Parade

[Ole Reichstein Nielsen]

I sent this last Friday, but it hasn't appeared yet in the digests so I 
assume it got lost somewhere.

--->

Major cities across the US do have parades, New York City perhaps the most,
inspired by its population of mixed national origin. Hence the St. Patrick's
Day parade. Also of course the probably most famous of them all is the
Easter Parade, immortalized in the 1948 movie of that name.
For 75 years Hollywood has had a Christmas Parade, instituted in 1928 with
the participation of celebrities along with Santa himself. In 2001 (and
probably many times before) Disney characters appeared as well, and the
parade inspired Gene Autry to write the song "Here Comes Santa Claus". (Gene
was both country singer, movie hero and cartoon character in his own book
from Dell.) See 
http://www.seeing-stars.com/Meet/HollywoodChristmasParade.shtml for more 
info.

The parade theme is apparent in the Dell books. Some covers show exactly
that, a parade of Disney characters, and perhaps as importantly: these
oversized books present stories with a wide variety of characters, a line-up
of popular characters, rather than focusing on a single one as the regular
titles named after a character.

So the definition of a parade fits: a festive procession, linked to a
holiday. Like Mayday in Old Moscow, only funnier. :-P


I believe the difference between Dell's and Harvey's naming of their comics
has to do with the Dell comics being seasonal specials, annual extras,
supposed to be bought by readers of any individual title, be it Donald Duck,
Mickey Mouse or Uncle Scrooge, so noone in particular was in the title
(except for Uncle Walt of course).
Harvey on the other hand were publishing many more separate titles (several
per week in fact) but rather than having a weekly title which most children
wouldn't be able to afford, the same character would cycle over a number of
different books, so you could follow a single title every two-three
onths  - or maybe more, depending on how thrifty you were or wealthy and
generous your parents. Also Harvey had many reprint titles, the digests
which were never very popular for Disney comics, as well as occasional
one-shot, but although individually named they were numbered in the regular
series.

Archie comics seem to have followed Harvey's trend, and although at the time
(we are roughly talking the 50es here) Dell's success with a few massively
selling Disney titles worked well, today at least Archie comics seem to do
well with the other recipe. (Feel free to correct me with circulation
figures here.)

It should be remembered that when talking Dell comics, the Disneys are just
a small part of the large catalog of licenced titles Dell produced comics
with, so perhaps the trend of the 60es, still felt today, with more titles
and smaller sales for each would have been impossible for Dell to
accomplish. Gold Key tried, but largely failed for a number of reasons which
are too numerous to discuss here.

-- Ole