New Fun

#1C

Facsimile Foil Variant

Release:	Sep 24, 2025
Cover:	Nov 2025

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I seem to use the Short Box for books that wouldn’t really fit in a short box…

While this edition is a reprint, the original comic, which hit the stands 90 years ago, was the first comic that did not consist of reprints.

It wasn’t just fun; it was new fun.

The tabloid-sized comic – the first from National Allied Publications, the company that in the fullness of time would come to be known as DC Comics – does, however, adhere to the same basic format as its reprint predecessors, looking less like a modern comic and more like a collection of Sunday newspaper strips.

Most of those strips…aren’t great. At least, not in 2025. I’m sure the mix of adventure stories – mostly Westerns – and gag strips were the bee’s knees in 1935, but most of them, particularly the humor strips, are just head-scratchers.

They’re also mostly things I’ve never heard of, with the only exceptions being “Ivanhoe” and “Tom Mix,” the latter of which appears on the back cover (along with a mail-in coupon to receive a free “Zyp Gun” like the one used in the strip).

The front and back cover strips are the only ones to appear in color; the interior is entirely black and white.

“OSWALD the Rabbit” is the one strip that really stood out to me. Not because it was good, but because it ran for multiple pages along the bottom and struck me as being a static equivalent of an early animated short. Oswald himself looked less like a rabbit and more like Mickey Mouse with pared down ears.

The other thing that stood out to me was the inclusion of “The Insult that Made a Man out of ‘Mac.'” I had no idea that the Charles Atlas ads had been a comic book mainstay from the very beginning.

Various text features round out the publication along with a lot of appeals to readers to write in and tell the publisher exactly what they want to see. There’s a sheen of flop sweat on the whole endeavor, a desperate hope that this will somehow take off, and a desperate attempt at appearing confident, but you can almost hear them screaming, “For the love of God, tell us what you want! We have no idea what we’re doing here! You like movies? Sure, everyone likes the talkies, right? Write in and tell us what you want to see, and we’ll give you free passes to see the movies!”

Ultimately, New Fun didn’t last long and was eventually replaced by the smaller More Fun, but it is a significant development in the history of the medium, laying the foundation for what was built over the course of nine decades. If nothing else, the final issue gave us the first published work of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

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