Hillman Periodicals
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
and comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
publishing
Publishing
Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...
company founded in 1938 by Alex L. Hillman, a former New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
book
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
publisher. It is best known for its true confession
Confessional writing
In literature, confessional writing is a first-person style that is often presented as an ongoing diary or letters, distinguished by revelations of a person's heart and darker motivations....
and true crime
True crime (genre)
True crime is a non-fiction literary and film genre in which the author examines an actual crime and details the actions of real people.The crimes most commonly include murder, but true crime works have also touched on other legal cases. Depending on the writer, true crime can adhere strictly to...
magazines; for the long-running general-interest magazine Pageant
Pageant (magazine)
Pageant was a 20th-century monthly magazine published in the United States from November 1944 until February 1977. Printed in a digest size format, it became Coronet magazine's leading competition, although it aimed for comparison to Reader's Digest....
; and for comic books including Air Fighters Comics and its successor Airboy Comics, which launched the popular characters Airboy
Airboy
Airboy is a fictional aviator hero of an American comic book series initially published by Hillman Periodicals during the World War II-era time period fans and historians call the Golden Age of comic books. He was created by writers Charles Biro and Dick Wood and artist Al Camy.-Golden Age:Airboy...
and The Heap
The Heap (comics)
The Heap is the name of several fictional comic book muck-monsters, the original of which first appeared in Hillman Periodicals' Air Fighters Comics #3 , during the period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books...
.
Founding
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hillman competed with Bernarr MacfaddenBernarr Macfadden
Bernarr Macfadden was an influential American proponent of physical culture, a combination of bodybuilding with nutritional and health theories...
and Fawcett Publications
Fawcett Publications
Fawcett Publications was an American publishing company founded in 1919 in Robbinsdale, Minnesota by Wilford Hamilton "Captain Billy" Fawcett . At the age of 16, Fawcett ran away from home to join the Army, and the Spanish-American War took him to the Philippines. Back in Minnesota, he became a...
by publishing comics, true confessions magazines (Real Story, Real Confessions, Real Romances) and crime magazines (Crime Detective, Real Detective, Crime Confessions).
In 1948 Hillman began publishing paperback books. There were several series of abridged mystery and western novels published in the larger 'digest' size. The long-running Hillman paperbacks first appeared in 1948 and lasted until 1961.
Pageant and Airboy
In 1944, Hillman launched a digest-sized, general-interest, "slick" (glossy paper) magazine, PageantPageant (magazine)
Pageant was a 20th-century monthly magazine published in the United States from November 1944 until February 1977. Printed in a digest size format, it became Coronet magazine's leading competition, although it aimed for comparison to Reader's Digest....
, with an initial print run of 500,000 copies. To obtain the paper during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
wartime rationing, Hillman ended his detective magazines and comics, which together brought in a $250,000 annual profit. He returned to comics in 1946, resuming some titles from the earlier series.
Like most comic book publishers during the period fans and historians called the Golden Age of comic books
Golden Age of Comic Books
The Golden Age of Comic Books was a period in the history of American comic books, generally thought of as lasting from the late 1930s until the late 1940s or early 1950s...
, Hillman's titles included costumed superheroes. As trends in the comic book market changed, the focus shifted more to crime fiction
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
/detective
Detective
A detective is an investigator, either a member of a police agency or a private person. The latter may be known as private investigators or "private eyes"...
stories (Crime Detective Comics, Real Clue Crime Stories), and Westerns
Western (comics)
Western is a Franco-Belgian one shot comic written by Jean Van Hamme, illustrated by Grzegorz Rosinski and published by Le Lombard in French and Cinebook in English.-Story:...
(Dead-Eye Western Comics and Western Fighters). Hillman's most notable character, continuing in new stories by another publisher, Eclipse Comics
Eclipse Comics
Eclipse Comics was an American comic book publisher, one of several independent publishers during the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1978, it published the first graphic novel intended for the newly created comic book specialty store market...
, in the 1980s, was the aviator
Aviator
An aviator is a person who flies an aircraft. The first recorded use of the term was in 1887, as a variation of 'aviation', from the Latin avis , coined in 1863 by G. de la Landelle in Aviation Ou Navigation Aérienne...
-adventurer Airboy
Airboy
Airboy is a fictional aviator hero of an American comic book series initially published by Hillman Periodicals during the World War II-era time period fans and historians call the Golden Age of comic books. He was created by writers Charles Biro and Dick Wood and artist Al Camy.-Golden Age:Airboy...
in Air Fighters Comics and its successor, Airboy Comics.
Later years
Hillman ceased publishing comic books in 1953, while continuing to launch such new magazines as Homeland and People Today, while also distributing Freeman, a journal of right-wing opinion. Amid a 1953 battle for control of directors and editors, publisher Hillman announced his resignation as the Freeman treasurer because "it has been almost impossible for the past six months to run the magazine". The following year, Hillman said he was thinking about launching a "conservative RepublicanRepublican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
" morning newspaper in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, but nothing came of it.
Hillman periodicals also had a publication named Flight, edited by Norton Wood. (Wood had previously served as managing editor of a highly-classified monthly report on air weapons prepared by McGraw-Hill
McGraw-Hill
The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Its primary areas of business are financial, education, publishing, broadcasting, and business services...
under contract with the U.S. Air Force. Wood had been a member of the editorial staff of This Week Magazine and of the U.S. Camera Publishing Co.) Flight contained stories of the tremendous revolution going on in the skies - the transition within a decade from air travel as men had understood it for two generations to an entire new era of flight at supersonic speeds and fantastic altitudes, of strange new shapes in aircraft design, of combat planes without pilots, and rocket voyages into outer space. Flight chronicled the revolution in the skies with lines of defense of the "H-Bomb" with futuristic drawings by Matt Greene artistically depicting a U.S. coastal city under coordinated attack by Russian bombers and submarines, and giant "inner tube" satellite space stations with depictions proposed by Wernher von Braun
Wernher von Braun
Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun was a German rocket scientist, aerospace engineer, space architect, and one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany during World War II and in the United States after that.A former member of the Nazi party,...
orbits in space flight.
Hillman sold Pageant to Bernarr Macfadden
Bernarr Macfadden
Bernarr Macfadden was an influential American proponent of physical culture, a combination of bodybuilding with nutritional and health theories...
in April 1961, and the magazine continued until 1977.
Alex L. Hillman
Published Alex L. Hillman was a noted art collector who initially developed an interest in the field when he was a book publisher, commissioning artists to illustrate new editions of classic literature. He was married to Rita Hillman. He began his collection with such American painters as Raphael SoyerRaphael Soyer
Raphael Soyer was a Russian-born American painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Soyer was referred to as an American scene painter...
and Preston Dickinson
Preston Dickinson
William Preston Dickinson was an American modern artist, best known for his paintings of industrial subjects in the Precisionist style.-Biography:...
, and expanded it to included impressionist
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
and other painters. He eventually established the Alex Hillman Family Foundation, a private foundation in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, to oversee the collection.
Comic book titles published
- Air Fighters Comics (1941 series)
- AirboyAirboyAirboy is a fictional aviator hero of an American comic book series initially published by Hillman Periodicals during the World War II-era time period fans and historians call the Golden Age of comic books. He was created by writers Charles Biro and Dick Wood and artist Al Camy.-Golden Age:Airboy...
Comics (1945 series - continues from Air Fighters) - All Sports Comics (1948 series continues from Real Sports)
- All-Time Sports Comics (1949 series continues from All Sports)
- Clue Comics (1943 series)
- Crime Detective Comics (1948 series)
- Crime Must Stop (1952 series)
- Dead-Eye Western Comics (1948 series)
- Frogman Comics (1952 series)
- Hot Rod and Speedway Comics (1952 series)
- Miracle Comics (1940 series)
- Monster Crime Comics (1952 series)
- My Date ComicsMy Date ComicsMy Date Comics was a short lived series of comics that ran from July 1947 to January 1948.The title was the first in the "romance humor" genre...
(1947 series) - Pirates Comics (1950 series)
- Punch and Judy ComicsPunch and Judy ComicsPunch and Judy Comics is a golden age comic book series in the humor genre, which also contains many stories in the funny animal genre. The series was published by Hillman Periodicals from 1944 to December 1951, and ran for 32 issues, in three volumes...
(1944 series) - Real Clue Crime Stories (1947 series continues from Clue Comics)
- Real Sports Comics (1948 series)
- Rocket Comics (1940 series)
- Top Secret (1952 series)
- Victory Comics (1941 series)
- Western Fighters (1948 series)