Francisco during the early seventies. I hope to resume my Shiver and Shake series soon afterwards.

3 comments:

  1. Interesting to see. I wonder what they're like inside?

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    1. I suspect the offices now look nothing like they did back then. I hoped to take some pictures of lobbies but it was a Sunday and all doors were locked.

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  2. Always nice to make personal pilgrimages that the tourist boards don't tell you about.

    Last time I was in London I got a bit over-excited when I happened upon the building that houses Dennis Publishing (current home of Viz and Fortean Times).

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