More on prices

[Kintoun]

I was surprised to hear this as well. Here's some more text from Wizard Special: The Beginning of the VALIANT Era which supports Dell's very profitable status in the 40s at least.
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Then, in 1938, Dell hired a company then known as Western Printing & Lithography to package and print all-new comics for the Dell line. Western did have some previous experience with comics. In 1935, it began publishing Mickey Mouse Magazine. Although this promotional publication was in a magazine format, it did contain some newspaper strip reprints.

After moderate success with new material published first in comics format, Dell pioneered another area that has become familiar territory in comic book circles, that of licensing outside properties. The publisher struck a deal with Walt Disney Studios, and in 1940, the first issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories hit the newsstands. By the mid-1940s, Comics and Stories was selling in excess of one million copies per issue, and Dell quickly followed this success with other Disney titles. Western provided the material and printed all of these comics for Dell.

Licensing was enormously profitable for Dell, and the company soon exploited the concept to its fullest potential, by starting an anthology of licensed projects in 1941. Dell's Four Color Comics, in addition to the proven Walt Disney characters, included issues featuring characters from radio, television, movies, and other animation studios, notably Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker), King Features (Popeye), and Warner Brothers (Bugs Bunny). Along with Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Four Color became a flagship of the Dell line, eventually lasting for over 1,300 weekly issues.
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Kintoun

  In a message dated 6/14/2004 1:11:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time, bangfish at cableone.net writes:
    >Dell was in serious financial straits by the late 1950s
  what's your source for this?  Not saying that you're wrong, but it goes against conventional wisdom.  My understanding is that Dell was still the number one selling comic publisher in the late 1950s (source: interview with Irwin Donenfeld, publisher of DC comics), and one of the leading publishers of magazines and paperbacks in the late 1950s.  (source was advance look at summary of an article in an upcoming or recently out Alter-Ego quoting various newsources from the late 50s, when Dell broke away from distributor ANC to do their own inhouse distribution, thus leading to the collapse of ANC as a distributor.

  steven rowe
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