Okay, let's try this once again, eh?
We're talking about the odd origins of The Bear as a feature in Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact.
One of the things that was quite unusual about the beginnings of the Bear is that he started as a text feature. And that's how he appeared for his first few years. The Grand Comics Database will tell you that The Bear first appeared in the latter half of volume 5, but that's not accurate. He had his premiere tale late in v.4 -
As you may have noticed, though Postal Regulations only require two pages of text, TC0F&F actually used those pages for more than mere filler and decided they needed three pages every issue.
The Bear had several tales in text form before he graduated to comics...
The most indicative of his popularity was El Vaquero -
This one would seem to show that these stories were quite popular indeed. And not simply because they promoted him from required filler text to comic stories.
After all - when's the last time you saw a comic's text pages take the cover of the book?
That's pretty freakin' amazing, as the saying goes.
Another odd little note - While the comics stories are written by Eric St. Clair, he used the name Ray St. Clair while doing the text stories.
We're talking about the odd origins of The Bear as a feature in Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact.
One of the things that was quite unusual about the beginnings of the Bear is that he started as a text feature. And that's how he appeared for his first few years. The Grand Comics Database will tell you that The Bear first appeared in the latter half of volume 5, but that's not accurate. He had his premiere tale late in v.4 -
As you may have noticed, though Postal Regulations only require two pages of text, TC0F&F actually used those pages for more than mere filler and decided they needed three pages every issue.
The Bear had several tales in text form before he graduated to comics...
The most indicative of his popularity was El Vaquero -
This one would seem to show that these stories were quite popular indeed. And not simply because they promoted him from required filler text to comic stories.
After all - when's the last time you saw a comic's text pages take the cover of the book?
That's pretty freakin' amazing, as the saying goes.
Another odd little note - While the comics stories are written by Eric St. Clair, he used the name Ray St. Clair while doing the text stories.
pages from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v4 #18, v5 #s 12 & 18, v6 #s 10 & 17, v7 #12, v8 #s 7 & 14, and v9 #1 (1946-1951)
