the 1894 version of “Planet of the Apes”?
Taken from Contraptions, by “the Staff of the Clarion” (1894).
as of today at 3:15 p.m.:
Companies done:
Ace
Ajax-Farrell
ACG
Avon
Better/Standard/Nedor/Thrilling
Centaur
Chesler
Columbia
Croydon
Dell
D.S. Publishing
Eastern Color
Now working on:
Fawcett
As described here, I’m adding a new Stretch Goal for my Kickstarter:
Six-Gun Gorilla! The one and only. For free.
Basically, if my Kickstarter hits $12K (!), I’ll upload the entire run of “Six-Gun Gorilla” as a free ebook. (Also available print-on-demand).
So if you’ve been hesitating about giving…Six-Gun Gorilla! The original cowboy gorilla, free.
Give now–the fate of the free world depends on you!
as of today at 11:48 a.m.:
Progress does seem slow, but it takes an average of fifteen minutes to do each entry, so progress doesn’t just seem slow, it is slow. But I’ll get there, eventually.
Companies done:
Ace
Ajax-Farrell
ACG
Avon
Better/Standard/Nedor/Thrilling
Centaur
Chesler
Columbia
Now working on:
Croydon
Entry of the day:
Skyman. Allan (later “Allen”) Turner is orphaned because of “an accident due to faulty material in your father’s airplane.” Allan’s scientist uncle raises him to be a perfect human: a great scientist, All-American fullback, “finest character,” etc. As an adult, Allan declares, “Uncle Peter, there will always be great scientists. I have decided to become better than that. I shall be a scientist-policeman, who will use his powers to prevent and overcome crime.” When his uncle passes, Allan uses the money he receives to become the crime-fighting vigilante Skyman. He has no superpowers, but he is a great inventor–among other things, he discovers the secret to atomic power by himself–and he wields the “stasimatic gun,” which can “halt the blood processes of the body – or stop them altogether!” Skyman also pilots the high tech airplane called the Wing. The Wing is boomerang shaped and flies by the power of the Earth’s smagnetic poles. It can achieve speeds of 800 mph and hover, allowing Skyman to descend on a cable. Skymen fights ordinary criminals, saboteurs (such as the Red Signet), Mad Scientists (in “The Death Lenses of Count Alexis”), cursed idols, Soviet scientists, Emma the Spy Queen, The Gremlin, and Nazis on the moon. Skyman is assisted by Fawn, who has a Lois Lane-like relationship with Turner (who poses as a thoughtless playboy) and Skyman.
First Appearance: Big Shot Comics #1 (Columbia), May 1940. 125 appearances, 1940-1949. Created by Gardner Fox and Ogden Whitney.
Because, what the hell, other writers do it, why shouldn’t I?
I’m doing a Kickstarter. It’s for a complete encyclopedia of every comic book hero, super- or normal, who appeared in comic books during their Golden Age, 1939-1945. Nobody’s written such a thing, believe it or not, which is a shame, because comics’ Golden Age is an unrivaled cornucopia of Mad Weirdness. The end result of the Kickstarter will be a website, with copies of the book available as print-on-demand and digital, with 2000+ entries like these three:
American Eagle. Lab assistant Tom Standish is accidentally exposed to a combination of “the serum which underlies the eagle’s strength and buoyancy” and “a weird black ray” from a cathode-tube-projector. The result is superstrength, limited invulnerability, and the power of flight. Standish kills the Nazi agent who he was inadvertently working for, and then is drawn into crime-fighting. He teams up with teenaged Bud Pierce to become the American Eagle and Eaglet. They fight Nazi saboteurs, the Yellow Peril scientist Dr. Amoto and his radio-controlled rocket bombs (which he uses to destroy ships of wounded G.I.s), the cowboy train-robber Red Mask, and a machine which Nazi agents use to bring back the dead (including Blackbeard, a Viking, and a monstrous Neanderthal). The American Eagle appears in stories with titles like “The Secret Gas Weapon and “The White Angels.”
First Appearance: America’s Best Comics #2 (Standard), Sept 1942. 34 appearances, 1942-1946. Created by Richard Hughes and Kin Platt.
Supermouse. “Soupie” the mouse gains Superman-like super-powers by eating super-cheese. He fights Mad Scientists like the cat Professor Zyx, but his arch-enemy is the dastardly rat Terrible Tom, who does things like summon all the criminals in the world so that he could trap and kill Supermouse. (The attempt fails–Supermouse’s super hearing receives Terrible Tom’s message–and Terrible Tom is kicked out of the International Association of Crooks and Bad Men). Supermouse, whose identity is publicly known, has a girlfriend named Annabel. He appears in stories with titles like “Supermouse is Unfair to Villains,” “The World of the Future,” and “The Revolt of the Machines.”
First Appearance: Coo Coo Comics #1 (Standard), Oct 1942. At least 100 appearances, 1942-1958?
Wonderman. Brad Spencer is accidentally exposed to a “sizzling voltage of a secret current.” This gives him superpowers, and he uses his new abilities to become Brad Spencer, Wonderman, and fight crime. He is helped by his girlfriend Carol Paige, who uses a “compensator belt” to travel with and fight alongside Brad. Brad has the ability to become invulnerable (as hard as steel) and has superstrength, and uses a “flame pistol” to kill certain enemies. Wonderman’s main opponents are the Mad Scientist Dr. Voodoo and the alien Immortal Emperor, who have teamed up to invade and conquer Earth. The Emperor’s home planet is “Lilith, the Dark Planet,” which harbors “evil souls after they ave run their gamut of violence and bloodshed on Earth.” When Wonderman goes to Lilith, he finds it full of harpies, Huns, and ghosts. Further superhero/horror adventures follow. Wonderman appears in stories with titles like “The Treasure of the Aztec Princess,” “The Monsters of Dr. Voodoo,” and “Peril on Pluto.”
First Appearance: Complete Book of Comics and Funnies #1 (Standard), 1944. 14 appearances, 1944-1947. Created by Bob Oksner and ?
Think about donating, won’t you? Thanks!
From 
Physical Culture for Babies (1904) by Margueritte & Bernarr Macfadden.
A product of the “physical culture” movement of the 19th and early 20th century–essentially a modern-style fitness movement–Physical Culture for Babies applies the dictates of physical culture to childhood development, with the result being children like the on the left.
I was prepared to mock this book, but most of what’s in there is not controversial by today’s standards, and as one who’s been exercising his baby boy since birth (with the result that Henry could do, at 2 1/2, what Gladys Martin is doing in the photo) I’m not in any position to mock. We can smirk at some of the statements–the “don’t use combs” thing, for example–but I actually agree with a lot of what’s in here.
For example, here’s a list of common beliefs, circa 1904, about children (the author is debunking them):
That baby from birth must be swaddled in as many garments as possible….
That rooms through which the air is circulating are highly dangerous to baby’s health….
That a baby will grow strong and vigorous even if it be rarely taken outside of the house.
That so-called baby foods are just as good as the food which Nature intended for the infant….
That “soothing syrups” and like poisonous compounds are harmless and really do the work which their proprietors foolishly or mendaciously claim they can accomplish.
Okay, Internets, mock me for being a loon. Go ahead. I don’t care.
The obvious omission in this table is detective/mystery films, which would occupy a significant fraction of the overall whole, but IMDB, from which I took my data and which I admit is a flawed resource, breaks down such films into “crime” and “mystery,” with some overlap between the two, and I don’t have the time to parse out which films are truly mystery and which aren’t.
That said…
Drama: I’m surprised at drama’s decline. The 1920s were the years when the pulp market monolith fractured under the pressure of the genre pulps, until general pulps were of minimal interest and had minimal impact on the market. So too here, apparently–the rise in genre films in the 1920s in the 1920s matched and I think caused the decline in general-interest dramas, presaging the 1930s, in which genre films play such an important role in cinema as a whole.
Romance: I confess to being surprised at how small (comparatively speaking) romances were in the film market. I suspect–and I’ll eventually run the numbers for the 1930s–that in the 1930s romances are more important than they were before sound, most likely because romance films work better with sound than without. That said, romance’s peak (by percentage) is 1926, pre-Jazz Singer.
Science Fiction: Never a major part of film before the 1930s. But note the numbers during World War One! We need someone to take a look at these films and see how they compare to the fiction of the time. (My piece in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction spends some time on the pulp fiction of those years).
Westerns: This is peculiar. Numerical peak in Westerns is 1912–in other words, before film had time to react to the popularity of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, which jumpstarted the Western genre in print. Over the next several years, as print Westerns became popular, film Westerns declined as a percentage of the market and in real numbers. Western films only increase in numbers starting in 1918 and then fluctuate, even while their percentage remains generally good. I suspect there’s a knock-on effect of the popularity of the Western pulps, but I can’t see a constant effect, much as I’d like to. And note 1929–romances are almost as much of the market as Westerns, for the first time.
Total: Criminy stevens, who’d have guessed film’s high point was 1915? And that the numbers of films made would decline almost interrupted after that? It will be interesting to see what the numbers are during the Depression.
