Ballyhoo was a huge success in its day and was quite long-lived by the measure of any magazine in any genre. It was published monthly from 1931 until 1938, when it was dropped to a quarterly, primarily because of paper rationing. It was then revived three times: in 1948 after paper rationing was lifted, in 1952 as something of a Men's magazine and in 1953 in response to the success of Mad Magazine. During its first run it was quite clearly the most important forum for gag cartoon illustration of the time. Unfortunately, that started to count for less and less.
Sign above the char woman reads "Through These Portals Pass The Loveliest Girls In The World"
Much like the Computer Shopper or Wired, once your special niche becomes ubiquitous, you lose your reason for being.
Caption "Run down to the cellar, James, and fetch the 1849 Burgundy."
There really wasn't much difference between the cartoons running in the New Yorker, Punch or Ballyhoo. These magazines had more than proven the attraction of spot gags to readers. By the time Ballyhoo first folded shop, even the idea of having a magazine mostly made up of comics wasn't all that novel.
Moreover, Ballyhoo peaked early and became linked with a fad whose rise and fall paralleled the magazine's own fate. Although started as counter-culture, it became very fashionable very quickly. It became an "art thing" and, when that passed, relied on a lot of "me too" pranks to try to stay in the public eye.
Ballyhoo's two editorial causes for being were Prohibition and the Great Depression. After Prohibition was lifted in 1933 and the Depression had become part of the "new normal", the magazine started to lose its edge. At that point the publisher no longer cared about innovating. Much like Playboy, Ballyhoo had become the in thing, a brand name unto itself.
Case in point: The bathtub lady scene, which will now be beaten to death.
The bathtub lady scene is on playing cards. The bathtub lady scene is on wall paper. (Last seen in Tony & Lil's Pizza in Chicago.) It's on shower curtains. It's on lady's bags.
The bathtub lady scene was the sound of a cash register ringing. Ballyhoo was wedded to the Art Deco movement and was its most influential consumer product brand name. There were Ballyhoo cigarettes, Ballyhoo cigarette holders, Ballyhoo cigarette cases, Ballyhoo Vodka, Ballyhoo themed night clubs featuring Ballyhoo branded furniture. Ballyhoo shoes and glasses were also produced under license. Video games? Close. The first branded pinball game bore the Ballyhoo trademark and was decorated in its cartoons. You can see why the publisher didn't want to mess with it.
It's called cashing in--and for publisher George Delacorte, it was about time. Ballyhoo had not emerged fully formed from a half shell. Prior to Ballyhoo, Dell Publishing had launched two other humor magazines: a Film Fun knock off called Film Humor (later revived by Dell in the 1940s) and a full color weekly Dime Novel featuring original comic strips called The Funnies. Dime Novels never featured actual cartoons before The Funnies and were not generally in full color. As stated before, Dime Novels and comic books are very close kin physically. In the case of The Funnies all that is missing is the slick cover. Delacorte's enterprise was originally known as Film Humor Incorporated. He apparently changed the firm's name to Dell Publications after a nasty-gram from Film Fun's lawyer ended the life of the flagship title.
(He didn't use his own last name since his father George Delacorte Sr. had been a prominent attorney and the partnership was still active in New York at the time.)
Ballyhoo changed the way George Delacorte did business. His intricate recycling circulation scheme proved to be unnecessary with Ballyhoo. The magazine sold out and sold out quickly. His mid-west and west coast distributors were paying for the magazine to be printed locally. Moreover, he leveraged Ballyhoo and forced distributors to take his other magazines. He was soon in book stores and chain stores and department stores and pharmacies. Coupled with his reach in the newsstand market, Dell Publishing had the best distribution system of anyone in the periodical business.
No, George Delacorte never made a penny off of the physical sale of Ballyhoo. Sometimes it was printed at a loss. It was a loss leader to many of its distributors. It was a loss leader to some retailers. It was also produced under license by other publishers in Canada, England, Germany and Australia. Delacorte started taking advertising, but NOT for Ballyhoo.
Whether Ballyhoo had advertising is something of a bone of contention. (Pulp magazine historians, like all lovers of the obscure, are a bitchy lot.) One historian claims that this is a real product. If this is a real product, it's very arguable that inclusion in a parody ad constitutes advertising. It's more a product placement.
There are many real-like products featured in Ballyhoo's parody advertisements. I think it doubtful that anyone was parting with money for this pleasure. Product managers are not like movie stars: some publicity is bad publicity.
Here was have both a product and a movie star being bashed. Most of these parodies are relentlessly negative. Again, Ballyhoo engaged in an unconscionable amount of Gay-bashing.
Most of the parody ads are for utterly ridiculous products. Note the type of illustration being used. As with all things, this is where Mad got the idea.
Many of the products themselves are stand ins for social commentary. Ballyhoo quickly lost its monopoly on doing parody ads. The New Yorker and Esquire, amongst others, followed suit. (Above is from Ballyhoo.)
Beyond the parodies, Ballyhoo had two continuing features. Readers of this blog may have heard me make multiple mentions of the Gay 90s nostalgia crazes. Now on its third revival, no one was more sick of the Gay 90s than Ballyhoo. Every issue featured a four framer on how lame that era really was.
The second feature, Modernizing The Old Masters, really speaks to whom this magazine was being read by. This was an art crowd. It was an upscale readership. The magazine itself was a peice of disposable art. The cartoons, the parodies were all intended to be torn out for temporary display in the office or as browsing material on the coffee table. It's an accessory to the Art Deco lifestyle.
It should be noted that Ballyhoo wasn't initially intended as such. The Art Deco movement itself wasn't actually named until after it had faded from the scene. Ballyhoo quite happily and accidentally found itself in a place where it could help define the style of its times. In reality, it was kind of a fashion magazine.
The problem with chic is that chic runs out. No one seems to have known this better than George Delacorte. He had as much sentimentality for his products as your average pulp publisher--think lizard with ice water for blood. The moment the revenue from licensing tapered off, Ballyhoo was dead.
Ballyhoo was the wildest thing Delacorte ever did. He was a mainstream publisher who targeted the tamer portion of the market. Dell Publications husbanded its boon from Ballyhoo and used it for the development of products with greater appeal.
Delacorte's work in publishing is so broad that there is a variance in emphasis depending on the type of historian you refer to. The crossword puzzle people will point at the racks pf puzzle magazines still in every Walgreens and supermarket and tell you that Dell Publications' marketing might is what put them there. (That is sort of true.) George Delacorte was the unquestioned king of the puzzle books. He also forced marched the paperbacks into supermarkets. If it wasn't for Dell, the paperback format would have gone nowhere. Dell is somewhat under-reported when it comes to comic books--and that's a crime. As a pulp magazine historian, I'll tell you that Delacorte was a hell of a paperback publisher.
It wasn't that he was bad at pulp magazines. He was actually very good at it. Unlike many pulp publishers, he wasn't interested in building a subscription base or having strong brand names for his anthologies. Rather, he was an impulse publisher. He wanted you to buy that magazine right now. Most of his magazines featured novel length works. If he had twenty magazines worth of good material, he would publish twenty magazines. If he had six, he would publish six. Delacorte had more magazines that didn't make it to issue four than any other publisher. (He largely used the same approach when it came to comic books.) The pulp magazine format was a weigh station, a format of convenience used until the paperback could gain traction. Unlike Alex Hillman, he bypassed digests since that format was a haven for smut. And Dell Publications didn't do smut.
In 1936 Delacorte did a pulp knock off of Ballyhoo, at first called Hullaballo, which eventually became 1000 Jokes Magazine.
As 1000 Jokes Magazine, it was one of Dell's longest lasting pulps, ceasing publication in the 1970s.
In 1935 Delacorte re-launched The Funnies, this time with a slick cover. It was a comic book as we know it today. For good measure, Delacorte was reprinting comic strips that people had actually heard of. It wasn't all that profitable, due to royalty costs. And the appeal of a reprint magazine, no matter how generous or well done, was limited. Chances are that if people liked these comic strips, they had probably already read them. Then as today, many cartoonists had their works reprinted in book form also. Showing up in book form was really the second bounce market. By the time the comic books got them, these strips were plenty stale.
And they weren't exclusive to any one publisher. The syndicates felt no shame in pimping out the same already published in comic book form works out to another firm. Some of the strips were so old there was no telling if you were getting the third or fourth bounce. To the syndicates, comic book rights were on the low end of the "found money" chain.
George Delacorte was the first to attempt a work around of this problem. In 1936 he started another comic book called Popular Comics. In this magazine he merely licensed the characters and then had new material commissioned for the book. A second title called The Comics using the same strategy was launched by Dell in 1937.
Although this seems like a good idea, the results were uneven at best. Comic strips are idiosyncratic things. If the comic strip isn't done by the original artist, is it really the same strip? As I mentioned, cartoonists were among the highest paid people in the United States--and not known then or now as workaholics. Very few of them are going to draw new material for your silly comic book, even if you offer to pay them. Because you will be paying them and their syndicate pimps for the artwork anyway, regardless of who does it. At best, you are going to get the work of an actual assistant to the strip's original artist. At worst, you are going to get an assistant for whom this extra work does not mean extra pay.
As poorly executed as the idea often was, it appears to have been profitable enough for Dell to have continued with it. Delacorte also continued to experiment with the format. Below are two examples which double both as early comic books and paperbacks. In both cases, Dell was printing the covers on cardboard with a color overlay.
Dell never stopped innovating with comics, although eventually most of the comics they published were in the conventional Golden Age comic book form. (52 color pages with a slick four color cover.) Below are two experiments from roughly the same era as the two above. Key Ring Comics is a spot color magazine, intended to be saved in children's work folder or binder. Western Action Thrillers was an attempt to reinvent the visual language of comics, with each frame being an illustration above typeset text. This format is suspiciously similar to the one adopted by Mad's publisher for its adventure and horror comics.
These are just the experiments which were concurrent with Ballyhoo. There were numerous others later. As for Ballyhoo, it started to wobble in focus after 1933, becoming an occasional hybrid of a movie magazine and a mature audience publication. It was a comic book for adults.
When Ballyhoo started, there were no comic books and its publisher was primarily in the pulp and movie magazine fields. By the time Ballyhoo wrapped up, it was one of many comic books its publisher produced.
Caption "Gwendolyn, did you ever think of settling down and having a baby?"
Caption "My dear! I've just had the very same experience!"
As for Ballyhoo, its fate may have been sealed by the inevitable success of this experiment.
Animation characters seemed to be the way to go. They were as well known as any comic strip character--only there was no artist or reprint material or syndicate to deal with. In fact, you were improving the licensed property by translating it into a new medium. And you could control the quality of your product by hiring your own contractors.
The problem for Dell was that someone already had that idea. Disney's rights were controlled by a firm called Centaur Comics. Centaur itself was locked into a really horrible distribution deal and, quite frankly didn't have the money to really exploit the license--
--Oh, about the license. It was a mega license, covering Disney, MGM, Warner Brothers, several syndicates and the NBC network. The seller and Centaur had essentially agreed on terms. Centaur printer, Western Publishing, was willing to front half the money. Between Centaur and Western they had the connections to produce just oodles of comics. But Centaur was effectively broke and Western was locked into the same distribution agreement that had driven Centaur under--
--Enter George Delacorte, who just happens to have the world's greatest distribution system as well as several dumpsters full of Ballyhoo cash. How this actually worked out will be a subject for another post. The upswing was that exploiting this mega license would involve all three firms somewhat equally. It was the start of the Western Printing/Dell Publishing partnership which would eventually create the paperback industry. In the mean time, they had comics to roll...
How did it work out? 400 plus titles. Over 300 million circulation a year at its height. No tag day for George Delacorte. What had been a second rate peddler of movie magazines and pulps was now the king of the comics. It didn't stop there. Dell eventually became one of the biggest firms in the publishing business.
Ballyhoo was revived twice, without much success. Even by 1938 it had become an afterthought. It had served its purpose in more than one way.
Coda: I promise to expand on this somewhat when I post it to the web pages. Our next posting may not be for more than a week. I am hoping to cover Centaur or Paper Rationing shortly.
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