Fiction House
House ad for "The Big 6 of the Comics!" advises, "Look for the Bull's-Eye..... Fiction House Magazines".
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| Industry | Publishing |
|---|---|
| Genre | Aviation, detective, jungle, sports, Western |
| Founded | 1920s |
| Defunct | 1950s |
| Headquarters | New York City |
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Key people
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Thurman T. Scott |
| Products |
Comic books Pulp magazines |
Fiction House is an American publisher of pulp magazines and comic books that existed from the 1920s to the 1950s. Its comics division was best known for its pinup-style good girl art, as epitomized by the company's most popular character, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
Fiction House began in 1921 as a pulp-magazine publisher of primarily aviation, Western and sports pulps. It occasionally acquired other publishers' magazines, such as its 1929 acquisition of Frontier Stories from Doubleday, Doran & Co. By the end of the year, a New York Times article referred to John B. Kelly as "head" of Fiction House, Inc., located at 271 Madison Avenue.
By the 1930s, the company had expended into detective mysteries. In late 1932, however, in the midst of the Great Depression, Fiction House cancelled all 12 of its pulp magazines — Aces, Action Stories, Action Novels, Air Stories, Detective Book, Detective Classics, Fight Stories, Frontier Stories, Lariat, Love Romances, North-West Stories and Wings — with the stated hope of eventually reviving them. At this time, John W. Glenister was president of Fiction House and his son-in-law, Thurman T. Scott, was secretary of the corporation.
By the late 1930s, Scott, now publisher, expanded Fiction House into comic books, an emerging medium began to seem a viable adjunct to the fading pulps. Receptive to a sales call by Eisner & Iger, one of the prominent "packagers" of that time who produced complete comic books on demand for publishers looking to enter the field, Scott released Jumbo Comics #1 (Sept. 1938).
Fiction House star Sheena, Queen of the Jungle appeared in that initial issue. Will Eisner and S.M. "Jerry" Iger had created the leggy, leopard-wearing jungle goddess for the British magazine Wags, under the joint pseudonym "W. Morgan Thomas".
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