There was one job in comics that was lower than the guy who cleaned the ink pens. That poor fool was the one who had the job of writing the two-page text feature that comics offered up until recent times. This story was included not because the editors thought comics needed text stories or because readers clamored for them. The reason these short pieces were included was strictly economic. In fact, we can thank the US Post Office for them. Back in the old days, publishers could mail out their Pulps at the 4th class rate. Publications that were not text based had to pay the severe 1st class rates. Comics, having come from the Pulps, walked the middle ground and included those little stories (usually 2 pages) to be included in the 4th class category. I can remember as a kid in the 1970s ignoring those two pages of boring text. I wanted artwork, color and… comics!
Whether you read them or ignored them, somebody had to write them. Most often they were slapped together by a junior editor, but in some cases more interesting people were hired to type away those 500-word masterpieces that nobody read. Comics that were created by Pulp chains were known to grab a veteran author from the bullpen occasionally, such as Donald Wayne Hobart or Jim Kjelgaard, but the biggest coup perhaps was when Marvel (then called Timely Comics) and Novelty Press shared for a year the work of mystery superstar, Mickey Spillane. (Mickey would start the Mike Hammer private eye series in 1947 with I, The Jury. This novel alone sold six and half million copies in the US. He was the superstar of the late noir period. His hard-boiled style would be encapsulated in the joke about the PI who beats confessions out of crooks: “Let me Spillane it to you.”)
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