American Comic Cuts –

⭐ Jake Geller on Comic Cuts, The Windsor Star - ‎Oct. 13, 1981. ⭐

– Our first issue of Comic Cuts, The National Comic weekly carried a cover date of May 19, 1934. It sold for a nickel and had 24 pages of color comics. The front-page comic strip was called ‘Simple Simon Scores Again This Week.’

How it happened is told here in Jake Geller’s own words, recorded in personal interviews, and taken, with his permission from the text of It’s Jake with Me, Geller’s unpublished autobiography. His is the true story of Canada’s own comic book hero.

“My Windsor News Company handled a series of English comic papers published by Lord Northcliffe’s Amalgamated Press in London, England. Every so often, a gentleman from Detroit would show up in my shop and buy 15 or 20 back issues of these papers. One day, out of curiosity, I asked him what he did with them. He told me, “When I was a boy I lived in Hamilton, Ontario. I used to read these English comics all the time. There is nothing like them available in Detroit, so whenever I’m in Windsor I pick up a few for my kids.”

“THAT GAVE ME an idea. I had my brother Maurice take the rest of the back issues to Detroit and set them up at a variety store which was located near a school. The papers cost two-and-a-half cents each and we sold them to the retailer for three-and-a-half cents, giving the retailer a cent-and-a-half profit on each five-cent sale. Boy were we ever surprised when Maurice returned the following week. Every copy had been sold and the storekeeper was clamoring for more.

Finally, it occurred to me that if I bought the American rights to these strips, I could issue my own publication and make it any size I wanted. I could also control the number of titles the retailers would have to handle.

I APPROACHED Wilbert Smith, president of Select Magazines, and asked him to be our national distributor in the United States. He was enthusiastic. Harry Baker, a friend of mine from New York, agreed to put up some of the money. We opened an office in New York and started to hire our staff. We hired a couple of big names to begin with. A.F. Cole joined us as our advertising manager from Popular Science, and Robert Ament, the former art director of the late lamented New York World, was hired as editor.

Our first issue of Comic Cuts, The National Comic weekly carried a cover date of May 19, 1934. It sold for a nickel and had 24 pages of color comics. The front-page comic strip was called ‘Simple Simon Scores Again This Week.’

You know, the World Encyclopedia of Comics (edited by Maurice Horn, published in 1976 by Chelsea House) gives credit for the first comic book where it isn’t due. Look at this.” Geller takes the book down from his shelf and reads, “In May 1934 the Eastern Color Printing Company issued the first comic book, Famous Funnies, a monthly (Geller again repeats ‘monthly’) collection of newspaper strip reprints.” There is no mention of Geller. Or of Comic Cuts.

GELLER CLOSES the book and says, “Why, we were a weekly. And we had six issues out before they were ever on the stands!

“You know who Eastern Color Printing was. They were the first printer we contacted for a price quote to print Comic Cuts. We didn’t go with them because they were in New England. Instead we chose a printer in Buffalo. But they sure must have liked the idea.

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