A brief list of ways in which Connecticut has influenced the comic book industry.

In 1819, New Haven artist John Warner Barber published The Metamorphosis on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the only known American-published harlequinade. Predating even Rudolphe Topffer’s 1842 Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, many Connecticut printmakers are now being considered as contributors to early 19th-century sequential graphic arts. Other early sequential work published in Connecticut includes Barber’s Drunkard’s Progress, and a sequential 1860’s print by Thomas Worth (both in CHS collection).

In 1928, Eastern Color Printing (of Waterbury, Conn.) co-produced (along with Dell Publishing Co.) The Funnies, a tabloid-sized (11" x 17") collection of newspaper reprints, the first four-color monthly comic to be sold on a newsstand. In 1933, Eastern published the very first modern-format comic book, Funnies on Parade, as a promotional giveaway. This comic book was wildly successful and lead to the production of further comic books. In 1934, Eastern marketed the first modern comic book to be sold, Famous Funnies Series One. Selling out promptly, Eastern Color Printing followed up with Famous Funnies, the first comic book published on a monthly basis. Around the same time, Eastern also published Skippy’s Own Book of Comics, the first four-color comic devoted to a single character; the book was a promotional comic book based upon a popular radio show. The comic book format proved incredibly popular, and by the late 1930s, dozens of publishers had followed Eastern’s lead with their own comic book publications.

Eastern Color Printing printed comic books for most major publishers as well as producing its own publications. A 1954 Hartford Courant article stated that roughly 40 percent of the 65 million comic books being printed each month at the time were produced by Eastern Color Printing.

Some of Eastern’s early employees went on to become influential publishers themselves, such as Leverett Gleason (Lev Gleason Publications and Comics House) and Maxwell Gaines (founder of EC Comics).

Being the first modern comic book publisher, Eastern Color Printing's publications are full of other “firsts.” Issue #3 of Famous Funnies featured the comic book debut of Buck Rogers. Through comics, movies, radio, and television, Buck Rogers did much to promote the genre of science fiction, as well as to popularize a contemporary vision of the future to American culture.

Famous Funnies #27 (published 1936) featured the first crime story in comic books. This genre, characterized by gangsters, molls, policemen and federal agents, would become one of comics’ most popular genres in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Later publishers would use the crime drama as a vehicle for sensationalistic violence, contributing to the controversy that lead to the creation of the Comics Code.

Famous Funnies, from issue #81 on (published 1941), featured the first super-powered female character in comics, Invisible Scarlet O'Neil (a character that would later serve as the inspiration for the Marvel character, the Invisible Girl).

Early issues of Heroic Comics featured work by one of the earliest and most prominent female artists of the Golden Age, Tarpé Mills. Mills was a comics pioneer in her own right: her character Miss Fury was one of the first female super-heroes, having debuted in newspapers earlier in 1941. Heroic Comics also featured early work by some of the finest comic book artists of the Golden Age, such as Bill Everett, Reed Crandall, Lou Fine, and Alex Toth.

Connecticut’s industrial contribution to the comic book publishing industry was furthered by Chemical Color Plate, a Bridgeport company specializing in color separation. Chemical Color Plate provided the service of color separation – in which inking plates are produced before being sent off to a printer – for much of the comics industry from the 1960s to the advent of the digital coloring process. Color separation was regarded almost exclusively as women’s work, making it something of a “pink collar ghetto” for the many uncredited women employed in the business of comic book production.

Westport, Connecticut's, Famous Artists School was founded by several top newspaper cartoonists, including Connecticut artists Walt Kelley and Al Capp. In addition to producing many artists who themselves went on to work in comic books, Famous Artists School became something of a pop icon itself through its widely-circulated advertisements. Famous Artists School did much to form Americans’ conception of distance education.

Another Connecticut publisher to raise the bar for artistic standards in the comic book industry was the Quality Comics Group. Lead artist Will Eisner is considered to be one of the most influential comic book artists of all time. Quality featured work by many other renowned artists as well. In addition to artwork by Crandall and Fine (who moved to Quality along with Eisner after Eisner broke off from his partnership with Jerry Iger), names such as Bob Powell, Jack Cole, Gill Fox, and Rube Goldberg are well-known to comic collectors and scholars. Many of Quality's artists and writers were quite prolific, and continued to work for other publishers in the industry long after Quality's demise.

Quality’s Feature Comics, beginning in 1939, featured one of comics’ very first super-heroes (and the first to wear a mask), the pulp-inspired character The Clock. Smash Comics #1, also published in 1939, featured comicdom’s first robotic crimefighter, Bozo the Robot (who is said to have served as the inspiration for a later technology-based superhero, Iron Man). Issue #42 of Feature Comics, published in 1940, featured USA, The Spirit of Old Glory, comics’ first patriotic super-heroine. 1941’s Millitary Comics #1 followed up by featuring another patriotic heroine, Miss America.

Quality’s character Plastic Man was one of the first humorous super-heroes, debuting in 1941 in Police Comics. Like many other Connecticut-born characters, Plastic Man was widely imitated among other publishers, most notably serving as the inspiration for the Marvel character Mr. Fantastic. This same issue would feature the debut of Phantom Lady, a character that would achieve notoriety in the 1954 senate hearings as reinvented by Victor Fox Studios.

Another Quality character, Doll Man, first appeared in Feature Comics #27. In addition to providing some of the finest and most surreal artwork of the Golden Age under the hand of artist Lou Fine, Doll Man also partly served as the inspiration for DC’s Silver Age hero, The Atom.

A Greenwich, Connecticut publisher, Fawcett Publications, was one of the most prominent comic book publishers during the 1940’s. The Fawcett character Captain Marvel was one of comic books’ most popular superheroes, outselling DC's Superman. Fawcett’s comic books were circulated worldwide: Captain Marvel, despite being a Superman imitation himself, spawned several imitators, including uniquely Canadian and English versions of the character. Captain Marvel’s sister, Mary Marvel, debuting in 1942, was notable in that she represented a concentrated effort to market superheroes toward young female readers. Despite the fact that many of Fawcett’s characters were inspired by World War II-era patriotism, Fawcett became known for its whimsical and lighthearted approach to comic book storytelling.

In 1938, future Fawcett artist Chad Grothkopf drew his character Willie the Worm for an experimental animated film clip, one of the first examples of animation to be shown on television. Willie the Worm later became a regular character in the comic book Fawcett’s Funny Animals. Fawcett’s Funny Animals popularized the genre of humorous books featuring animation-inspired, anthropomorphic animals, and many publishers produced their own "funny animal" books in imitation of Fawcett.

Fiction House, located in Stamford from 1952 to 1954, became notorious for its pulp-inspired action and for its portrayal of scantily clad heroines. The female characters of Fiction House – most notably, the jungle heroine and pop-culture icon, Sheena – drew much negative attention for their portrayal of the female form and implications of bondage. Despite this opinion, the Fiction House females have also been praised as independent, pre-feminist characters – strong-willed and rarely relying upon male assistance.

Fiction House is also notable for the diversity of artists and writers who contributed to their comic books, hired through the Jerry Iger production studio. Many female artists, such as Fran Hopper, Lily Renee, Ruth Atkinson Ford, and Marcia Snyder worked alongside male artists and received credit for their work. Matthew Baker, arguably the first African American comic book artist to achieve widespread recognition, did much of his work for Fiction House.

In 1946, an obscure Connecticut publisher known as the Lafayette Street Corporation began publication of Picture News. Picture News was the first news comic book, featuring sequential art adaptations of current news stories. Nonfiction comic books (and literary adaptations such as Classics Illustrated) became popular during the late 1940’s and early 50’s, at least in part due to publishers’ efforts to diffuse anti-comics criticism by producing comic books with educational value.

1945 saw the founding of a new publisher, Charlton Publications, a company that would provide a new business model for the comic book publishing industry. Charlton (which also published magazines, paperbacks, and song lyric books) saved money by keeping its entire operation self-contained, including a subsidiary paper mill and distributor. This approach worked well for Charlton, as by the 1960s Charlton had secured a place as one of the industry’s significant publishers behind powerhouses Marvel and DC. Despite its poor page rate, Charlton earned a reputation as a good place for beginning artists to start out. The early work of many prominent Silver and Bronze Age artists, such as John Byrne and Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, is represented in Charlton’s publications.

Charlton’s comic book series Yellowjacket Comics was one of, if not the, first comic books with a horror theme.

One approach used by Charlton in maintaining its popularity was through close association with media tie-ins such as movies and television shows. Although other comic publishers would capitalize on the success of existing properties with their own comic books, this practice was particularly commonplace for Charlton.

During the mid-60s, graphic designer Pat Masulli developed a comic typesetting machine for Charlton, called the Typositer. Although the results were poor in quality, it was one of the first examples of a publisher making use of an automated lettering system.

Charlton was also notable for its proliferation of romance comic books, at one time consisting of eleven simultaneously published titles, and continuing publication several years after the bigger publishers had given up on the genre. Charlton may also be characterized by its attempt to cash in on youth culture, producing its own line of comic books about hot rods, surfing, and other popular teenage activities. Even into the 1980s, Charlton continued to publish a diverse range of genres such as westerns, fantasy, and war titles at a time when superheroes were becoming the predominant genre among other publishers. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Charlton was one of the few publishers to produce war stories concerning the war in Vietnam.

Ironically, Charlton’s greatest critical acclaim was achieved not through its own comics, but through a derivative work published after Charlton stopped publishing comic books. In 1986, DC published Watchmen, a deconstructionist classic of the superhero genre based on the characters of Charlton’s “Action Heroes” line.

Connecticut was also a national leader in the criticism of comic books. By 1948, the American public was beginning to show concern over content of comic books that was deemed inappropriate. Hartford enacted municipal legislation to clean up the city’s newsstands. In February 1954, the Hartford Courant ran a widely reprinted 4-part series of articles opposing the content of comic books, and the following year Connecticut passed state legislation to ban the distribution of offensive comic books. Connecticut’s concern over comic books influenced the U.S. Senate Hearings for the investigation of the comic book industry, leading to the institution of the Comics Code Authority, a restrictive code designed to regulate the content of published comic books.

Connecticut continues to contribute to the comic book industry today as the home of many prominent comic book artists and writers. Throughout the history of the industry, many artists have chosen to live in the suburbs of Connecticut rather than face the hectic pace of the New York City lifestyle. This practice continues to this day, with many artists choosing to commute while working for the New York-based publishers.