Captain Billy's Whiz Bang

Fawcett · 1919–1936

Format: Ongoing series
Status: Ended
Issues: 214
Frequency: Monthly
Cover price: 15¢–$1.00

New issues go on your pull list in Releases, with the date to order each one by.

Issues

214 issues

Sources

Grand Comics Database series 126911

Catalog data from the Grand Comics Database is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 and was normalized by The Collector. Cover images belong to their publishers.

Captain Billy's Whiz Bang (1919) · The Collector

Publication details

Publication notes

While a World War I Army captain, Wilford "Captain Billy" Fawcett's experience with the Army publication Stars and Stripes gave him the notion to get into publishing. His bawdy cartoon and joke magazine, Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, became the launchpad for a vast publishing empire embracing magazines, comic books and paperback books.

The title Captain Billy's Whiz Bang combined Fawcett's military moniker with the nickname of a destructive World War I artillery shell. According to one account, the earliest issues were mimeographed pamphlets, typed on a borrowed typewriter and peddled around Minneapolis by Captain Billy and his four sons. However, in Captain Billy's version, he stated that when he began publishing in October 1919, he ordered a print run of 5,000 copies because of the discount on a large order compared with rates for only several hundred copies. Distributing free copies of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang to wounded veterans and his Minnesota friends, he then circulated the remaining copies to newsstands in hotels.

The publication, delivered in a 64-page, saddle-stitched, digest-sized format, soon saw a dramatic increase in sales. By 1923, the magazine had a circulation of 425,000 with $500,000 annual profits. With the rising readership of Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, Fawcett racked up more sales with Whiz Bang annuals, and in 1926, he launched a similar publication, Smokehouse Monthly. The popularity of Whiz Bang peaked during the 1920s. It continued into the 1930s, but circulation slowed as readers graduated to the more sophisticated humor of Esquire, founded in 1933. It had an influence on many other digest-sized cartoon humor publications, including Charley Jones Laugh Book, which was still being published during the 1950s.

The earliest issues contain no cartoons, only jokes. It is currently not known when cartoons first appeared in the magazine. There are no cartoons in #67 (December 1924).

From the Grand Comics Database.

Publishing format: was ongoing series
Binding: saddle-stitched
Color: color covers; black and white interior
Dimensions: digest
Paper stock: glossy cover; newsprint interior

Issues

Sources

Issues

Sources

Creators

Publication details

Publication notes