The Eastern Color Printing Company was a company that revolutionized the American comic book industry. Founded in 1928, the company initially specialized in printing color newspaper sections for various papers in New England and New York. In 1930, Eastern was the first major institution to perfect an engraving process that allowed color to be added to black-and-white comics, a game-changer for the newspaper syndicates.

In 1933, Eastern’s sales manager Harry I. Wildenberg came up with the idea of using comics as a medium for advertising. The company’s first comic, Gulf Comic Weekly, was a promotional giveaway for Gulf Oil Company. Each issue of the comic contained a full-color single-page comic strip and proved a hit at Gulf service stations, with distribution reaching three million copies a week. Eastern also published another four-page tabloid for Standard Oil, titled Standard Oil Comics.

In the same year, Eastern published the first modern-format comic book, the 32-page Funnies on Parade, which was a promotion for Procter & Gamble.

The success of the promotion led to Eastern producing similar periodicals for Canada Dry, Kinney Shoes, Wheatena cereal, and others. In late 1933, Eastern published Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, A Century of Comics, and Skippy’s Own Book of Comics, with Famous Funnies being the most popular.

Famous Funnies was the first true American comic book, and it gave birth to the American comic book industry. The comic featured reprints of popular newspaper comic strips, such as Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy, and Flash Gordon, and became an instant hit. In 1934, Eastern printed Shell Globe, a comic featuring Bud Fisher’s popular characters Mutt and Jeff, for distribution at 13,000 Shell gas stations.

Eastern published its comic books until the mid-1950s and continued to print comic books for other publishers until 1973. However, the company struggled financially from the 1970s to 2002, when it closed due to changing printing technologies. Despite its closure, Eastern Color Printing’s legacy as the company that revolutionized the American comic book industry remains intact.