Jackie Robinson Comics Covers

With Spring Training for Baseball Season in Full Swing...

...here's a bunch of serious collectibles!
Not baseball cards, but baseball comics!

These are the covers of the never-reprinted series that ran from 1949 to 1952 about the exploits of legendary player Jackie Robinson!

Not only was he Rookie of the Year, National League MVP, National League Batting Champion, two-time National League Base-Stealing Champion, a six-time All-Star, and a Baseball Hall of Famer (as if that wasn't enough)...

...he was also the man who made history in 1947 as the first Black player in the major leagues!

He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1947 through 1956 before retiring due to the effects of diabetes on his performance.

 

During that period, this series from Fawcett Comics came out each summer and fall from 1949 through 1952.
Besides being sold in newsstands and candy stores, it was also sold at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn where the Dodgers played home games.
Trivia: Babe Ruth was the only baseball player to have a longer-running comic than Robinson, but his mag, Babe Ruth Sports Comics was an anthology covering numerous sports with Babe himself appearing in only one story per issue for 11 issues!

There was a 1950 movie about Jackie, The Jackie Robinson Story, where he played himself (as an adult)!
In 2013, Chadwick (Black Panther) Boseman superbly-portrayed Jackie in the movie 42: the Jackie Robinson Story!

To this day, Jackie Robinson is remembered as one of the greatest players in baseball history!

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42: The Jackie Robinson Story

(BioPic starring Chadwick [Black Panther] Boseman)

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Reading Room / Tales Twice Told THIS IS SUSPENSE "Short Step to Oblivion"

 We saw this tale of terror and justice uncut in Part 1...

Now let's see how it looked after the Comics Code Authority took their censoring scissors to the reprinted version...

The knife, seen in panels 5-7 on the original page, is now missing!

The knife in panels 3 and 5 is missing in the reprint page!

Despite being removed from the previous pages, the knife is shown to be the murder weapon!

But how did the knife get there if it was deleted from the earlier pages?

Ruth's word balloon in the last panel is rewritten to eliminate reference to the knife shown on the original page!

Why is Ruth screaming?

It's not like there's a dead body, like there was in the original page!

Why did the villain fall to his death?

Maybe it's the fact that Holiday shot him in the original version of the first panel!

This Comics Code Authority-eviscerated reprint appeared in Charlton's This is Suspense # 24 (1955).

The writer is unknown and the illustrator is George Evans.

A comic with no more violence or blood than a TV cop show of the period is gutted by the CCA to Protect the Morals of the Youth of America.

Take a good look at your parents.

Did it work?

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Ten-Cent Plague

The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America

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Reading Room / Tales Twice Told SUSPENSE DETECTIVE "Short Step to Oblivion"

With the revelation that Fredric Wertham lied about comics' effects on kids...

...it seems appropriate to take a look at how his far-reaching deception altered pop culture as we know it!

BTW, most people (myself included) felt that Wertham exaggerated his claims, but altering/modifying evidence to validate his theories went over the line.

This pre-Comics Code tale appeared in Fawcett's Suspense Detective #1 (1952), illustrated by George Evans, but the writer is uncredited.

It seems to be a straightforward tale of mistaken identity and justice served with some violence mixed in, but nothing over-the-top, right?

Not according to the Comics Code Authority!

Be back Thursday to see how the Code altered this story, which they considered too violent!

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Ten-Cent Plague

The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America

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