Eastern Color Printing

Printing company and comic book publisher

The Eastern Color Printing Company was a company that published comic books, beginning in 1933. At first, it was only newspaper comic strip reprints, but later on, original material was published. Eastern Color Printing was incorporated in 1928, and soon became successful by printing color newspaper sections for several New England and New York papers. Eastern is most notable for its production of Funnies on Parade and Famous Funnies, two publications that gave birth to the American comic book industry. Eastern published its own comic books until the mid 1950s, and continued to print comic books for other publishers until 1973. Eastern Color Printing struggled financially from the 1970s to 2002, when the business closed, a victim of changing printing technologies.

In March 1924, William Jamieson Pape, owner of the Waterbury Republican newspaper in Waterbury, Connecticut, purchased a Goss International single width printing press to use in printing Sunday color newspaper comics sections. The Knickerbocker Press of Albany, New York, and the Springfield Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts, approached the Republican about using the press to print their own color comics supplements. The Springfield Union soon afterward did as well. Shortly, Pape was selling his color printing services to other newspapers. A few years later, in August 1928, Pape formed the Eastern Color Printing Company, with himself as vice president and principal executive officer. Replacing the original press with a Goss four deck press, the company acquired additional presses in 1929 and 1931. During this time period, Eastern, headquartered at 61 Leavenworth Street in Waterbury, established itself in the pulp magazine industry by being one of the few firms to print color covers for the pulps. From 1928 to 1930, Eastern published 36 issues of a tabloid format comics periodical, The Funnies, with original comic pages in color, for Dell Publishing. This title was the first four color comic newsstand publication. Dell, owned by George Delacorte, would later be closely associated with other landmark Eastern Color Printing publications. Around 1929, Eastern became the first major institution to perfect an engraving process that allowed for the addition of color to black and white comics, proving a boon to newspaper syndicates just beginning to introduce full page Sunday comics sections. From 1929 through 1932, Sunday comic pages were printed in both black and white and color.