Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and ninety-seventh installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.
As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for part one of this installment's legends. Click here for part two of this installment's legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
Archie Comics released a copy of their own Archie Andrews with Wilbur Wilkin.
STATUS:
False
In May of 1944, Wilbur Comics #1 debuted, which showed the misadventures of an often lovestruck teen named Wilbur Wilkin....
The comic book was published by MLJ comics, which stood for the three founding members of the company (the initials of their first names), Morris Coyne, Louis Silberkleit and John Goldwater. That was over a year after Archie Comics #1 debuted, which showed the misadventures of an often lovestruck teen named Archie Andrews...
Wilbur Comics actually continued to come out bi-monthly by MLJ even as the company changed its name to Archie Comics and it pretty much wrapped up its run at the end of 1959 with Wilbur Comics #87, although oddly enough, Archie then put out three more copies of Wilbur Comics in 1963, 1964 and finally, 1965's Wilbur Comics #90 being the end (does anyone have any idea why Archie put out three issues spread out over three years of a comic that had been canceled for four years at that point?).
Naturally, then, people have just assumed that Wilbur Comics was a knockoff of Archie Comics, much like many, many comic books over the years have come out that were...ahem..."inspired" by the roaring success of Archie.
Here's the twist, though....Wilbur actually PREDATES Archie!!
MLJ, you see, initially was, like most other Golden Age comic book companies, primarily interested in superhero comics. Archie Andrews debuted in October 1941 in Pep Comics #22 (by Vic Bloom and Bob Montana), the home of MLJ's main superhero, the Shield...
However, Wilbur Wilkin actually debuted three months earlier in July 1941 in the pages of Zip Comics #18 (by Harvey Willard and Lin Streeter...I'm unfamiliar with Willard, so he miiiight have been a pseudoynm), the home of the lesser known Steel Sterling (and others, of course, as almost all comic books back then were anthologies)...
So what gives? Did Archie Andrews actually copy Wilbur Wilkin?!?!
Of course not. The real answer, naturally, is that they were both copying someone ELSE. Comic books have long been a game of "monkey see, monkey do," and with good reason. If something works for someone else, why not try to do it yourself?
And in 1941, one of the top film franchises around was the Andy Hardy series, about the misadventures of an often lovestruck teen named Andy Hardy, played by Mickey Rooney (who THE biggest box office star in Hollywood at the time, and we're talking the same time that James Gagney, Clark Gable and Gary Cooper were HUGE and right around the time that John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart were getting big, as well).
So obviously, MLJ head John Goldwater told his writers and artists to go out and give him MLJ's own version of Andy Hardy and that they would try them out as features in their anthologies and if they worked out, then they would go from there. Obviously, both of them technically DID work out, as they both graduated to ongoing series, but one of them, Archie, broke out a good deal MORE, probably due to the talent of Bob Montana, who gave Archie a slight "edge," as it were.
However, imagine if things had gone differently and Wilbur had been the one to break out? Imagine the whole company named Wilbur Comics today! Instead of Riverdale, we'd be watching Westfield on The CW.
And yes, obviously from the featured image, later Wilbur Comics stories were basically just Archie stories (in fact, it often was EXACTLY that, as I'll get to in a future Comic Book Legends Revealed), but at the start, Wilbur was his own man! Interestingly, Archie Comics later had a comic called That Wilkin Boy. No relation.
Today, Wilbur Comics is best known for being the series where Katy Keene debuted as a back-up feature in 1945 (as I wrote about in this Look Back).
CHECK OUT A MOVIE LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest Movie Legends Revealed - Was the Die Hard arcade game actually just a re-branded version of another Japanese video game?
MORE LEGENDS STUFF!
OK, that's it for this installment!
Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!
Here's my most recent book, 100 Things X-Men Fans Should Know And Do Before They Die, from Triumph Books.
If you want to order a copy, ordering it here gives me a referral fee.
Here's my second book, Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? The cover is by Kevin Hopgood (the fellow who designed War Machine's armor).
If you want to order a copy, ordering it here gives me a referral fee.
Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends. -- half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).
The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...
If you'd like to order it, you can use this code if you'd like to send me a bit of a referral fee.
Follow Comics Should Be Good on Twitter and on Facebook (also, feel free to share Comic Book Legends Revealed on our Facebook page!). Not only will you get updates when new blog posts show up on both Twitter and Facebook, but you'll get some original content from me, as well!
See you all next time!