Feature Funnies was a comic book anthology title published by Comic Favorites, Inc. in the United States for 20 issues from 1937 until 1939. Feature Funnies cannily mixed color reprints of popular newspaper comic strips like Joe Palooka, Mickey Finn and Dixie Dugan with a smattering of new features.
Publication history
Publisher Everett M. "Busy" Arnold, deducing that Depression-era audiences wanted established quality and familiar comic strips for their hard-earned dimes, formed the suitably titled Comic Favorites, Inc. in collaboration with three newspaper syndicates: the McNaught Syndicate, the Frank J. Markey Syndicate and Iowa's Register and Tribune Syndicate. (Comic Favorites later became an imprint of Arnold's Quality Comics, established in 1939.)
Hiring cartoonist Rube Goldberg and Goldberg's assistant, Johnny Devlin, Arnold in mid-1937 began publishing Feature Funnies from his office as at 389 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Goldberg drew many of the covers.
The new material came from comics "packagers," small studios that sprang up to produce comics on demand for publishers looking to enter the emerging comic-book field. Arnold initially bought from the quirkily named Harry "A" Chesler shop but later relied solely on Eisner & Iger, headed by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger. "I believe the first feature I purchased from Eisner & Iger was 'Espionage' in 1938 for Feature Comics (then Feature Funnies)," Arnold recalled in the early 1970s.
Other newspaper comic strip characters in Feature Funnies included the constantly bickering Bungle Family and girl reporter Jane Arden.
Arnold changed the title to Feature Comics beginning with issue number 21.
References
Sources consulted
- Feature Funnies at the Grand Comics Database