Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Batman, dc comics, golden age, green arrow, superman

Superman & Batman vs Comic Publisher in All Funny Comics, at Auction

All Funny Comics #16 has Superman & Batman imposters trying to strong-arm a rival publisher into selling his superhero character.

The key early meetings of Superman and Batman in comic books are fairly well chronicled.  The characters appeared on the cover of New York World's Fair 1940 together.  They had a single-panel cameo in All-Star Comics #7 in 1941.  They then appear together briefly in the set-up to the adventure in All-Star Comics #36 (cover-dated August 1947) and more famously learn each other's secret identities in an adventure Superman #76 (cover-dated May 1952).  We could go on.

But before even that All-Star Comics #36 appearance, there's the strange and wonderful All Funny Comics #16 (cover-dated March-April 1947), which might be viewed as a weird meta-commentary on the comic book industry and perhaps even DC Comics itself.  In the story, a comic book publisher who owns the superhero character called "The Pink Eyebrow" is tormented into (almost) selling his character to another publisher by imposter versions of Superman, Batman, Robin, Green Arrow, and Vigilante.

It's hard not to take that as a meta on DC Comics publisher Harry Donenfeld, who had an ownership interest in numerous publishers beyond DC Comics, and was known to be ruthless in getting what he wanted.  For example, in the years leading up to this issue, industry legend and All-American Comics founder Max Gaines describes what had apparently become a common scene in the DC Comics offices:

Max found himself partnered with Liebowitz, and they didn't get along. Bill remembers that every afternoon his father would take a taxi to the uptown offices, where he, Liebowitz, and Donenfeld would scream at each other for two hours. Something had to give and that something was Max's patience. In early 1945, he hurled out his ultimatum: "You buy me out or I'll buy you out."

We do know that Gaines's relationship with Donenfeld was volatile during this period, to the point that he severed the branding tie-up with DC Comics that year, briefly using the All-American brand on covers rather than the DC Comics bullet.  As for the actual "buy out", there are conflicting reports and data in regards to when this actually played out, but a statement of ownership dated September 25, 1945, suggests that the process to buy Gaines out began sometime before that date.

Whatever the intent of the unknown story writer of the time, given that Gaines's All-American Comics was, of course, the publisher of some of the world's most valuable comic book characters including Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, the notion that stand-ins for Superman, Batman and Robin were pressuring the publisher of this All Funny Comics #16 story to sell off his star character feels like a fascinating insider commentary about DC Comics slipped into one of the publishers' own titles.  There's a copy of All Funny Comics #16 up for auction in the 2024 May 30 Adventures in the Golden Age Comics Showcase Auction #40261 at Heritage Auctions.

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