TREASURYCAST #56 – WHAM-O GIANT COMICS
Rob welcomes fellow comics podcaster Kyle Benning to discuss the biggest comic book in the world, 1967’s WHAM-O GIANT COMICS!
Check out images from this comic by clicking here!
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Thanks for listening! Go big or go home!
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This is the biggest comic book in the world? Perhaps currently and “mass produced”! I hate to break it to you Rob but the manga ATTACK ON TITAN, which is currently wrapping up it’s run, announced not too long ago that they are running a special print run collecting the first two chapters of it’s series in a book of only 100 copies. The price for a single copy is $1,540 each. If you have the time, check out the below article. There are scale photos of a woman with the book so you can see just how big it is. It’s massive!
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2021-03-04/attack-on-titan-manga-breaks-records-with-titan-sized-print-volume/.170219
Well, sure, but to be fair:
1) that special print run isn’t out yet, and
2) that woman looks really tiny.
Props to ’em for staying on brand, AND for establishing the new standard of “titan-sized.” Any comic significantly bigger than a treasury from here on out will bear that designation and thus be a de facto ad for Attack on Titan. Genius! Sheer, unmitigated, unadulterated genius!
And what IS the point of something that big, other than to break some record? Give me a mass-produced comic kids can actually deal with any day.
You know those people (not Brits, who actually have umbrellas) who put newspapers over their head and run when it rains? This comic doubles as an expedient shelter.
Great episode guys! I had never even heard of this massive comic book and your discussion was most enlightening.
I hate to be “that guy,” but I have one small nit to pick: Rob mentioned that Little Lulu’s creator was John Stanley. Although he did write & draw many of the Lulu comic books. Marjorie Henderson Buell (1904-1993) actually created the moppet back in 1935 for The Saturday Evening Post. She was known by the pen name “Marge” & retained the copyright to the character, which was unusual for the era. She ceased working on the comic strip in the late 1940s and eventually sold her rights to Little Lulu in 1971.
In 2006, Buell’s family donated the “Marge Papers” to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. The papers include a collection of fan mail, comic books, scrapbooks of high points in Lulu’s history and a complete set of the newspaper cartoons.
In the 1940s, Lulu appeared in a series of theatrical animated shorts produced by Famous Studios for Paramount Pictures from 1943 to 1948, which replaced the Superman shorts of the 1940s. In all, 26 Little Lulu cartoons were released in a period of less than five years.
Thanks so much for bringing this up. I thought I was going to have to, so I’m pleasantly surprised to find someone beat me to it. Little Lulu’s always been a particular favorite of mine, and Marge was a pioneer when it comes to women in mainstream comics, so it’s good to see her legacy remembered.
Great episode, love these hidden gems. Nice coverage of the material guys.
Just wanted to plug another great comic historian Fizz Pop who has a recent 4-part essay on Wally Wood’s legendary panels https://youtu.be/trbvRAU0zAM
Talk about a hidden gem! This comic sounds tremendously interesting, and Rob is right, it’s more like a European comic in its mix of genres. Grab any UK Christmas annual of the Sixties and Seventies and you’ll find your war heroes alongside football stars, barbarians, space cops, comical cops and the occasional Nazi mad scientist trying to take over Britain with an animal-enlarging ray. Heck, Jerry Siegel wrote for British comic Lion in the Sixties, handling The Spider, criminal mastermind turned good-ish guy (Mark Millar wrote the character decades later and made him a cannibal; of course he did).
The big difference with this and UK comics is, of course, the panel count – I know kids have better eyesight than do us coffin dodgers, but goodness, those pages are crowded. I loved the Rob and Kyle chat, the knowledge and enthusiasm, tempered with what sounded to be very fair criticisms, made for a cracking episode.
I would imagine what killed Wham-O Giant Comic was its very USP – the size of the package and corresponding price. How many parents – because this wasn’t a book most kids would be able to afford from their pocket money – would spend six times the usual amount for a book full of characters they’d never heard of, giant size or not?
And I look forward to that first Superman/Spider-Man encounter getting its episode. I love that comic.
Ah, how cool that you covered this book. I had heard about it many times before – apparently for a time it had an almost legendary status among older comics fans. And then about ten years ago scans of the whole book were posted over at the wonderful blog Diversions of the Groovy Kind. I was going to suggest that the scanned version is possibly a good way to read that ‘Melvin the Magician’ story – but I just downloaded that page to my computer and opened it in a viewer program, and the panels in the lower half of the page get blurry and unreadable if you enlarge them too much. I guess a good magnifying glass, or maybe a microfiche reader, may be the only option.
By the way, I believe the story by Ernie Colon is in fact his first published work – so that’s just one more thing that makes the Wham-O Giant a historically significant book.
If you can’t be the best, be the biggest! This certainly seems like a big fun idea by the folks at Wham-O! Grab your Frisbee, hook up your Slip’n Slide and enjoy hours or fun in the sun. Getting to much sun? Wheel this comic also serves as a tent!
I had never heard of this comic until now, but afternoon television as a child seemed to be almost exclusively sponsored by Wham-O! At least 2 or there ads per commercial break featured one of their many products and the closing two words “from Whamo!”
Fun show fellas. I first heard about this comic a few years back, in Craig Shutt’s “Baby Boomer Comics” book. I love the cover of this thing. The way “giant comics” is almost like a huge monolith in the background, and the rocket trail makes the “WHAM-O” logo.
I will say when I saw the art from “Kaleidoscope of Fear” I thought it may be influenced by Jonny Quest. The kid looks a bit like Johnny, but the white-haired guy is the spitting image of Race Bannon!
While we are talking about WHAM-O and merchandise, how is it that it took the MCU for kids to finally get a Captain America shield they could throw like a Frisbee? Why didn’t WHAM-O get the Marvel license and make a super-sized Frisbee in red, white and blue? It would have outsold this comic, for sure!!!
Chris