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Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Wheeler-Nicholson
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (January 7, 1890[1] – September 21, 1965)[2] was an American pulp magazine writer and entrepreneur who pioneered the American comic book, publishing the first such periodical consisting solely of original material rather than reprints of newspaper comic strips. Long after his departure from the comic book company he founded, Wheeler-Nicholson's National Allied Publications would evolve into DC Comics, one of the U.S.'s two largest comic book publishers along with rival Marvel Comics.
He was a 2008 Judges' Choice inductee into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.[3]
Wheeler-Nicholson spent his boyhood both in Portland and on a horse ranch in Washington State.[8] Raised riding horses, he went on to attend the military academy The Manlius School in DeWitt, New York, and in 1917 joined the U.S. Cavalry[9] as a second lieutenant.[10] According to differing sources, he rose to become either "the youngest major in the Army",[7] the youngest in the Cavalry,[11] or, as per the family, one of the youngest in the Cavalry, at age 27,[8] By his own account, he "chased bandits on the Mexican border, fought fevers and played polo in the Philippines, led a battalion of infantry against the Bolsheviki in Siberia, helped straighten out the affairs of the army in France [and] commanded the headquarters cavalry of the American force in the Rhine".[12] His outposts included Japan; London, England; and Germany.[13] After World War I, Wheeler-Nicholson was sent to study at Saint-Cyr in Paris, France.[8]
The Major's public criticism of Army command in an open letter to President Warren G. Harding, and his accusations against senior officers, led to countercharges, hearings, and a lawsuit against West Point Superintendent General Fred W. Sladen.[14] Wheeler-Nicholson also was a victim of a shooting that his family called an Army-sanctioned assassination attempt. It left him hospitalized with a bullet wound.[8][15][14] Following this, Wheeler-Nicholson in June 1922 was convicted in a court-martial trial of violating the 96th Article of War in publishing the open letter.[16][17] Although he was not demoted, his career was dead-ended.[18] He resigned his commission in 1923.[16] His $100,000 lawsuit against Sladen was dismissed by the New York State Supreme Court the following year.[19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Wheeler-Nicholson
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (January 7, 1890[1] – September 21, 1965)[2] was an American pulp magazine writer and entrepreneur who pioneered the American comic book, publishing the first such periodical consisting solely of original material rather than reprints of newspaper comic strips. Long after his departure from the comic book company he founded, Wheeler-Nicholson's National Allied Publications would evolve into DC Comics, one of the U.S.'s two largest comic book publishers along with rival Marvel Comics.
He was a 2008 Judges' Choice inductee into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.[3]
Wheeler-Nicholson spent his boyhood both in Portland and on a horse ranch in Washington State.[8] Raised riding horses, he went on to attend the military academy The Manlius School in DeWitt, New York, and in 1917 joined the U.S. Cavalry[9] as a second lieutenant.[10] According to differing sources, he rose to become either "the youngest major in the Army",[7] the youngest in the Cavalry,[11] or, as per the family, one of the youngest in the Cavalry, at age 27,[8] By his own account, he "chased bandits on the Mexican border, fought fevers and played polo in the Philippines, led a battalion of infantry against the Bolsheviki in Siberia, helped straighten out the affairs of the army in France [and] commanded the headquarters cavalry of the American force in the Rhine".[12] His outposts included Japan; London, England; and Germany.[13] After World War I, Wheeler-Nicholson was sent to study at Saint-Cyr in Paris, France.[8]
The Major's public criticism of Army command in an open letter to President Warren G. Harding, and his accusations against senior officers, led to countercharges, hearings, and a lawsuit against West Point Superintendent General Fred W. Sladen.[14] Wheeler-Nicholson also was a victim of a shooting that his family called an Army-sanctioned assassination attempt. It left him hospitalized with a bullet wound.[8][15][14] Following this, Wheeler-Nicholson in June 1922 was convicted in a court-martial trial of violating the 96th Article of War in publishing the open letter.[16][17] Although he was not demoted, his career was dead-ended.[18] He resigned his commission in 1923.[16] His $100,000 lawsuit against Sladen was dismissed by the New York State Supreme Court the following year.[19]
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DC Comics Before Superman: Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's Pulp Comics SDCC Panel Hermes Press
Hermes Press's DC Comics Before Superman: Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's Pulp Comics San Diego Comic Con Panel. Moderated by Publisher Dan Herman On the p...
Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that January 4 is the anniversary of the birth of American pulp magazine writer and entrepreneur who pioneered the American comic book Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson "who pioneered the American comic book, publishing the first such periodical consisting solely of original material rather than reprints of newspaper comic strips."
DC Comics Before Superman: Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's Pulp Comics SDCC Panel Hermes Press
Hermes Press's DC Comics Before Superman: Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's Pulp Comics San Diego Comic Con Panel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFgG_rtvt6Y
Images:
1. Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson on horseback
2. 1929 corral of death
3. Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson
4. rider of the goldmare
Biographies
1. majormalcolmwheelernicholson.com/about-the-major/
2. peoplepill.com/people/malcolm-wheeler-nicholson/
1. Background from majormalcolmwheelernicholson.com/about-the-major/
"In the mid-1930′s, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson created the foundation of what has become one of the most enduring icons of modern American culture–the comic book featuring original scripts and artwork. Much of what has since been written about “the Major,” as he was called, has been based largely on hearsay and what we might call creative caricature, with a small amount of factual knowledge thrown into the mix.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster saw these first comic books and sent Wheeler-Nicholson several ideas for scripts including a drawing of a Super Hero on butcher paper. The drawing was the first appearance of a character that would go on to become one of the great fictional creations of the 20th century: Superman.
Wheeler-Nicholson hired Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1935, at the beginning of his initial efforts to push the boundaries of the medium of comics. He recognized their innovative ideas and immediately published two of the original comics they submitted–Henri Duval and Doctor Occult. The Major, as publisher and editor, encouraged the creative side of the two younger men, providing character ideas like Slam Bradley and Federal Men as well as some story lines. The two boys from Cleveland responded with a prolific outpouring of stories and artwork. Jerry Siegel said that without the Major’s help they would never have made it into print. Wheeler-Nicholson saw the potential of Superman from the very beginning. Recent research into the period of the forced bankruptcy–late December 1937 through September 1938–provides some intriguing clues to the Major’s part in Action Comics #1 appearing on newsstands June 1938.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was born in 1890 in the mountains of East Tennessee. In 1900, Malcolm’s mother, Antoinette, a journalist and suffragette, moved her family to Portland, Oregon. Young Malcolm spent his boyhood in Portland, Oregon, and on a horse ranch in Washington State, just across the Columbia River.
In 1912 Malcolm was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry after graduating from St. John’s Military Academy. He moved quickly through the ranks, becoming at 27 one of the youngest majors in the Cavalry. Along the way he saw action in Mexico, chasing Pancho Villa under General “Black Jack” Pershing. In 1915 he was posted to the Philippines commanding Troop K of the 9th Cavalry’s famed African-American Buffalo Soldiers and by 1917, when most American soldiers were being sent to the trenches of France, he was on a diplomatic mission as a liaison and intelligence officer to the Japanese embassy in the far reaches of Siberia, to gather intelligence in the shifting alliances between Cossacks, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Bolsheviks.
At the end of WWI, the Major was sent to the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris. There he met the beautiful Swedish aristocrat Elsa Bjorkböm, and after a romantic courtship they married in Koblentz, Germany, under the crossed swords of his fellow officers. His military career ended with a dramatic assassination attempt during a court martial under trumped up charges. Entering his darkened quarters at Fort Dix late at night, the Major was fired at by a guard watching from an upstairs window. He was left bleeding on the ground for some time before help arrived, and the circumstantial evidence pointed to an assassination attempt.
Recent scholarship by military historians has uncovered possible motivations for his problems with his superiors, which can be traced back to his refusal to allow his superiors to harass the men of the African-American Buffalo soldiers under his command. The Major was declared innocent of all charges with the exception of publishing a letter in The New York Times to President Warren Harding openly criticizing the Army. He was discharged from the Army and began to pursue his literary career.
His first two books are indicative of the dual paths his professional life would follow—The Modern Cavalry (1922), a classic military-strategy book that is still quoted in military journals today, and The Corral of Death (1929), a western mystery published in hardcover. His writing is visual and immediate, and it is not surprising that he was also interested in the potential of the graphic medium of comic books. He began his publishing career in 1925 with the establishment of Wheeler-Nicholson Inc., a newspaper syndicate.
His initial syndication efforts failed, but he was more than successful with his adventure stories featured in the best of the pulp magazines. The family moved to Paris and lived in a fairy-tale chateau in the countryside in Vic sur Aisnes. The Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 took what fortune they had with it, and the Wheeler-Nicholsons were forced to return to New York. The Major decided that the only way to survive was to follow his creative vision. He returned to syndicating comic strips but quickly realized the potential of newly formatted comic books. He believed that what the American public needed at such a dark time was the comic book, with its simple humor and its archetypal heroes—and, crucially, not just reprints of lowbrow comic strips but innovative and artistic graphic versions of literary classics.
With the appearance of New Fun in early 1935 and its mixture of educational material and classics (Ivanhoe) along with the funnies there is a natural progression in the Major’s ideas. This culminated in Detective Comics with the adventure stories in picture form that were reminiscent of the pulp fiction he knew so well. Thus it was in the midst of the economic darkness of the 1930s that the ideas of the Major and the two kids from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, met and a new, never-before-seen kind of hero was born. The Major was the first publisher to believe in the vision of Siegel and Shuster. In the figure of Superman, the Major saw the ideal representative of hope, Nietzsche’s Übermensch, literally the “super man,” who could lift the American spirit out of the depths of the Great Depression.
His contribution to comics was just one of the events that made up the life of this visionary man. Born January 7, 1890 in Greeneville, Tennessee, MWN died September 21, 1965 on Long Island, NY. “The Major” had a truly adventurous life.
In 2008 Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was awarded an Eisner for his contributions to the comic book industry and inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.
In 2011 he was inducted into The Overstreet Hall of Fame in Robert Overstreet’s 41st Guide to Comic Books.
Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson"
2. background from peoplepill.com/people/malcolm-wheeler-nicholson/
Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (January 7, 1890 – 1965) was an American pulp magazine writer and entrepreneur who pioneered the American comic book, publishing the first such periodical consisting solely of original material rather than reprints of newspaper comic strips. Long after his departure from the comic book company he founded, Wheeler-Nicholson's National Allied Publications would evolve into DC Comics, one of the U.S.'s two largest comic book publishers along with rival Marvel Comics.He was a 2008 Judges' Choice inductee into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.
Biography
Early life and military career
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was born in Greeneville, Tennessee. His father, whose surname was Strain, died in 1894, after the birth of his second son, Malcolm's brother Christopher. Another sibling, a sister, died in 1894, when Malcolm was four. Their mother, Antoinette Wheeler, afterward moved to New York City, became a journalist, and later joined a start-up women's magazine in Portland, Oregon. By this time she had changed her last name to "Straham", a variant of "Strain", and upon marrying teacher T. J. B. Nicholson, who would become the boys' stepfather, reverted to her maiden name and appended her new married name. The brothers were raised in "an iconoclastic, intellectual household" where his family entertained such guests as Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling.
Wheeler-Nicholson spent his boyhood both in Portland and on a horse ranch in Washington State. Raised riding horses, he went on to attend the military academy The Manlius School in DeWitt, New York, and in 1917 joined the U.S. Cavalry as a second-lieutenant. According to differing sources, he rose to become either "the youngest major in the Army", the youngest in the Cavalry, or one of the youngest in the Cavalry. By his account, he "chased bandits on the Mexican border, fought fevers and played polo in the Philippines, led a battalion of infantry against the Bolsheviki in Siberia, helped straighten out the affairs of the army in France [and] commanded the headquarters cavalry of the American force in the Rhine". His Cavalry unit was among those under John J. Pershing's command that in 1916 hunted the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. The following year, he served under Pershing fighting the Muslim Moros in the Philippines, and served with a Cossack troop in Siberia. Subsequent outposts included Japan; London, England; and Germany. After World War I, Wheeler-Nicholson was sent to study at Saint-Cyr in Paris, France.
The major's public criticism of Army command in a New York Times open letter to President Warren G. Harding, and his accusations against senior officers, led to countercharges, hearings, and a lawsuit against West Point Superintendent General Fred W. Sladen. As well, a shooting that his family called an Army-sanctioned assassination attempt left Wheeler-Nicholson hospitalized with a bullet wound. Following this, Wheeler-Nicholson in June 1922 was convicted in a court-martial trial of violating the 96th Article of War in publishing the open letter. Although he was not demoted, his career was dead-ended. He resigned his commission in 1923. His $100,000 lawsuit against Sladen was dismissed by the New York State Supreme Court the following year.
Writing career
Having already written nonfiction about military topics, including the 1922 book The Modern Cavalry, and fiction, including the Western hardcover novel Death at the Corral, also 1922, Wheeler-Nicholson now began writing short stories for the pulps. The major soon became a cover name, penning military and historical adventure fiction for such magazines as Adventure and Argosy. He additionally ghost wrote six adventure novels about air hero Bill Barnes for Street & Smith Publications.
Concurrently, in 1925, he founded Wheeler-Nicholson, Inc. to syndicate his work, which included a daily comic-strip adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, with art by N. Brewster Morse.
New Fun
In autumn 1934, having seen the emergence of Famous Funnies (1933) and other oversize magazines reprinting comic strips, Wheeler-Nicholson formed the comics publishing company National Allied Publications. While contemporary comics "consisted ... of reprints of old syndicate material", Wheeler-Nicholson found that the "rights to all the popular strips ... had been sewn up". While some existing publications had included small amounts of original material, generally as filler, and while Dell Publishing had put out a proto-comic book of all original strips, The Funnies, in 1929, Wheeler-Nicholson's premiere comic – New Fun #1 (Feb. 1935) – became the first comic book containing all-original material. As author Nicky Wright wrote,
It was at this point Wheeler-Nicholson made history. He produced a comic appropriately titled New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine, so-called because it was larger than the other comics, measuring 10 by 15 inches. ... Not only was the size different, so were the strips. They were all original, featuring all new characters specially drawn for New Fun ... Besides original strips, New Fun was the first comic to carry advertising.
A tabloid-sized, 10-inch by 15-inch, 36-page magazine with a card-stock, non-glossy cover, New Fun #1 was an anthology of "humor and adventure strips, many of which [Wheeler-Nicholson] wrote himself". The features included the funny animal comic "Pelion and Ossa" and the college-set "Jigger and Ginger", mixed with such dramatic fare as the Western strip "Jack Woods" and the "yellow peril" adventure "Barry O'Neill", featuring a Fu Manchu-styled villain, Fang Gow. While all-original material was a risky venture, the book sold well enough that National Allied Publishing continued to fill books "with new strips every month". Golden Age comics creator Sheldon Mayer quipped years later of Wheeler-Nicholson: "Not only the first man to publish comic books but also the first to stiff an artist for his check".
The first four issues were edited by future Funnies, Inc. founder Lloyd Jacquet, the fifth by Wheeler-Nicholson himself. Issue #6 (Oct. 1935) brought the comic-book debuts of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the future creators of Superman, who began their careers with the musketeer swashbuckler "Henri Duval" (doing the first two installments before turning it over to others) and, under the pseudonyms "Leger and Reuths", the supernatural-crimefighter adventure Doctor Occult. They would remain on the latter title through issue #32 (June 1938), following the magazine's retitling as More Fun (issues #7–8, Jan.-Feb. 1936), and More Fun Comics (#9-on).
Wheeler-Nicholson added a second magazine, New Comics, which premiered with a Dec. 1935 cover date and at close to what would become the standard size of Golden Age comic books, with slightly larger dimensions than today's. The title became New Adventure Comics with issue #12, and finally Adventure Comics with #32. Continuing for many decades, until issue #503 in 1983, it would become one of the longest-running comic books. In 2009, it was briefly revived with its original numbering, ultimately ending again in 2011 with issue #529, prior to DC Comics' New 52 reboot.
Despite Wheeler-Nicholson's optimism, however, finding a place in the market was difficult. Newsstands were reluctant to stock a magazine of untested new material from an unknown publisher, particularly as other companies' comics titles were perceived as being "successful because they featured characters everyone knew and loved". Returns were high, and cash-flow difficulties made the interval between issues unpredictable. Artist Creig Flessel recalled that at the company's office on Fourth Avenue, "The major flashed in and out of the place, doing battles with the printers, the banks, and other enemies of the struggling comics".
Later career
Wheeler-Nicholson suffered from continual financial crises, both in his personal and professional lives. "Dick Woods" artist Lyman Anderson, whose Manhattan apartment Wheeler-Nicholson used as a rent-free pied-à-terre, said, "His wife would call [from home on Long Island] and be in tears...and say she didn't have money and the milkman was going to cut off the milk for the kids. I'd send out 10 bucks, just because she needed it".
The third and final title published under his aegis would be Detective Comics, advertised with a cover illustration dated Dec. 1936, but eventually premiering three months late, with a March 1937 cover date.
Detective Comics would become a sensation with the introduction of Batman in issue #27 (May 1939). By then, however, Wheeler-Nicholson was gone. In 1937, in debt to printing-plant owner and magazine distributor Harry Donenfeld – who was as well a pulp-magazine publisher and a principal in the magazine distributorship Independent News – Wheeler-Nicholson was compelled to take Donenfeld on as a partner in order to publish Detective Comics #1. Detective Comics, Inc. was formed, with Wheeler-Nicholson and Jack S. Liebowitz, Donenfeld's accountant, listed as owners.
The major remained for a year, but cash-flow problems continued. DC's 50th-anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great cites the Great Depression as "forc[ing] Wheeler-Nicholson to sell his publishing business to Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz in 1937". However, wrote comics historian Gerard Jones:
In early 1938, Harry Donenfeld send him and his wife on a cruise to Cuba to 'work up new ideas'. When they came home, the major found the lock to his office door changed. In his absence, Harry had sued him for nonpayment and pushed Detective Comics, Inc. into bankruptcy court. There a judge named Abe Mennen, one of Harry's old Tammany buddies, had been appointed interim president of the firm and arranged a quick sale of its assets to Independent News. Harry gave the major a percentage of More Fun Comics as a shut-up token and wished him well.
Wheeler-Nicholson "gave up on the world of commerce thereafter and went back to writing war stories and critiques of the American military" in addition to straight "articles on politics and military history".
He died in 1965 on Long Island, in New York.
Personal life
While studying at the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris, France, after World War I, Wheeler-Nicholson met Elsa Sachsenhausen Bjorkböm. They were married in Koblenz, Germany in 1920. Their first child, Antoinette, was born in Stockholm, Sweden, his wife's home, in 1922. She was married on April 11, 1945, when Wheeler-Nicholson and his wife lived in Great Neck, New York, on Long Island.
In 1923, their second child, daughter Marianne, was born. Sons Malcolm and Douglas were born in 1927 and 1928, respectively, and daughter Diane in 1932. Douglas married on September 2, 1955, by which time Wheeler-Nicholson and his wife were living in Bayside, Queens, New York City.
Actress Dana Wheeler-Nicholson (sometimes credited as Dana Wheeler Nicholson), who has appeared in movies including Fletch and Tombstone, such TV series as Sex in the City, Friday Night Lights and Law & Order: Criminal Intent and the soap opera All My Children, is the daughter of Wheeler-Nicholson's son Douglas.
Other works
• Modern Cavalry: Studies on Its Role in the Warfare of To-day with Notes on Training for War Service (Macmillan, 1922)
• Battle Shield of the Republic (Macmillan, 1940)
• America Can Win (Macmillan, 1941)
• Are We Winning the Hard Way? (Crowell Publishing, 1943)
• The Texas-Siberia Trail: Adventure stories of Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (Off-Trail Publications, 2014) edited by John Locke
• Baldwin, Hanson W. (December 15, 1940). "Concerning the Army". The New York Times. p. 111. Retrieved June 10, 2015. (subscription required)
• Williamson, S.T. (May 18, 1941). "'Action Now' or 'Hold Everything'?". The New York Times. p. BR12. Retrieved June 10, 2015. (subscription required)
FYI SGT Mark Anderson SGT Jim Arnold SSgt Terry P. Maj Robert Thornton SFC (Join to see) SGT Steve McFarland MSG Andrew White Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MSG (Join to see)
COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL LTC Greg Henning SGT Gregory Lawritson SP5 Mark Kuzinski SGT John " Mac " McConnell SGT (Join to see) SGT (Join to see) CWO3 (Join to see)
DC Comics Before Superman: Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's Pulp Comics SDCC Panel Hermes Press
Hermes Press's DC Comics Before Superman: Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's Pulp Comics San Diego Comic Con Panel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFgG_rtvt6Y
Images:
1. Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson on horseback
2. 1929 corral of death
3. Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson
4. rider of the goldmare
Biographies
1. majormalcolmwheelernicholson.com/about-the-major/
2. peoplepill.com/people/malcolm-wheeler-nicholson/
1. Background from majormalcolmwheelernicholson.com/about-the-major/
"In the mid-1930′s, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson created the foundation of what has become one of the most enduring icons of modern American culture–the comic book featuring original scripts and artwork. Much of what has since been written about “the Major,” as he was called, has been based largely on hearsay and what we might call creative caricature, with a small amount of factual knowledge thrown into the mix.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster saw these first comic books and sent Wheeler-Nicholson several ideas for scripts including a drawing of a Super Hero on butcher paper. The drawing was the first appearance of a character that would go on to become one of the great fictional creations of the 20th century: Superman.
Wheeler-Nicholson hired Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1935, at the beginning of his initial efforts to push the boundaries of the medium of comics. He recognized their innovative ideas and immediately published two of the original comics they submitted–Henri Duval and Doctor Occult. The Major, as publisher and editor, encouraged the creative side of the two younger men, providing character ideas like Slam Bradley and Federal Men as well as some story lines. The two boys from Cleveland responded with a prolific outpouring of stories and artwork. Jerry Siegel said that without the Major’s help they would never have made it into print. Wheeler-Nicholson saw the potential of Superman from the very beginning. Recent research into the period of the forced bankruptcy–late December 1937 through September 1938–provides some intriguing clues to the Major’s part in Action Comics #1 appearing on newsstands June 1938.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was born in 1890 in the mountains of East Tennessee. In 1900, Malcolm’s mother, Antoinette, a journalist and suffragette, moved her family to Portland, Oregon. Young Malcolm spent his boyhood in Portland, Oregon, and on a horse ranch in Washington State, just across the Columbia River.
In 1912 Malcolm was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry after graduating from St. John’s Military Academy. He moved quickly through the ranks, becoming at 27 one of the youngest majors in the Cavalry. Along the way he saw action in Mexico, chasing Pancho Villa under General “Black Jack” Pershing. In 1915 he was posted to the Philippines commanding Troop K of the 9th Cavalry’s famed African-American Buffalo Soldiers and by 1917, when most American soldiers were being sent to the trenches of France, he was on a diplomatic mission as a liaison and intelligence officer to the Japanese embassy in the far reaches of Siberia, to gather intelligence in the shifting alliances between Cossacks, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Bolsheviks.
At the end of WWI, the Major was sent to the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris. There he met the beautiful Swedish aristocrat Elsa Bjorkböm, and after a romantic courtship they married in Koblentz, Germany, under the crossed swords of his fellow officers. His military career ended with a dramatic assassination attempt during a court martial under trumped up charges. Entering his darkened quarters at Fort Dix late at night, the Major was fired at by a guard watching from an upstairs window. He was left bleeding on the ground for some time before help arrived, and the circumstantial evidence pointed to an assassination attempt.
Recent scholarship by military historians has uncovered possible motivations for his problems with his superiors, which can be traced back to his refusal to allow his superiors to harass the men of the African-American Buffalo soldiers under his command. The Major was declared innocent of all charges with the exception of publishing a letter in The New York Times to President Warren Harding openly criticizing the Army. He was discharged from the Army and began to pursue his literary career.
His first two books are indicative of the dual paths his professional life would follow—The Modern Cavalry (1922), a classic military-strategy book that is still quoted in military journals today, and The Corral of Death (1929), a western mystery published in hardcover. His writing is visual and immediate, and it is not surprising that he was also interested in the potential of the graphic medium of comic books. He began his publishing career in 1925 with the establishment of Wheeler-Nicholson Inc., a newspaper syndicate.
His initial syndication efforts failed, but he was more than successful with his adventure stories featured in the best of the pulp magazines. The family moved to Paris and lived in a fairy-tale chateau in the countryside in Vic sur Aisnes. The Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 took what fortune they had with it, and the Wheeler-Nicholsons were forced to return to New York. The Major decided that the only way to survive was to follow his creative vision. He returned to syndicating comic strips but quickly realized the potential of newly formatted comic books. He believed that what the American public needed at such a dark time was the comic book, with its simple humor and its archetypal heroes—and, crucially, not just reprints of lowbrow comic strips but innovative and artistic graphic versions of literary classics.
With the appearance of New Fun in early 1935 and its mixture of educational material and classics (Ivanhoe) along with the funnies there is a natural progression in the Major’s ideas. This culminated in Detective Comics with the adventure stories in picture form that were reminiscent of the pulp fiction he knew so well. Thus it was in the midst of the economic darkness of the 1930s that the ideas of the Major and the two kids from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, met and a new, never-before-seen kind of hero was born. The Major was the first publisher to believe in the vision of Siegel and Shuster. In the figure of Superman, the Major saw the ideal representative of hope, Nietzsche’s Übermensch, literally the “super man,” who could lift the American spirit out of the depths of the Great Depression.
His contribution to comics was just one of the events that made up the life of this visionary man. Born January 7, 1890 in Greeneville, Tennessee, MWN died September 21, 1965 on Long Island, NY. “The Major” had a truly adventurous life.
In 2008 Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was awarded an Eisner for his contributions to the comic book industry and inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.
In 2011 he was inducted into The Overstreet Hall of Fame in Robert Overstreet’s 41st Guide to Comic Books.
Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson"
2. background from peoplepill.com/people/malcolm-wheeler-nicholson/
Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (January 7, 1890 – 1965) was an American pulp magazine writer and entrepreneur who pioneered the American comic book, publishing the first such periodical consisting solely of original material rather than reprints of newspaper comic strips. Long after his departure from the comic book company he founded, Wheeler-Nicholson's National Allied Publications would evolve into DC Comics, one of the U.S.'s two largest comic book publishers along with rival Marvel Comics.He was a 2008 Judges' Choice inductee into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.
Biography
Early life and military career
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was born in Greeneville, Tennessee. His father, whose surname was Strain, died in 1894, after the birth of his second son, Malcolm's brother Christopher. Another sibling, a sister, died in 1894, when Malcolm was four. Their mother, Antoinette Wheeler, afterward moved to New York City, became a journalist, and later joined a start-up women's magazine in Portland, Oregon. By this time she had changed her last name to "Straham", a variant of "Strain", and upon marrying teacher T. J. B. Nicholson, who would become the boys' stepfather, reverted to her maiden name and appended her new married name. The brothers were raised in "an iconoclastic, intellectual household" where his family entertained such guests as Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling.
Wheeler-Nicholson spent his boyhood both in Portland and on a horse ranch in Washington State. Raised riding horses, he went on to attend the military academy The Manlius School in DeWitt, New York, and in 1917 joined the U.S. Cavalry as a second-lieutenant. According to differing sources, he rose to become either "the youngest major in the Army", the youngest in the Cavalry, or one of the youngest in the Cavalry. By his account, he "chased bandits on the Mexican border, fought fevers and played polo in the Philippines, led a battalion of infantry against the Bolsheviki in Siberia, helped straighten out the affairs of the army in France [and] commanded the headquarters cavalry of the American force in the Rhine". His Cavalry unit was among those under John J. Pershing's command that in 1916 hunted the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. The following year, he served under Pershing fighting the Muslim Moros in the Philippines, and served with a Cossack troop in Siberia. Subsequent outposts included Japan; London, England; and Germany. After World War I, Wheeler-Nicholson was sent to study at Saint-Cyr in Paris, France.
The major's public criticism of Army command in a New York Times open letter to President Warren G. Harding, and his accusations against senior officers, led to countercharges, hearings, and a lawsuit against West Point Superintendent General Fred W. Sladen. As well, a shooting that his family called an Army-sanctioned assassination attempt left Wheeler-Nicholson hospitalized with a bullet wound. Following this, Wheeler-Nicholson in June 1922 was convicted in a court-martial trial of violating the 96th Article of War in publishing the open letter. Although he was not demoted, his career was dead-ended. He resigned his commission in 1923. His $100,000 lawsuit against Sladen was dismissed by the New York State Supreme Court the following year.
Writing career
Having already written nonfiction about military topics, including the 1922 book The Modern Cavalry, and fiction, including the Western hardcover novel Death at the Corral, also 1922, Wheeler-Nicholson now began writing short stories for the pulps. The major soon became a cover name, penning military and historical adventure fiction for such magazines as Adventure and Argosy. He additionally ghost wrote six adventure novels about air hero Bill Barnes for Street & Smith Publications.
Concurrently, in 1925, he founded Wheeler-Nicholson, Inc. to syndicate his work, which included a daily comic-strip adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, with art by N. Brewster Morse.
New Fun
In autumn 1934, having seen the emergence of Famous Funnies (1933) and other oversize magazines reprinting comic strips, Wheeler-Nicholson formed the comics publishing company National Allied Publications. While contemporary comics "consisted ... of reprints of old syndicate material", Wheeler-Nicholson found that the "rights to all the popular strips ... had been sewn up". While some existing publications had included small amounts of original material, generally as filler, and while Dell Publishing had put out a proto-comic book of all original strips, The Funnies, in 1929, Wheeler-Nicholson's premiere comic – New Fun #1 (Feb. 1935) – became the first comic book containing all-original material. As author Nicky Wright wrote,
It was at this point Wheeler-Nicholson made history. He produced a comic appropriately titled New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine, so-called because it was larger than the other comics, measuring 10 by 15 inches. ... Not only was the size different, so were the strips. They were all original, featuring all new characters specially drawn for New Fun ... Besides original strips, New Fun was the first comic to carry advertising.
A tabloid-sized, 10-inch by 15-inch, 36-page magazine with a card-stock, non-glossy cover, New Fun #1 was an anthology of "humor and adventure strips, many of which [Wheeler-Nicholson] wrote himself". The features included the funny animal comic "Pelion and Ossa" and the college-set "Jigger and Ginger", mixed with such dramatic fare as the Western strip "Jack Woods" and the "yellow peril" adventure "Barry O'Neill", featuring a Fu Manchu-styled villain, Fang Gow. While all-original material was a risky venture, the book sold well enough that National Allied Publishing continued to fill books "with new strips every month". Golden Age comics creator Sheldon Mayer quipped years later of Wheeler-Nicholson: "Not only the first man to publish comic books but also the first to stiff an artist for his check".
The first four issues were edited by future Funnies, Inc. founder Lloyd Jacquet, the fifth by Wheeler-Nicholson himself. Issue #6 (Oct. 1935) brought the comic-book debuts of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the future creators of Superman, who began their careers with the musketeer swashbuckler "Henri Duval" (doing the first two installments before turning it over to others) and, under the pseudonyms "Leger and Reuths", the supernatural-crimefighter adventure Doctor Occult. They would remain on the latter title through issue #32 (June 1938), following the magazine's retitling as More Fun (issues #7–8, Jan.-Feb. 1936), and More Fun Comics (#9-on).
Wheeler-Nicholson added a second magazine, New Comics, which premiered with a Dec. 1935 cover date and at close to what would become the standard size of Golden Age comic books, with slightly larger dimensions than today's. The title became New Adventure Comics with issue #12, and finally Adventure Comics with #32. Continuing for many decades, until issue #503 in 1983, it would become one of the longest-running comic books. In 2009, it was briefly revived with its original numbering, ultimately ending again in 2011 with issue #529, prior to DC Comics' New 52 reboot.
Despite Wheeler-Nicholson's optimism, however, finding a place in the market was difficult. Newsstands were reluctant to stock a magazine of untested new material from an unknown publisher, particularly as other companies' comics titles were perceived as being "successful because they featured characters everyone knew and loved". Returns were high, and cash-flow difficulties made the interval between issues unpredictable. Artist Creig Flessel recalled that at the company's office on Fourth Avenue, "The major flashed in and out of the place, doing battles with the printers, the banks, and other enemies of the struggling comics".
Later career
Wheeler-Nicholson suffered from continual financial crises, both in his personal and professional lives. "Dick Woods" artist Lyman Anderson, whose Manhattan apartment Wheeler-Nicholson used as a rent-free pied-à-terre, said, "His wife would call [from home on Long Island] and be in tears...and say she didn't have money and the milkman was going to cut off the milk for the kids. I'd send out 10 bucks, just because she needed it".
The third and final title published under his aegis would be Detective Comics, advertised with a cover illustration dated Dec. 1936, but eventually premiering three months late, with a March 1937 cover date.
Detective Comics would become a sensation with the introduction of Batman in issue #27 (May 1939). By then, however, Wheeler-Nicholson was gone. In 1937, in debt to printing-plant owner and magazine distributor Harry Donenfeld – who was as well a pulp-magazine publisher and a principal in the magazine distributorship Independent News – Wheeler-Nicholson was compelled to take Donenfeld on as a partner in order to publish Detective Comics #1. Detective Comics, Inc. was formed, with Wheeler-Nicholson and Jack S. Liebowitz, Donenfeld's accountant, listed as owners.
The major remained for a year, but cash-flow problems continued. DC's 50th-anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great cites the Great Depression as "forc[ing] Wheeler-Nicholson to sell his publishing business to Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz in 1937". However, wrote comics historian Gerard Jones:
In early 1938, Harry Donenfeld send him and his wife on a cruise to Cuba to 'work up new ideas'. When they came home, the major found the lock to his office door changed. In his absence, Harry had sued him for nonpayment and pushed Detective Comics, Inc. into bankruptcy court. There a judge named Abe Mennen, one of Harry's old Tammany buddies, had been appointed interim president of the firm and arranged a quick sale of its assets to Independent News. Harry gave the major a percentage of More Fun Comics as a shut-up token and wished him well.
Wheeler-Nicholson "gave up on the world of commerce thereafter and went back to writing war stories and critiques of the American military" in addition to straight "articles on politics and military history".
He died in 1965 on Long Island, in New York.
Personal life
While studying at the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris, France, after World War I, Wheeler-Nicholson met Elsa Sachsenhausen Bjorkböm. They were married in Koblenz, Germany in 1920. Their first child, Antoinette, was born in Stockholm, Sweden, his wife's home, in 1922. She was married on April 11, 1945, when Wheeler-Nicholson and his wife lived in Great Neck, New York, on Long Island.
In 1923, their second child, daughter Marianne, was born. Sons Malcolm and Douglas were born in 1927 and 1928, respectively, and daughter Diane in 1932. Douglas married on September 2, 1955, by which time Wheeler-Nicholson and his wife were living in Bayside, Queens, New York City.
Actress Dana Wheeler-Nicholson (sometimes credited as Dana Wheeler Nicholson), who has appeared in movies including Fletch and Tombstone, such TV series as Sex in the City, Friday Night Lights and Law & Order: Criminal Intent and the soap opera All My Children, is the daughter of Wheeler-Nicholson's son Douglas.
Other works
• Modern Cavalry: Studies on Its Role in the Warfare of To-day with Notes on Training for War Service (Macmillan, 1922)
• Battle Shield of the Republic (Macmillan, 1940)
• America Can Win (Macmillan, 1941)
• Are We Winning the Hard Way? (Crowell Publishing, 1943)
• The Texas-Siberia Trail: Adventure stories of Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (Off-Trail Publications, 2014) edited by John Locke
• Baldwin, Hanson W. (December 15, 1940). "Concerning the Army". The New York Times. p. 111. Retrieved June 10, 2015. (subscription required)
• Williamson, S.T. (May 18, 1941). "'Action Now' or 'Hold Everything'?". The New York Times. p. BR12. Retrieved June 10, 2015. (subscription required)
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LTC Stephen F.
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So, that is how comic books got started, thanks for the interesting bio Capt.
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