Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: l.b. cole, Star Publications

The Kramer Mystery and L.B. Cole's Popular Teenagers, Up for Auction

Popular Teen-Agers was a 1950s romance comic book title from Star Publications, a company formed by L.B. Cole and Jerome A. Kramer.

Comic book publisher Jerome A. Kramer (born Abraham Joseph Kramer, 1907-1956) was born in New York City and had become a CPA by 1930.  Much of the scant detail that has been published about Kramer up to now has been incorrect, including his professional background and the listing of his name as "Gerhard Kramer" in some references.  Kramer had also become an accounting teacher by the late 1930s.  He entered the publishing business in 1942 with a 25-cent instructional booklet, Income Tax Simplified (with revised versions published under various other titles), founding his own publishing company, Croydon Publishing Company, in the process.  The tax booklets became a hit, and he was well-known for his expertise in this area for the rest of his life. He was featured in an eight-part weekly television series called DuMont's Taxcasts in the runup to the 1953 tax season.

Croydon Publishing Company entered the comic book business in 1944 with Variety Comics. Note that the unconfirmed GCD reference to a man named Benjamin Gerber owning Croydon is incorrect. Gerber is connected to Croydon Detroit Publishing, a different company that publishes maps.  Beyond the three-issue Variety Comics, Kramer's Croydon published several one-shot titles in 1945-1946, including Miss Cairo Jones and Captain Wizard Comics. The timing of Kramer's entry into comics strongly suggests he was induced to enter the field just as it was booming due to his access to paper at a time when newsprint usage was being controlled in the United States by the War Production Board.  Many such publishers from outside of comics were induced to enter the field as sort of "surrogates" in precisely this time frame due to their access to paper.  Croydon also began publishing paperbacks around 1945, with L.B. Cole providing some covers for Croydon paperbacks beginning in that year.

This background provides a framework, and perhaps some gentle corrections, for understanding Cole's later recollections of Kramer and the circumstances surrounding the formation of Star Publications.  As quoted in the indispensable Black Light: The World of L.B. Cole, Cole says they both "showed up in the Novelty Publications office on the same day to bid on Premium's assets."  Kramer was interested in the Curtis Publishing Company's Premium Comics Group / Novelty Publications comic book inventory when it became available in 1949 because he already had prior comic book publishing experience.  Further, he and Cole had worked together for years by that time.

According to Cole, Star Publications acquired 15,000 pages of comic art inventory from Curtis and, by my calculations, they would eventually use less than half of it at best. The typical Star Publications formula was to create an issue out of all or mostly reprints with a new L.B. Cole cover, but Popular Teen-Agers was an early exception. The series continued its numbering from the similarly-themed School-Day Romances beginning with issue #5, and the series didn't contain reprints in the early going.  The Cole cover of this issue, clearly his best of this series, is loosely based on Manny Stallman's interior Ginger Bunn story.  A classic and highly sought-after L.B. Cole cover, there's a CGC FN+ 6.5 copy of  Popular Teen-Agers #5 (Star Publications, 1950) up for auction in 2024 October 3 – 5 Good Girl Art and Romance Comics Showcase Auction #40269.

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