Ideal Magazines Group (Pulp History)

GIRLS MADE GOOD

A History of

 William Cotton’s Ideal Magazines

 and Editor Muriel Babcock

When comic book or pulp magazine publishers are accounted for in various histories, they are often dismissed as being slip shod, fly by night, penny ante operators.  As most of us familiar with these publishers know, this is seldom the case.  Street & Smith, Dell and Fawcett were large as publishers and substantial when compared to nearly any business. A majority of even the small operators, such as Alex Hillman, Fiction House and tonight’s subject Ideal Magazines are not small as businesses go. They were lucrative enterprises, employing dozens of people and operating on a national scale.

To turn back the clock, just being in publishing involved the possession of considerable assets. There are massive barriers to entering even the silly little pulps end of this business. Typesetting and layout required an investment in specialized equipment and skilled artists. Add in four color illustrations, printing, distribution logistics, as well as the recruitment of advertising and the scale of the operations start to take shape. No one got into this business and then flew by the seat of their pants. Prior to entry, all of the operators spent time in the continuum of the magazine trade, generally either in distribution or editorial. This perhaps explains the outstanding success rate of the firms in this field when compared to just about any other branch of publishing.

By the time these guys show up with their credit facility, drafting boards and distribution agreements in place, they have a fairly good idea of what they are going to do. The general plan goes something along these lines: produce for 2 cents, wholesale for 5 cents and live off 40% sales of your print run. (The prices change, but in the old retail magazine trade, the ratios remained the same.) Ideal Magazines had a variation on that plan. Their magazines were specifically designed with a set audience demographic in mind. Ideal Magazines were targeted at the Shop Girl market, what we would today call the Blue Collar Female segment: working poor to lower middle class females from 14-30. Catering to this segment is the Ideal behind Ideal Magazines—as is delivering that market to its advertisers.

Most pulp magazine publishers stuck to the general formula. The audience was an extrapolation gleaned from reading return figures and fielding distributor feedback. Many of the publishers simply didn’t care who read their magazines.  Pulp publishers operated oddball recirculation schemes, wherein returned magazines were reshipped, re-dated and repackaged as other magazines. None of this holds up to advertiser circulation scrutiny. Hence the average pulp publisher had a hard time making any circulation or readership claims and thus picked up pennies, attracting only those advertisers who had nowhere else to go. William Cotton was one of the few publishers to forgo whatever savings there was to the recycling circus.  Instead, he focused on delivering his demographic and building his circulation figures.

In short, he acted more like a conventional magazine publisher. Cotton is plying the same advertising waters as most fashion magazines, although his target is more down-market. He isn’t interested in selling full page ads to Channel. He’s more out for Maybelline and the drugstore brands—and he sells by the half page, the quarter page, the column length, the column inch or the classified line. Through this method he is able to pad out his name brand display advertising with offerings from lesser merchants wishing to reach the same audience. As we covered in our initial post on this subject (You Stink and Your Breasts Are Too Small), the advertising environment of Ideal Magazines was a smorgasbord of discount bras and feminine hygiene.

Ideal Magazines was an extremely successful pulp operator. It published an average of four magazines a month from 1943 to 1980. It went through a change of ownership and continued to survive, which is rare for either a sole proprietorship or a publisher. During most of its history the firm maintained fashionable offices in both New York and Los Angeles. Two of its titles ran for the entirety of the firm’s operations.

And it made William Cotton a very wealthy man.  Despite its long and successful track record, not much has been written about Ideal Magazines. There are reasons for this, not all of them valid. It is a comparatively late publisher, starting up its operations at a time when most of the other pulp houses were shutting their doors. The firm’s stock and trade is in Movie Fan Magazines and True Confessions, which have limited modern attraction. Although many of its core titles are in the ‘also ran’ class, they were a nimble and often innovative operator. Ideal Magazines followed their demographic around like a dog and changed offerings and slants as the tastes of shop girls changed.  The firm took a lot of chances, unafraid to expand categories and branch into niches others had left for dead. But Perhaps its most interesting aspect is that the firm was under female editorial control. (1) Ideal trained generations of female editors and had a unique system set up for recruiting prospects.  Couple this with the fact that they largely stayed in magazines and never abandoned the production of fiction and it firms up a nice position in the history of the pulp magazine field.

As we will see, they were more of a full bodied house than one might expect, offering titles in several pulp genres. They were also a high production quality operator, an early adopter of photo offset and full color photo offset. Those are the fingerprints of success.

End of praise. From an editorial standpoint, they were kind of sleazy. Much of their category expansion was into the fields of gossip and Big Lie Newsfiction. From a fiction standpoint, they were essentially continuing the smutty romance genre which had emerged out of Flapper Fiction in the 1920s.  It’s all sob stories and sex fantasies, with no particular house distinction in terms of slant or general quality. Given their bi-coastal set up in writer’s hubs, one might have expected more. If anything, Ideal’s output is distinguished by being consistently the lowest rung of lowbrow.

William Cotton got his start in pulp publishing at Fawcett Publications, the producers of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, Family Circle, Mechanics Illustrated and a fleet of pulp titles in various genres. This publisher was the originator of a certain type of Movie Fan magazine and Cotton eventually rose to become an editor in the Movie Fan division.

Fawcett’s slant on the Movie Fan genre was to have his magazines largely act as mouthpieces for the studios. The pictures and stories were provided by the studios or the press agents of various stars.  It was essentially free editorial. All the publisher did was slate it, lay it out and print it. This was a nice set up for both parties, with the publisher receiving an attractive package all decorated with stars and starlets and the movie studio receiving free publicity for its upcoming projects. It was a bit of a logistical headache for the editor, who had to coordinate the flow of materials between Fawcett’s headquarters in Minnesota, its press battery in New York and the content providers in Hollywood. By 1937 William Cotton decided that he had learned all he could from Fawcett and set out to found his own firm.

He got off to an inauspicious start. Cotton initially was invited into partnership with a coalition of firms which I will call Centaur Comics. This ill-fated confederation went in several directions at once and was eventually revealed as lacking in credit facility and distribution connections. (2) Despite this, Cotton was able to launch the two publications which would become the flagships of Ideal Magazines while still in the Centaur fold. And he seems to have produced both magazines simultaneously in 1937.

Movie Life was a flat out knock off of Fawcett’s Movie Fan magazines. Each of Fawcett’s magazines had a slightly different focus or presentation. Cotton made Movie Life an amalgamation of different departments, all modeled on those from the magazines he had previously edited. If anything, Cotton was aiming for an even more relentlessly positive and up with Hollywood people take than what the ardently boosterish Fawcett was peddling. This was going contrary to the direction of the field at the time and turned out to be a dubious tactic. Like every other Movie Fan magazine of the time, it was produced on litho stock and was about the size of the average newspaper magazine section. Like a lot of Centaur output, there are early problems with color registry and the magazine looks smudgy.  It muddles for the first three years.

Cotton’s second publication is a pulp. Of some kind. As Personal Adventure Stories it is a standard pulp with standard pulp dimensions and a painted cover. The genre is somewhat unclear, other than being very violent personal accounts. This merits three issues. Either the returns were terrible or, more likely, the printer cut off their credit.  

So they switch printers. For the next three issues the title is shortened to Personal Adventure. In this incarnation it’s a fairly straight forward True Crime magazine produced off a photo offset press. Personal Adventure had a spot color cover featuring a black and white photographic illustration. The presentation is similar to the approach used in the 1950s by other True Crime periodicals and scandal zines of the Confidential ilk. In 1937 this presentation is somewhat rare, and not a halo of success.

Then it becomes Personal Romances. This magazine is a litho slick, mechanically identical to Movie Life. It’s the same page count, stock and production method as Movie Life, which probably netted some economies on the print run of both magazines. This makes Personal Romances somewhat thin for a Love Confessions pulp, but it wasn’t unheard of. MacFadden’s True Story, which started the Love Confessions trend, was also a litho magazine. Like MacFadden, Cotton made up for his lack of a page count by peppering his stories with staged photographs for illustration.

Eventually both Movie Life and Personal Romances dropped down to a format similar to Personal Adventure, only with full color process covers. (3) Advances in photo offset printing allowed him to keep the photographs in both magazines. He occasionally seeded in slick stock, generally to accommodate full page colored advertisements. Cotton also took advantage of the run technology and splashed his interiors with spot color underlays,  used to highlight advertisements.

I can’t say if Personal Adventure Stories was his original idea or if he simply inherited it at some point. Whenever the brain trust at Centaur Comics collaborated on a project, disaster soon followed. Personal Adventure Stories has that Centaur touch to it. By the time it becomes Personal Romance, it is Cotton’s tar baby. It is one of the publications he left with after Centaur exploded like Krypton in 1940.

Whether Cotton was hampered by his involvement with Centaur, the Depression, the onset of paper shortages or poor consumer reception, I cannot say. That he was able to survive under these conditions says a lot about Cotton. But he was sort of muddling on for the first few years.

At least until he made modifications, both of his magazines were swimming upstream. Movie Life in particular was going against the trend of public tastes. During the late 1930s the public had started to sour on the constant stream of fluff shovel-wared out by the studio publicity houses. Gossip --or at least a slightly less studio-leaning approach-- was on the rise. Murial Babcock was a leading voice in this new approach.

If Muriel Babcock had opinion about the goings on in Hollywood, she had at least come by them honestly. She was a Hollywood thing. A WWI era graduate of Michigan University, she had landed herself a reporter’s job at the Los Angeles Times by 1926. (4) Babcock was a beat reporter, with a knack for human interest stories. (5) Hollywood grew up on her beat and her career grew with it, covering the later stages of the silent era and the start of the golden age. She knew everyone, was part of the overall scene.

She seems to have been very well liked. There are numerous stories of cocktail parties being thrown in her honor. With the start of the Depression, Babcock changed jobs often. (Probably not by choice.) When it came to the denizens of Hollywood, Babcock either loved them (Charlie Chaplin) or hated them (Mae West)—and wrote accordingly. Objective, she was not. Her style was bombast or lambaste. She seemed to have it in for the more pretentious of the actor’s lot and had special venom for those actresses whose only talents were filling up a shirt. And she was just as quick to champion the actresses which went against type.

All of that said, she was an industry booster. Over time her style became more bombastic and run on laudatory. Her tact was to compare her subjects of adulation to unnamed talentless shirt stuffers. She lent her prose a focus on glamour, trappings and aspirations. It’s a goofy rap: part bootlicking, part You Are There, part Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. 

By the mid 1930s her rap had become her business. Her reporting appeared in Modern Screen, Motion Picture, Movie Classic, Movie Mirror, Screen Book, Screenland, Silver Screen and Photoplay. She was appointed the editor of Photoplay and held that position for the publication’s last three years as a going concern. She was also employed by the Margaret Ettinger publicity bureau. (6)

In 1940 she was lured to New York by Street & Smith to head up a new women’s slick magazine. Street & Smith was a pulp magazine publisher looking to leave the penny dreadfuls behind them and enter the exciting world of lady’s fashion. They had already experienced some success in this and designed to launch another slick title.  Babcock was appointed the Editor in Chief.

I’m not sure what Charm magazine was supposed to be. A more newsy version of Good Housekeeping? A more Hollywood version of Time? In three issues it became Muriel Babcock’s burial ground. She was fired and the magazine unceremoniously cancelled before the fourth issue.

(Sources conflict: One source said that Babcock was the editor of Picture Play for its last three years and that Charm is a retitle of Picture Play. In that case, she didn't survive a drastic format change. All of my sources say that she resigned her position at Charm. Sources also conflict if Charm went on to be something else.) 

Babcock was now marooned in New York and jobless. Reports in the press at the time indicated that Babcock was going to South America as a part of a government initiative to promote Hollywood films there. She seems to have met with William Cotton, instead.

Babcock opened Ideal’s Hollywood office in 1941. From that point on, all editorial would originate from the Hollywood office, under her direct supervision. Cotton would handle pre press, advertising, printing and distribution out of Ideal’s New York headquarters. This arrangement would remain in effect until the firm was sold in 1963. (7)

It wasn’t an entirely reptilian arrangement. Cotton visited Babcock frequently. There are several newspaper reports of Babcock and Cotton appearing together at various Hollywood cocktail parties.  Tellingly, Cotton always shows with his wife and two daughters in tow. (He was that kind of guy.) Cotton did at one point send out a western states operations manager, but that person probably answered to Babcock. Whatever Babcock and Cotton’s arrangement was, it seemed to have worked out.

The firm soon expanded its line, issuing Movie Star Parade in 1941. There isn’t much to distinguish Movie Star Parade from Movie Life. Initially it had more photos than the other magazine. In various guises, this magazine became Ideal’s third flagship title. It changed title to Movie Stars TV Close Ups in 1958 and then to just Movie Stars in 1961. As Movie Stars it ran until 1980. Over the years, it became less photo oriented and more slanted to gossip. The same is also true of Movie Life.

Three titles would be it for a while. Once WWII got underway, paper quotas cut off most opportunities for expansion. Ideal was in a sweet spot as far as paper rationing was concerned. The firm was entitled to a ration only because they were in business prior to the outbreak of war. And the ration Ideal was entitled to wasn’t that much smaller than larger firms in their business. It helped even the field for Ideal, since their competitors were having to choose what titles to cancel. Fawcett, the heavy hitter in Movie magazines, cancelled quite a few of their Fan titles in favor of not cutting the magazines in their Mechanics Illustrated tier. Other pulp publishers left the field entirely, in favor of producing digests or comic books. Ideal didn’t cut at all. And due to its genre focus, their audience wasn’t going anywhere. They came out of the war in much better shape than when they went in.

William Cotton also operated a side business which I will call Conel Books. This firm was an issuer of digest sized mass market offerings as well as little how-to pamphlets. I’m not sure how much input Muriel Babcock had with this line, other than writing at least one of the books. (8) On the high end, they published digest editions of the works of A.A. Milne. This sort of dovetails with the Christmas activity books that this firm put out seasonally. At some time during the 1940s they put out a digest called Movie Diary which was structured much like a birdwatcher’s guide. It had the star’s name and photo facing a lined page. The intention seems to be for the buyer to record when and where he saw the star. It’s unclear how many editions there were of this publication. The firm also produced a series of astrology pamphlets, authored by Anthony Norvel, seemingly for impulse sale at drug stores. (We covered Norvel in a previous posting.)  After the war, the firm produced a series of stand alone digests on various celebrities. Mostly, however, Conel peddled get thin diets and manuals on exercise designed to enhance one’s proportions. It’s all scam material, very little of which we have much record of. Then as now, there were occasional slumps in the advertising market. Cotton used his in house ads for Conel Books to fill out column space.

With the end of the war came a lifting of the quota. Ideal was in good enough shape to attempt another round of expansion. In 1947 Ideal originated their second True Confessions pulp, Intimate Story.

Or at least I think they did. Records on magazines in the True Confessions category are very spotty. (9) The earliest issues I can find online date to the early 1950s. My own copy of Intimate Story from October 1959 says that it is issue 7 volume 12. If this fits in with the system Cotton uses on the rest of his magazines, this places the start date at 1947 or 1948. Given that the Intimate Story continued until 1980, it had a healthy run for a magazine in any category. As with Movie Star Parade and Movie Life, there wasn’t much that distinguished Personal Romances from Intimate Story. (10) So it seems by the end of the 1940s Ideal already had in place four of the five titles which they would publish continuously  until the firm’s eventual amalgamation with Marvel Comics. Which is to say that all of these sleazy magazines are now probably the possessions of Disney.

I’m sure the mouseketeers would be none too pleased with 1949’s Glamourous Models. This offering is as close to porn as anything Cotton produced. To cut Ideal some slack, they weren’t the only firm doing this. This sweater girl pin up genre had picked up steam during the war. Most of the people in this magazine are aspiring actresses or have been cast in bit parts in upcoming films. In this light, it is somewhat on the low end of the Movie Fan magazine spectrum. Sadly, the success of this offering seems to have set the stage for…

Movie Pin Ups. Again no points for taste are awarded. Just stick them in bathing suits and call it a day. Making matters worse, the magazine’s editorial divides the various stars into categories such as “Beefy”, “Dreamy” and “Cheesecake."

Due to the success of TV Guide, Pageant and Ellery Queen’s  the digest format was considered the hot coming thing, suitable for sale at drug store checkouts. (11)  Ideal was like a number of publishers trying to make something work in this format. They hit on their fifth flagship title in 1951 with the release of TV Star Parade.

TV Star Parade functioned as something of a written trailer reel for the television production industry. It features were designed to drum up enthusiasm for coming shows. With largely this formula, the magazine continued on the newsstands until 1980. It wandered into Movie Fan style gossip and evolved over a time to focus on soap operas. As with other titles under Ideal’s control, it provided the firm with the platform for issuing titles labeled as annuals and special editions.

Many of the shorter run titles I’ve listed may not have been slated as continuing publications in the first place. Ideal liked to issue ‘one off’ titles. When a category is particularly hot, you issue a ‘one off’ title to satiate demand. Ideal did this with seasonal titles all the time. Movie Pin Ups and Glamorous Models may simply be serial one offs.  Other serial one offs included Movie Thrills, a movie magazine dedicated to westerns, and Star Album, a movie magazine in digest form.

1956’s Living Story seems to be an attempt to break into the then hot fiction digest category. Choosing a genre would have been a good first move. As it is, they were emulating the presentation of the remaining pulp magazines.  Which was not the way to go.

During the mid 1950s Ideal came into the possession Modern Movies, started in 1937. This may have been one movie magazine too many for the firm. They changed its slant several times, and its name twice, first to simply Movies and then to Movies Secrets. In its final incarnation it was solid gossip, somewhat similar to Confidential Magazine. By 1957 the Confidential trend had burnt out and Ideal cancelled the magazine.

Ideal seems to have peaked in the 1950s. Their volume of output and willingness to fling titles indicates a flush position. This was not the case of the pulp industry or magazines in general. The general fiction pulps were dead and every genre other than romantic western was in reprint mode. Even the love pulps were in trouble, the tamer section of the market being syphoned off by love comic books. Ideal’s romance titles were shielded from this by virtue of being not all that tame. They played follow the leader into a gossip focus for their movie titles, but they also broke from the pack. By the mid 1950s Movie Parade had transitioned into covering the Rock N Roll scene. It was an early and nimble move.

Muriel Babcock kept her editorial current through a unique process. Every few years she would sponsor an essay contest. The contest was only open to women within Ideal’s demographic, arguably only to the readers of its magazines. A cash award was offered, but the real prize was an offer of employment as an editor at Ideal. And they did this for decades, keeping a steady stream of 20 somethings in their editorial ranks.

This may have been one of the reasons Ideal didn’t suffer the declines seen by its competitors. Other houses were folding shop. And other houses were getting in trouble with the authorities. Censorship was in the winds. Ideal had stayed out of comics, porn and True Crime, so its visibility on the parent’s radar screen was low.

They did make at least a tangential contribution to the history of censorship efforts. In 1952 novelist Margaret Culkin Banning was called before a Congressional House committee investigating sex and crime magazines on the newsstands. She testified to having recently surveyed 1,231 pulp offerings currently available. Of the titles examined, she found all but 99 “vicious and provocative.”

As the hearing was concluding, it came to the committee’s attention that Banning herself was a current contributor Personal Romances. Her own prose was then cited: “It says no sensible person now considers a girl ruined because of a single impetuous experience…”

When contacted by reporters, Banning explained that she had excluded the detective and romance pulps, which she had no objection to.

The committee’s chairman (Gainings D-Ark) was then presented with the issue of Personal Romance in which Banning’s work appeared. “This definitely is the type of magazine she was objecting to,” he told reporters. “I wish I had known about it when she was before us as a witness.”

Another committee member was even more blunt. “Why was she our star witness!” (11)

By 1963 both Cotton and Babcock were getting on in years. (12) Cotton accepted a standing offer for his firm and cashed out. It is unclear exactly who Cotton sold out to, but by 1963 Ideal was under the corporate umbrella of Filmways Corporation.

Filmways made no substantial changes to Ideal and retained their staff, long term. They enshrined the systems Cotton and Babcock had set up. They seem to have bought Ideal because they wanted it. They liked how it was run. And they threw a lot of money at it. Filmways continued all of Ideal’s titles.

On paper, Filmways was a good fit. Like Ideal, Filmways was bi-coastal, with sales offices in New York and production offices in Los Angeles. They had not been in the magazine business before, however. The firm is best remembered as a TV production studio, responsible for such shows as Mr. Ed, Addams Family, Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Mary Hartman—Mary Hartman and Cagney & Lacey. In theory, the firm was set up to mimic other vertically integrated media firms of the time, like Warner Brothers 7 Arts (One of the components merged into Time Warner.) Under Filmways Ideal underwent another round of expansion, some of it outside of the historical target demographic. Much of this expansion was in the Activity Sector: crossword puzzles, word finds and astrology magazines.

Filmways also acquired titles for Ideal. The venerable Screen Stories, a movie magazine dating from 1929, was added to the fold as was love pulp Daring Romances.

The biggest move Ideal undertook at this time was an attempt at going head to head with TV Guide. The TV Dawn to Dusk title ran from 1971 to 1979 and spearheaded Ideal’s overall thrust into the general interest segment.

As if Ideal didn’t already have enough Movie titles in its armada, Filmways green lighted two additions. Cinema TV Scene (1970-1978) was a throwback to the uncritical and boosterish Movie Fan magazines of old.  The later Super Star Heroes, which covered science fiction, was in the same rah rah mode. The field had come full circle.  

Considering how long Ideal had been in the pin up game, Teen Beat seems to be a no brainer. This followed a mere ten years after the debut of Tiger Beat. I’m not sure how well Teen Beat did, but it gave Ideal numerous excuses to produce one off titles. There were soon more one offs of Teen Beat and Movie Life than there were actual issues of either magazine.

Under Filmways Ideal produced a parade of one off publications. By my calculation, at least a third of their output was in this class. Serial one offs of existing titles made up the majority of these issues. Ideal also produced instant biographies of people in the news, such as Anita Bryant The Woman Behind The Controversy. Other stand alones included Punk Rock Stars, Bay City Rollers, Shark Encounters, Biorhythm and Dracula. Some of these were attempts at category expansion. Ideal issued an army of sports stand alones, but then decided not to go forward with the Ideal Sports title. But some of these experiments did work out.

Yarn Crafts may seem like something of an odd fit for Ideal. The firm had been issuing craft kits for decades. This offering  was preceded by a two year raft of stand alones with titles such as  Miniature and Doll Crafts and Leisure Crafts.

Country Music Scene is really the spawn of Movie Life’s various one offs. For once, Ideal wasn’t late to the party.

Besides purchasing a new pulp for the firm, Filmways also allowed Ideal to issue three new pulp titles. Since that is our real focus, I thought I would highlight them before closing.

Ideal’s UFO Magazine is about as blunt of a title as it gets.  The last of the UFO titles vanished in the 1950s and I am not sure what could have possibly inspired this. (Close Encounters of the Third Kind?) It’s not high camp. The thing is done straight. And it lasted as long as most UFO magazines did.

Battle. All of the Men’s Adventure pulps had disappeared seven years before. Prior to that, they had all dropped war stories in favor of modern woman abuse tales and let’s play mobster. So what prompted Ideal to issue a good, old fashioned war pulp is anyone’s guess. Apparently no one told them that Viet Nam does not sell. Within one issue,  Battle went back to WWII—Pulp WWII, which as we know involves naked women and giant monsters. (Didn’t you read that in your history books?) Like Ideal’s UFO Magazine above, Battle lasted three years and was still in business until the end.

Wacko. Ok, it’s a comic book. I remember seeing this at the time. It’s not badly done at all, although one does question the need for another clone of Mad Magazine. Had it gone on, I think it was headed in the direction of a tamer version of National Lampoon. It did make it to Ideal’s finish line, but unfortunately it was started mere months before operations were halted.

What Happened?

All of Ideal’s titles were going strong until late 1980. Their circulation was what it had been since the 1960s. They were releasing between 8 and 10 titles a month until the end.

The problem was at Filmways, which had mutated away from being a vertically integrated media company and into being a cluster doodle of unrelated businesses.  All entities in the Filmways fold were supposed to throw off money to fund the production of big time theatrical motion pictures. None of these fine films made money. Eventually the film production debt service exceeded the conglomerate’s income. That’s when the bankers crab pitchforks and storm your house. The brain trust at Filmways reacted to this crisis by suing each other and creating shell corporations so that they all could continue playing movie moguls. This prompted the bankruptcy court to order them to CEASE ALL OPERATIONS and then SEIZE THEIR ASSETS.

Ideal was done at the CEASE ALL OPERATIONS mark. Normally the trustee would allow a firm such as Ideal to continue its operations with cash in hand, but (A) Filmways was viewed as a bad actor whose officers had been attempting to dismember it in a disorderly manner and (B) the firm’s cash on hand was valued over that of its other assets. By the time Ideal was sold, its titles had been fallow for two years. Complicating matters further, the titles were sold to Marvel Comics’ owner Martin Goodman, who in turn was in the process of merging his firm with Perfect Film Corporation. And then they went broke. Twice.  

Recalling how Ideal got its early start, this is almost a poetic ending. This time when Krypton exploded, there was nothing left.

I doubt Mickey Mouse even knows he owns this crap. (13)

(I do have sympathy for the people who lost their jobs. But it’s been 35 years.)

WE DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING!

Your comments and corrections are very much invited! I know I have some big time holes in this piece. That’s why I held off for three years. I’m not sure at what point Babcock left the firm or what her working relationship with Cotton was actually like. I have a lot of Babcock’s writing, but not a lot about her. And there’s little of note on Cotton. Without those sort of details, the thing reads like a book of lists. (On the other hand, sometimes there’s nothing there.) What I DID NOT WANT TO DO was get bogged down with the Filmways soap opera. Filmways is really the same thing as Centaur Comics, only with less likeable Semites. That they went on to sink the next company they were involved in is interesting, but off topic. I care about Filmways only to the extent that it is a pulp publisher. Because this is a pulp history web site. The history of douchebags is someone else’s beat.

Notes:

(1)    Female Editorial Control. Female editors in the pulps were rather common. Histories are full of husband and wife teams operating the pulps. What makes Ideal unique is that the lead editor is not related to the publisher and that the firm had a system for recruiting and training female editors.

(2)    Centaur Comics. The Wikipedia entry discloses the ugly details. No one had the connections they claimed. And worse, none of the partners really had any money.

(3)    This isn’t a real four color photograph. It’s a black and white photograph which has been area filled with a color process. Full color photography was available at the time, as was the stock for reproducing it, but not in this format.

(4)    Babcock’s byline shows in the Los Angeles Times for the first time in 1926. She may have been at the paper earlier. Babcock does not have a biography that I can find. There is a published credit for a Muriel Babcock in several University of Michigan publications, circa 1917. Babcock herself claimed to have been born in 1900.

(5)    Babcock may be the founder of popular culture history. In the 1920s she did a feature on a big time Dime Novel collector.

(6)    Why Babcock’s Style Changed. Having a sharp wit is a great way to make friends. Using that sharp wit on the studio’s well paid pets will get you boycotted. The studios provided their stars to the magazines to make them look good. If you want a steady stream of assignments, make the stars look good. Babcock wasn’t a blogger. The woman had to write to eat. So she switched from caustic and critical to interior decorating with words.

(7)    Babcock died in New York in 1988, so there is some question if they eventually closed down the Los Angeles office.

(8)    Babcock wrote Conel’s book on Liberace in which she gushes poetic about what a wonderful piano player he was (he was) and goes on to deny the rumors of his homosexuality (he was). I also believe she wrote Conel’s book on Jackie O.

(9)    Pulp magazine historians are all men. Men look for reasons to ignore the female slanting genres. Not that I’m a saint. My image fishing and non direct sources indicate that the magazine may have started under the title of Intimate Romances, but the distribution mark seems wrong.

(10) Personal Romances and Intimate Story. Both titles are take offs on MacFadden’s magazines True Romances  and True Story.

(11) Or he may have said “Why, she was our star witness!” In this case ‘why’ is a shout of exclamation. In any case, Congress was not amused.

(12) I have no idea how old Cotton was, other than he was older than Babcock. Babcock says she was born in 1900, although she seems to have graduated the University of Michigan in 1919 with a four year degree. And I am not sure that she retired or at what point. She was formally replaced as Vice President with Cotton’s departure.

(13) As amusing as Mickey’s ownership may seem, it’s not all that clear. What is clear is that Martin Goodman owns it, which means it was a part of Marvel Comics or the company that used to produce porn movies. Pick your bankruptcy.