Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Avon Publications, golden age

The Mystery of Avon's Comic Book Debut, Molly O'Day #1 Up for Auction

In 1945, paperback publisher Avon Publications entered the comics with Molly O'Day, including work by George Tuska, Paul Gattuso, and Jack Cole.

Avon Publications had been a presence on America's newsstands for four years when they entered the comic book field in 1945 with Molly O'Day Super Sleuth #1.  Molly O'Day was created by unknown creators working for the Harry A. Chesler studio. The release was cover-dated February 1945 and may have been put together simply to demonstrate to business partners that Avon was entering the comic book business, but beyond that, this one-shot title is a bit of an underappreciated mystery.  There's a Molly O'Day #1 (Avon, 1945) Condition: VG- up for auction in the 2024 June 2-4 Sunday, Monday & Tuesday Comic Books Select Auction #122423 at Heritage Auctions.

It appears that Avon's Joseph Meyers used Molly O'Day to pitch The Saint creator Leslie Charteris on doing a comic book series featuring The Saint. Avon was already publishing The Saint paperbacks and sent Charteris a copy of Molly O'Day along with their proposal. As for the character herself, she's a bit of a mystery. A film actress named Molly O'Day was popular from the late 1920s through the early 1940s, and would've still been a fairly well-known name in 1944 when this comic was being produced.

Avon Publications traces an interesting path through the history of the cheap mass market collected and reprinted edition in America. The oldest thread of the company began under publisher John Stuart Ogilvie who started his own publishing firm, best known as J.S. Ogilvie Publishing Company or J.S. Ogilvie & Co., in 1868. After John Stuart Ogilvie's 1910 death, the firm passed onto his sons Donald and Frank, who seem to have remained in charge of the company until their own deaths in 1936 and 1937 respectively.  By this time, the company maintained a back catalog of self-help, "home study" and a dizzying array of other non-fiction and fiction titles in clothbound and various formats of softcover editions with a heavy mail-order sales presence.

At this point, the company came under the control of Joseph Meyers and his sister Edna Meyers Williams. Meyers and Williams had run publishing businesses beginning around 1928 with Illustrated Editions Company and related companies. According to Meyers' 1943 testimony in Pocket Books v Avon,  he had been in the book business in some form since 1923. By some accounts, American News Co. subsequently helped fund Meyers' 1941 transformation of J.S. Ogilvie into the paperback publisher Avon. But whatever role ANC might have played in this scenario, the resulting distribution arrangement would soon become frayed.  From 1953 to 1956, Avon and ANC would engage in a series of lawsuits over Avon's use of the separate corporate entity Avon Book Sales Corporation in what ANC construed as an end run around their exclusive distribution contract.

Along the way, Avon published over 100 comic book titles from 1945 to  1956, most of them extremely short-lived.  Avon Books also sporadically published paperback format collections of newspaper comics and similar material throughout that period and continued to do so through the mid-1990s.  The company was acquired by Hearst in 1959 and is currently a romance imprint of HarperCollins, where it has been active through at least 2019.

Notably, the cover of Molly O'Day Super Sleuth #1 is a swipe of the figure from the cover of Inside Detective Volume 10 #1 (January 1940) by Peter Driben.  There are only 28 entries for Molly O'Day #1 on the CGC census, but you can get a raw copy of Molly O'Day #1 (Avon, 1945) Condition: VG- up for auction in the 2024 June 2-4 Sunday, Monday & Tuesday Comic Books Select Auction #122423 at Heritage Auctions.

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