Fawcett#201
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#201
Jul 1935
Issues
214 issues
Sources
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.
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
#201
Jul 1935
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#202
Aug 1935
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#203
Sep 1935
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#204
Oct 1935
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#205
Nov 1935
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#206
Dec 1935
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#207
Jan 1936
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#208
Feb 1936
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#209
Mar 1936
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#210
Apr 1936
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#211
May 1936
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#212
Jun 1936
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#213
Jul 1936
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
#214
Aug 1936
Who made the most issues of this run, with the issues they span.
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.