Fox Feature Syndicate
Encyclopedia
Fox Feature Syndicate was a comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

 publisher from early in the period known to fans and historians as the Golden Age of Comic Books
Golden Age of Comic Books
The Golden Age of Comic Books was a period in the history of American comic books, generally thought of as lasting from the late 1930s until the late 1940s or early 1950s...

. Founded by entrepreneur
Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

 Victor S. Fox, it produced such titles as Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle is the name of three fictional superheroes that appear in American comic books published by a variety of companies since 1939.-Publication history:...

, Fantastic Comics and Mystery Men Comics.

It is unrelated to the company Fox Publications, a Colorado
Colorado
Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...

 publisher of railroad photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

 books.

Background

Victor S. Fox and business associate Bob Farrell launched Fox Feature Syndicate at 480 Lexington Avenue in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 in the late 1930s. For content, Fox contracted with comics packager Eisner & Iger
Eisner & Iger
Eisner & Iger was a comic book "packager" that produced comics on demand for publishers entering the new medium during the late-1930s and 1940s period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books...

, one of a handful of companies creating comic books on demand for publishers entering the field. Writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

-artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 Will Eisner
Will Eisner
William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an...

, at Victor Fox's request for a hero to mimic the newly created hit Superman
Superman
Superman is a fictional comic book superhero appearing in publications by DC Comics, widely considered to be an American cultural icon. Created by American writer Jerry Siegel and Canadian-born American artist Joe Shuster in 1932 while both were living in Cleveland, Ohio, and sold to Detective...

, created the superhero
Superhero
A superhero is a type of stock character, possessing "extraordinary or superhuman powers", dedicated to protecting the public. Since the debut of the prototypical superhero Superman in 1938, stories of superheroes — ranging from brief episodic adventures to continuing years-long sagas —...

 Wonder Man
Wonder Man (Fox Publications)
Wonder Man is a fictional comic book superhero, created by Will Eisner, whose first appearance was Wonder Comics #1 .The character is of some historical significance by virtue of the lawsuit that resulted from his only appearance....

 for Fox's first publication, Wonder Comics #1 (May 1939), signing his work "Willis". Eisner said in interviews throughout his later life that he had protested the derivative nature of the character and story, and that when subpoenaed after National Periodical Publications, the company that would evolve into DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...

, sued Fox, alleging Wonder Man was an illegal copy of Superman, Eisner testified that this was so, undermining Fox's case; Eisner even depicts himself doing so in his semi-autobiographical graphic novel The Dreamer. However, a transcript of the proceeding, uncovered by comics historian Ken Quattro in 2010, indicates Eisner in fact supported Fox and claimed Wonder Man as an original Eisner creation.

After losing at trial, Victor Fox dropped Eisner & Iger and hired his own stable of comic creators, beginning with a New York Times classified ad on Dec. 2, 1939. Joe Simon
Joe Simon
Joseph Henry "Joe" Simon is an American comic book writer, artist, editor, and publisher. Simon created or co-created many important characters in the 1930s-1940s Golden Age of Comic Books and served as the first editor of Timely Comics, the company that would evolve into Marvel Comics.With his...

, a former Eisner & Iger freelancer, became Fox Publications' editor
Editing
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...

.

As one of the earliest companies in the emerging field, it employed or bought the packaged material of a huge number of Golden Age greats, many at the start of their careers. Lou Fine
Lou Fine
Louis Kenneth Fine was an American comic book artist known for his work during the 1940s Golden Age of comic books, where his quality draftsmanship became an influential model to a generation of fellow comics artists....

 created the superhero The Flame  in Wonderworld Comics; Dick Briefer
Dick Briefer
Richard "Dick" Briefer was an American comic-book artist best known for his various adaptations, including humorous ones, of the Frankenstein monster...

 created Rex Dexter of Mars in the eponymous series. George Tuska
George Tuska
George Tuska , who early in his career used a variety of pen names including Carl Larson, was an American comic book and newspaper comic strip artist best known for his 1940s work on various Captain Marvel titles and the crime fiction series Crime Does Not Pay, for and his 1960s work illustrating...

 did his first comics work here with the features "Zanzibar" (Mystery Men Comics #1, Aug. 1939) and "Tom Barry" (Wonderworld Comics #4). Fletcher Hanks
Fletcher Hanks
Fletcher Hanks, Sr. was a cartoonist from the Golden Age of Comic Books, who wrote and drew stories detailing the adventures of all-powerful, supernatural heroes and their elaborate punishments of transgressors...

 wrote and drew Stardust the Super Wizard
Stardust the Super Wizard
Stardust the Super Wizard is a fictional character, a comic book superhero from the Golden Age of Comics. Created by writer-artist Fletcher Hanks, he first appeared in Fox Comics' Fantastic Comics #1 .-Publication history:...

 in Fantastic Comics in 1939 and 1940. Matt Baker, one of the few African-American comic book artists of the Golden Age, revamped — in more than one sense — the newly acquired Quality Comics
Quality Comics
Quality Comics was an American comic book publishing company that operated from 1939 to 1956 and was an influential creative force in what historians and fans call the Golden Age of comic books....

 character Phantom Lady
Phantom Lady
Phantom Lady is a fictional superheroine, one of the first female superhero characters to debut in the 1940s Golden Age of Comic Books. Originally published by Quality Comics, the character was subsequently published by a series of now-defunct comic book companies, and a new version of the...

' in 1947, creating one of the most memorable and controversial examples of superhero "good girl art
Good girl art
Good girl art is found in drawings or paintings which feature a strong emphasis on attractive women no matter what the subject or situation. GGA was most commonly featured in comic books, pulp magazines and crime fiction...

".

Future comics legend Jack Kirby
Jack Kirby
Jack Kirby , born Jacob Kurtzberg, was an American comic book artist, writer and editor regarded by historians and fans as one of the major innovators and most influential creators in the comic book medium....

, brought on staff here after freelancing for Eisner & Iger, wrote and drew the syndicated
Print syndication
Print syndication distributes news articles, columns, comic strips and other features to newspapers, magazines and websites. They offer reprint rights and grant permissions to other parties for republishing content of which they own/represent copyrights....

 newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

 comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 The Blue Beetle (starting Jan. 1940), starring a character created by Charles Nicholas Wojtkowski
Charles Nicholas (comics)
"Charles Nicholas" is the pseudonymous house name of three early creators of American comic books for the Fox Feature Syndicate and Fox Comics....

 in Mystery Men Comics #1 (Aug. 1939). Kirby retained the house name "Charles Nicholas" for the comic strip, which lasted three months. Kirby, additionally, created and did one story each of the Fox features "Wing Turner" (Mystery Men #10, May 1940) and "Cosmic Carson" (Science Comics #4, same month).

Throughout the 1940s, Fox produced comics in a typically wide variety of genres, but was best known for superheroes and humor. With the post-war decline in superheroes' popularity, Fox, like other publishers, concentrated on horror and crime comics
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...

, including some of the most notorious of the latter. Following the establishment of Comics Code Authority
Comics Code Authority
The Comics Code Authority was a body created as part of the Comics Magazine Association of America, as a tool for the comics-publishing industry to self-regulate the content of comic books in the United States. Member publishers submitted comic books to the CCA, which screened them for adherence to...

 in the mid-1950s, Fox went out of business, selling the rights to the Blue Beetle to Charlton Comics
Charlton Comics
Charlton Comics was an American comic book publishing company that existed from 1946 to 1985, having begun under a different name in 1944. It was based in Derby, Connecticut...

.

Victor Fox

Born April 13, 1893 in Nottingham, England, Fox Publications founder Victor S. Fox was a stockbroker for the Allied Capital Corp./Fox Motor and Bank Stocks, Inc./American Common Stocks, Inc., on Park Avenue
Park Avenue (Manhattan)
Park Avenue is a wide boulevard that carries north and southbound traffic in New York City borough of Manhattan. Through most of its length, it runs parallel to Madison Avenue to the west and Lexington Avenue to the east....

 in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 when he was indicted on Nov. 27, 1929 for mail fraud and related illegal "boiler room" activities. It appears unrecorded whether this resulted in a conviction.

Historian Jon Berk has written that Fox went on to become an accountant
Accountant
An accountant is a practitioner of accountancy or accounting , which is the measurement, disclosure or provision of assurance about financial information that helps managers, investors, tax authorities and others make decisions about allocating resources.The Big Four auditors are the largest...

/bookkeeper at the publishing
Publishing
Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...

 firm that would become DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...

, where he was privy to sales figures that convinced him to launch his own comic-book company. Fellow historian Gerard Jones
Gerard Jones
For the entrepreneur see Gérard Jones.Gerard Jones is an award-winning American author and comic book writer.-Biography:Jones was born in Cut Bank, Montana, and raised in Los Gatos and Gilroy, California...

, writing in his book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, was unable to find documentation of this.

Quotes

Jack Kirby: "Victor Fox was a character. He'd look up at the ceiling with a big cigar, this little fellow, very broad, going back and forth with his hands behind his back saying, 'I'm the King of Comics! I'm the King of Comics!' and we would watch him and, of course, smile a little because he was a genuine type".

Joe Simon on Victor Fox : "He was an accountant for DC Comics. He was doing the sales figures and he liked what he saw. So, he moved downstairs and started his own company.... I happened to get a job; I went over to Fox and became editor there, which was just an impossible job, because ... there were no artists, no writers, no editors, no letterers — nothing there. Everything came out of the Eisner and Iger shop. ... He was a very strange character. He had kind of a British accent; he was like 5'2", told us he was a former ballroom dancer. He was very loud, menacing, and really a scary little guy. He used to say, 'I'm the King of the Comics. I'm the King of the Comics. I'm the King of the Comics.' We couldn't stop him".

Joe Simon The man was insane, absolutely insane. He would go off on a speech like, “I’m the King of the Comics, and I’m not playing school here with chalk on the blackboard, I’ve got millions of dollars tied up in this business!…The man was mad.” He was a “short, round, nattily dressed man in his late forties, with a rasping voice that would shrill to frightening crescendos when he was excited. And he was excited often.”

Will Eisner “Fox was a very, very shifty, fast-footed business man who would create fictitious names because he was always afraid of being sued.”

Al Feldstein Fox was “coarsely gruff,”, “with horn rimmed glasses and a permanent cigar clamped between his teeth.” “He was the personification of a typical exploiting comic book publisher of his day - grinding out shameless imitations of successful titles and trends, and treating his artists and editors like dirt.”

Nicky Wright: "Competing well in the 'most sexy, sadistic, and violent' category, Victor Fox’s Murder Incorporated and Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle is the name of three fictional superheroes that appear in American comic books published by a variety of companies since 1939.-Publication history:...

are noteworthy.... When historians describe sleaze, sex, and violence as Fox’s obsession, they are masters of understatement. His best artists, Jack Kamen and Matt Baker, are much revered and collected for their good girl art. (Of special note is the company’s breasty crime-fighter-in-bedroom-lingerie, Phantom Lady
Phantom Lady
Phantom Lady is a fictional superheroine, one of the first female superhero characters to debut in the 1940s Golden Age of Comic Books. Originally published by Quality Comics, the character was subsequently published by a series of now-defunct comic book companies, and a new version of the...

...along with the wild and scantily attired Rulah, Jungle Goddess.)"

Boyd Magers: "Never one to overlook a secondary sale, Fox often repackaged four remaindered (unsold) comics into a 25¢ Giant with a new cover, hence Hoot Gibson's Western Roundup, 132 pages dated 1950. However, since Fox always started their stories on the inside front cover (where other publishers ran an ad), these repackaged comics are always missing the first page of story content. Also, since Fox used remaindered issues, contents will vary from copy to copy of Hoot Gibson's Western Roundup."

Fox characters

  • The Banshee
  • Birdman
  • The Blackbird
  • Black Fury & Kid Fury
  • Black Lion
  • Blue Beetle
    Blue Beetle
    Blue Beetle is the name of three fictional superheroes that appear in American comic books published by a variety of companies since 1939.-Publication history:...

     (later sold to Charlton Comics
    Charlton Comics
    Charlton Comics was an American comic book publishing company that existed from 1946 to 1985, having begun under a different name in 1944. It was based in Derby, Connecticut...

    , who later sold to DC Comics
    DC Comics
    DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...

    )
  • The Bouncer
  • Bronze Man
    Bronze Man (comics)
    Bronze Man was a fictional comic-book superhero in comics published by Fox Feature Syndicate. He first appeared in Blue Beetle #42 .-Fictional character biography:...

  • Captain V
  • Dagar, the Desert Hawk
    Dagar, the Desert Hawk
    Dagar, the Desert Hawk was a fictional character that appeared in comic books published by Fox Feature Syndicate. Dagar first appeared in All Great Comics #13 , with pencils by Edmond Good....

  • The Dart & Ace, the Bat Boy
  • Dynamite Thor
  • The Eagle & Buddy (Steven Woods, who as an adult takes on the name Blue Eagle)
  • Electro (later known as Dynamo)
  • The Flame
  • The Gorilla with the Human Brain
  • Green Mask
  • Illuso
  • The Jaguar/Jaguar Man
  • Jo-Jo, Congo King
    Jo-Jo, Congo King
    Jo-Jo, Congo King was a fictional character that appeared in comic books published by Fox Feature Syndicate. Jo-Jo first appeared in Jo-Jo, Congo King #7 ....

  • Lunar the Moon Man
  • The Lynx
  • Marga the Panther Woman
  • Miss X
  • The Moth/Mothman
  • Nightbird
  • Phantom Lady
    Phantom Lady
    Phantom Lady is a fictional superheroine, one of the first female superhero characters to debut in the 1940s Golden Age of Comic Books. Originally published by Quality Comics, the character was subsequently published by a series of now-defunct comic book companies, and a new version of the...

     (obtained from Quality Comics
    Quality Comics
    Quality Comics was an American comic book publishing company that operated from 1939 to 1956 and was an influential creative force in what historians and fans call the Golden Age of comic books....

     via Iger Studios)
  • The Purple Tigress
  • Rani-Bey
  • The Rapier
  • The Raven
  • Rulah, Jungle Goddess
    Rulah, Jungle Goddess
    Rulah, Jungle Goddess is a fictional character, a jungle girl, in comic books published by Fox Feature Syndicate. She first appeared in Zoot Comics #7...

  • Samson
  • Spider Queen
    Spider Queen
    Spider Queen was a fictional Golden Age comic book character. She first appeared in Fox Feature Syndicate's The Eagle #2 . The character was later revived by writer Roy Thomas for Marvel Comics' 1993 Invaders mini-series....

     (later appeared in Marvel Comics
    Marvel Comics
    Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...

    's Invaders
    Invaders
    Invaders may refer to:*those who participate in an invasion*Invaders , a Marvel Comics group of World War II superheroes*Invaders , of the DC Comics universe...

    series)
  • Stardust the Super Wizard
    Stardust the Super Wizard
    Stardust the Super Wizard is a fictional character, a comic book superhero from the Golden Age of Comics. Created by writer-artist Fletcher Hanks, he first appeared in Fox Comics' Fantastic Comics #1 .-Publication history:...

  • Tangi
  • Tegra, Jungle Empress
  • Thor
  • The Topper
  • Tumbler
  • U.S. Jones
    U.S. Jones
    U.S. Jones is a fictional patriotic superhero character who first appeared in comic books from Fox Feature Syndicate in the 1940s.-Publishing history:...

  • V-Man
    V-Man
    V-Man is a fictional patriotic-themed superhero character who first appeared in January, 1942. His name, and the large letter V on his costume, come from the “V for Victory” symbolism that had proliferated throughout the United States and Europe during World War II.-History:V-Man debuted in the...

  • Wonder Man
    Wonder Man (Fox Publications)
    Wonder Man is a fictional comic book superhero, created by Will Eisner, whose first appearance was Wonder Comics #1 .The character is of some historical significance by virtue of the lawsuit that resulted from his only appearance....

  • The Wraith
  • Yarko the Great, Master Magician
  • Zago, Jungle Prince
    Zago
    Zago is a fictional character that appeared in comic books published by Fox Feature Syndicate. He first appeared in Zago, Jungle Prince #1 .Zago was a jungle adventurer, very much like the more popular Tarzan...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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