Camera Comics (just 10 cents)

*HERE’S A STRANGE COMIC BOOK FOR YOU.
(* the review is taken from this blog below: Accidental Mysteries)

Thanks to my friend and snapshot collector Robert Jackson, who sent me these comics from his collection, I can now share them with reader’s of Accidental Mysteries.

These comic books were published between July 1944 and 1946 by the U.S. Camera Publishing Company, apparently as a way to build interest in the growing hobby of photography. With on-going cornball series like Jim Lane, Insurance Investigator and Kid Click, the publishers were making sure that they were strategically hitting all areas for the growth of photography. Yep! I want to be an insurance investigator and follow people with my camera! Also, Linda Lens was a female professional photographer—very progressive for the day.

While these comic books were obviously targeted to kids, there was always some more adult articles, like how to build a pin hole camera, or how to make wooden “pistol grip” for your camera—a way to make rapid fire pics. This pistol grip device is especially odd— a low-tech approach to a high tech (for the time) device.


https://accidentalmysteries.blogspot.com/2010/02/camera-comics.html

Some versions online:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=cameracomics

Thank You!

Once I was looking for comics on photography and even inquired at comics experts, to no avail. What I got I found myself.
This series is new to me.

That’s actually very well drawn.
Far above contemporary DC for example.

There is a tonne of account names and avatars right there.

Nice use of a Medalist.
Perhaps that is where the trope of “solid enough to fight with and take a photo of the attacker afterwards” comes from.

Interesting blog as such too.

Very interesting. A great combination of entertaining and educational!

War time art was always about propaganda, and this takes it into the low lying land of racial insults. Wow. George Grosz was a German artist who also took things to such a hard hitting and depraved level w/ his caricatures of German politicians that they were actively looking for him and wanted to kill him.

Some of the racism hits one in the face.

AgX said:

Thank You!

Once I was looking for comics on photography and even inquired at comics experts, to no avail. What I got I found myself.
This series is new to me.

Click to expand...

Cheers !
It´s incredible how much more material of that type there has been forgotten out there.

momus said:

War time art was always about propaganda, and this takes it into the low lying land of racial insults. Wow. George Grosz was a German artist who also took things to such a hard hitting and depraved level w/ his caricatures of German politicians that they were actively looking for him and wanted to kill him.

Click to expand...

...with a bit of a mood to debate, but aren't the Sistine Chapel, The Coronation of Napoleon, or Battleship Potemkin a works of propagandas as well? ... said it again, nowadays often we forget our "advantage" and we are judging a lot of cultural products in the light of our time and not the contexts where they were made. This beyond the fact that we share their ideas or they seem really despicable to us. Actually I don't know if it makes much sense to start this discussion here in this thread, but anyway, I don´t get how you fit Grosz as propaganda art. Propaganda to whom?