St. John Publications
Their mother Amy, a nurse, and father John, a pharmacist, moved the family to suburban Oak Park in 1910.
Following the father's death in 1917 and the mother's eventual remarriage, Archer attended the St. Albans Episcopal Academy boarding school in Sycamore, Illinois.
[1] It had offices at 545 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City,[7] and in 1950 took on additional space at 235-243 Pulaski Street in the neighboring borough of Brooklyn.
[13] Artist Lily Renée also recounted that St. John chased her once around a table in the office and a woman editor put a stop to it.
[14] In the early 1950s St. John became friends with artist Matt Baker, who provided most of the comic book covers for the company.
They traveled to Los Angeles together and were photographed in the TCL Chinese Theatre in front of Jean Harlow's footprints.
Graphic designer Warren Kramer recounted that St. John would attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and was sober "most of the time".
The by-then divorced St. John was found at the 170 East 79th Street Manhattan penthouse apartment of Frances Stratford, with whom he had been involved since at least September 1954, when they took a vacation together to the Bahamas.
Other St. John comic books included the first movie-comedian tie-in series, Abbott and Costello Comics; one of the first proto-graphic novels, the 25-cent "picture novel" It Rhymes with Lust (1950); and a five-issue series (Sept. 1953 – Oct. 1954), appearing under three titles, that introduced the enduring Kubert prehistoric hero Tor.
[1] St. John Publications utilized the first African-American comic-book artist in mainstream media, Matt Baker, who contributed to the ostensibly true-crime series Authentic Police Cases, the light humor comic Canteen Kate, the romance books Cinderella Love and Teen-Age Romances, and many others.
St. John acquired the license to publish comics based on the movie cartoons of producer Paul Terry.
[28] The company expanded into licensed characters from another animation company, the joint Paramount Pictures-Famous Studios, which included the future Harvey Comics characters Casper the Friendly Ghost, Baby Huey (who premiered in that Casper the Friendly Ghost #1[1] before his March 3, 1950, screen debut, "Quack A Doodle Do"), and Little Audrey.
This hardboiled fiction by the pseudonymous Michael O'Malley (writer Ernest Lynn and others) and artists Ralph Lane, Dean Miller, Art Sansom and John Lane, was reprinted in the comic books Vic Flint (#1–5?, Aug. 1948 – April 1949);[30][31] all but the first issue of Fugitives from Justice (#1–5, 1953); and some issues of Authentic Police Cases (#1–38, 1948–1955).
[1] That and the two St. John series titled Atom-Age Combat directly reflected the era's Cold War "nuclear jitters" and popular culture fascination with the breaking of the sound barrier.
[citation needed] In 1950—more than 20 years before Gil Kane & Archie Goodwin's Blackmark and almost 30 before Don McGregor & Paul Gulacy's Sabre and Will Eisner's A Contract with God—St.
The digest-sized, adult-oriented "Picture Novel" It Rhymes with Lust was a film noir-influenced slice of steeltown life starring a scheming, manipulative redhead named Rust.
It proved successful enough to lead to an unrelated second picture novel, The Case of the Winking Buddha, by pulp novelist Manning Lee Stokes and illustrator Charles Raab.
