Hillman Periodicals
| Status | defunct: 1953 (comics), 1961 (magazines and paperbacks) |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1938 |
| Founder | Alex L. Hillman |
| Country of origin | United States of America |
| Headquarters location | 535 Fifth Avenue, New York City |
| Publication types | Comic books, Magazines, Paperback books |
| Fiction genres | Superhero, Crime/detective, Western |
Hillman Periodicals, Inc. was an American magazine and comic book publishing company founded in 1938 by Alex L. Hillman, a former New York City book publisher. It is best known for its true confession and true crime magazines; for the long-running general-interest magazine Pageant; and for comic books including Air Fighters Comics and its successor Airboy Comics, which launched the popular characters Airboy and The Heap.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hillman competed with Bernarr Macfadden and Fawcett Publications 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.
In 1944, Hillman launched a digest-sized, general-interest, "slick" (glossy paper) magazine, Pageant, with an initial print run of 500,000 copies. To obtain the paper during World War II 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, Hillman's titles included costumed superheroes. As trends in the comic book market changed, the focus shifted more to crime fiction/detective stories, making Hillman one of the earliest crime comics publishers (Crime Detective Comics, Real Clue Crime Stories), and Westerns (Dead-Eye Western Comics and Western Fighters). During this time, Hillman often utilized the talents of Captain America creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Hillman's most notable character, however, continuing in new stories by another publisher, Eclipse Comics, in the 1980s, was the Charles Biro, Dick Wood and Al Camy-created aviator-adventurer Airboy in Air Fighters Comics and its successor, Airboy Comics.
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