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Today, we look at what the first comic book was that was based on a toy.
In “When We First Met”, we spotlight the various characters, phrases, objects or events that eventually became notable parts of comic lore, like the first time someone said, “Avengers Assemble!” or the first appearance of Batman’s giant penny or the first appearance of Alfred Pennyworth or the first time Spider-Man’s face was shown half-Spidey/half-Peter. Stuff like that.
Longtime reader James T. wrote in to ask, “What is the earliest comic book published about an actual toy?”
This is a fun one, since I get to ramble a bit about something that always interests me when it comes up, which is the fascinating (to me) history of toys in the United States. Whenever I start to discuss this topic, I always want to make sure that I am properly balancing myself. The last thing I want to do is to give off the impression that I am acting like the commercialism of today is superior to the commercialism of the past, but at the same time, I also don’t want to romanticize the past as some sort of glorious time when commercialism didn’t exist. Commercialism has always existed, it’s just that the ways of society and mass production has altered the very NATURE of commercialism.
One of the key things to keep in mind is that toys have been a constant in American society since the mid-19th century. They certainly exited BEFORE that point, as toys have always existed so long as there have been children, as kids were always playing with SOMEthing, it’s just that the APPROACH to children’s toys have changed dramatically over the centuries. A big part of that came from the change to how we perceive children. Remember, we’re literally less than a century away from the most definitive child labor law regulation (although to be fair, it’s really more like 1906 that child labor stopped the way that it used to exist, where “childhood” really didn’t exist for many kids the way that it does today). It really wasn’t until the 18th century that something clearly defined as “childhood” started to exist and it wasn’t until the 20th Century that it became a generic thing in the United States. So just like how “childhood” was typically something that existed only for people with money, toys, too, existed only for people with money. Toys obviously were around, but they were niche items, so generic toys ruled the day.
Amusingly, in 1933, Eastern Color did a comic book ABOUT toys, but it was just a giveaway meant to draw customers to buy toys at a department store (this was the early days of comics where the thought was that their only real value was as promotional giveaways)…
Here’s an example of how niche most toys were. Betsy Wetsy was invented in 1934 by Ideal Toy Company (the same company that invented what we think of as Teddy Bears early in the 20th Century). Here is a 1947 ad for Betsy Wetsy…
The bare bones doll retailed for $5 ($62 today) and the full package retailed for $10! These were luxury items. However, there was one toy that tried to challenge that idea a bit…
WAS RAGGEDY ANN AND ANDY THE FIRST COMIC BOOK BASED ON A TOY?
In 1915, cartoonist Johnny Gruelle came up with the idea of producing a rag doll that he would then write a children’s book about, so that they could sell the two things together, using the book series to promote the dolls and vice versa. The doll was called Raggedy Ann and the original versions of the doll in the late teens/early 20s was much more stripped down than it would later become…
To give a sense of the scale of what it meant to be a “hit” toy back in those days, when mass production really wasn’t quite a thing yet, the biggest years for the dolls would see about 3,000 dolls sold, which, of course, was a huge success, but not nearly what you think about for a popular toy these days, right?
In any event, the book series was even more popular than the dolls (although, it is important to note that the toy came first) and in 1942, Dell Comics released their first Raggedy Ann and Andy comic book as part of its Four Color Comics series (Raggedy Ann and Andy then got their own series, as well, a couple of years later)…
So what do you think? Does this count? Raggedy Ann WAS a toy first before she was a book character, so I think it technically DOES count. However, I suspect that it wasn’t really the sort of thing that James was looking for, so let’s keep looking!
WAS BARBIE AND KEN THE FIRST COMIC BOOK BASED ON A TOY?
After War II was over and the baby boom occurred, the toy industry exploded and suddenly, niche products like Betsy Wetsy were mainsteam successes. All of these new little boomer kids wanted toys and the new American middle class (and the more generalized “childhood”) made toys a much bigger deal than they ever were before and then television allowed toys to be advertised nationally easily and soon, we had hits like Barbie that were successful in ways previous toys (including hits like Ideal’s Shirley Temple dolls of the 1930s) never quite matched.
And so sure enough (I say sure enough because this was James’ guess at the answer when he sent in the question), Dell’s 1962 Barbie and Ken was the first comic book where the comic book was clearly outright just tying into the toy (unlike how Raggedy Ann and Andy was a popular book series, as well)…
The hook of the comic is that it would star girls in Barbie fan clubs…
And that each of the girls would tell a fictional story about them meeting Barbie (all the stories were by the brilliant Norman Nodel), whether it was as an “Air hostess”…
or a ballet dancer…
or a labor and delivery nurse…
Two years later, DC did its first toy tie-in comic with two comics based on the then-new Hasbro toy, G.I. Joe…
DC was so new at the game that the “tie-in” comics were really just generic war stories by DC’s main war creative teams of the era, Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert, Bob Haney and Russ Heath and Haney and Ross Andru and Mike Esposito…
So your pick, folks, either Raggedy Ann or Barbie!
There ya go, James! Thanks for the suggestion! If anyone else wants to know about an interesting comic book first, just drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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