![]() ![]() Whiz Bang by all accounts was actually fairly popular, and despite the fact that Fawcett was given to inflating his own sales figures, it allowed him and his sons to expand in the 30’s, moving on to publish other popular pulps as well as magazines like Mechanix Illustrated, Screen Secrets, Daring Detective, and most notably True Confessions, which reported sales in the millions each month!Ĭaptain Billy was such a success as a pulp publisher in the 1930’s, that he built a huge home called the Breezy Point Resort, where he rubbed shoulders with and entertained movie and sports stars and prominent political figures.ġ939 was the boom year for comic books, and Fawcett followed suit by engaging writer William Parker and artist C.C. It was certainly more of a general humor pulp - mostly text - than the sexually explicit “8-pagers” or “Tijuana Bibles” that were floating around in the 20’s underground… Although most of what is recollected about “Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang” characterizes the general tone as being of a “bawdy” nature, upon review, the content was actually pretty mild by today’s standard. And it was after his discharge that he made the decision to enter the publishing arena in conjunction with his sons.įawcett’s initial offering was a humor magazine featuring mostly humorous stories, limericks and a few single page illustrations (at first). While working for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, he somewhere along the way became enamored with cartoons and humor of a slightly off-color nature ( you know those soldiers). Because of his previous military service, he was able to assume the rank of Captain - and also acquired the nickname “Captain Billy.” Having made it through relatively unscathed, he decided to be a reporter for the Minneapolis Journal, until the Great War came along. When he was 16, he ran away from home to fight in the Spanish-American War, where he was stationed in the Philippines. Wilford Fawcett was quite a character, and, for the most part, a self-made man.īorn in Ontario, Canada in 1885, his family, at some point during his childhood, immigrated to Minnesota. ![]()
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