The Fabuleous Fifties

What The Beck?

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Captain Tootsie appeared in just about every comic from every publisher in the forties and early fifties. The series ans the character were initiated by Captain Marvel artists C. C. Beck and Pete Costanza. After their first run of four to five years, the series was taken over by Bill Schreider. The last artist to do them was Pete Costanza on his own. Most of these comic book ads were adapted from the two weekly Sunday newspaper ad series. And of course there also was a comic book version.

So manyof these ads were made and so many of them were used in comic books, that no one has ever managed to create a list of all ads used in the comic books. They are titled, so a good list could be made. But even with most comic books from that period available on the internet now, who has the time to go through all of them? And even then, with many key DC books still not in public domain, who know what strips are in the Superman and Batman books? And as for the supposedly original series in the newspapers even if you would find a run in one of the papers avaiable on microfiche somewhere, there would be over five hundred to collect and even then you wold not know if the order in which they were used was the same in every paper (which it seems not to be the case).

So it is a hit or miss operation. I collect these ads where I can and put them on my blog in the hope that maybe someday someone can use them to create a more coherent timeline. I would love to know how and if these ads were rebuild for the comic books. Frankly, I have not yet seen even one in both forms, although similar series that were used in papers and comics (like the Sam Spade series) suggest that must be the case.

And added to that, there are the back and white strips, which may or may not have been made for daily newspapers. The ones I have here are all streamers that were run underneath normal comic strips in a Sunday paper, but as you can see they could also be cut up for use elsewhere. Of course, there are doubles as well, suggesting there may only have been a couple which were used and reused whenever possible.