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| Founded | 1938 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Alex L. Hillman |
| Defunct | 1953 (comics), 1961 (magazines and paperbacks) |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | 535Fifth Avenue,New York City |
| Publication types | Comic books,magazines,paperback books |
| Fiction genres | Superhero,crime,Western |
Hillman Periodicals, Inc., was an Americanmagazine andcomic bookpublishing company founded in 1938 byAlex L. Hillman, a formerNew York Citybook publisher. It is best known for itstrue confession andtrue crime magazines; for the long-running general-interest magazinePageant; and for comic books includingAir Fighters Comics and its successorAirboy Comics, which launched the popular charactersAirboy andThe Heap.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hillman competed withBernarr Macfadden andFawcett Publications by publishing comics, true confessions magazines (Real Story,Real Confessions,Real Romances) and crime magazines (Crime Detective,Real Detective,Crime Confessions).
In 1948 Hillman began publishing paperback books. There were several series of abridged mystery and western novels published in the larger 'digest' size. The long-running Hillman paperbacks first appeared in 1948 and lasted until 1961.
In 1944, Hillman launched adigest-sized, general-interest, "slick" (glossy paper) magazine,Pageant, with an initial print run of 500,000 copies.[1] To obtain the paper duringWorld War II wartime rationing, Hillman ended his detective magazines and comics, which together brought in a $250,000 annual profit.[1] He returned to comics in 1946, resuming some titles from the earlier series.
Like most comic book publishers during the period fans and historians called theGolden Age of comic books, Hillman's titles included costumedsuperheroes. As trends in the comic book market changed, the focus shifted more tocrime fiction/detective stories, making Hillman one of the earliestcrime comics publishers (Crime Detective Comics,Real Clue Crime Stories), andWesterns (Dead-Eye Western Comics andWestern Fighters). During this time, Hillman often utilized the talents ofCaptain America creatorsJoe Simon andJack Kirby. Hillman's most notable character, however, continuing in new stories by another publisher,Eclipse Comics, in the 1980s, was theCharles Biro, Dick Wood and Al Camy-createdaviator-adventurerAirboy inAir Fighters Comics and its successor,Airboy Comics.
Hillman ceased publishing comic books in 1953, while continuing to launch such new magazines asHomeland, andPeople Today, while also distributingThe Freeman, a journal oflibertarian opinion. Amid a 1953 battle for control of directors and editors, publisher Hillman announced his resignation as theFreeman treasurer because "it has been almost impossible for the past six months to run the magazine".[2] The following year, Hillman said he was thinking about launching a "conservativeRepublican" morning newspaper inWashington, D.C., but nothing came of it.
Hillman periodicals also had a publication namedFlight, edited by Norton Wood. (Wood had previously served as managing editor of a highly classified monthly report on air weapons prepared byMcGraw-Hill under contract with theU.S. Air Force. Wood had been a member of the editorial staff ofThis Week Magazine and of the U.S. Camera Publishing Co.)Flight contained stories of the tremendous revolution going on in the skies - the transition within a decade from air travel as men had understood it for two generations to an entire new era of flight at supersonic speeds and fantastic altitudes, of strange new shapes in aircraft design, of combat planes without pilots, and rocket voyages into outer space.Flight chronicled the revolution in the skies with lines of defense of the "H-Bomb" with futuristic drawings by Matt Greene artistically depicting a U.S. coastal city under coordinated attack by Russian bombers and submarines, and giant "inner tube" satellite space stations with depictions proposed byWernher von Braun orbits in space flight.
Hillman soldPageant toMacfadden Communications Group in April 1961, and the magazine continued until 1977.
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Publisher Alex L. Hillman was a noted art collector who initially developed an interest in the field when he was a book publisher, commissioning artists to illustrate new editions ofclassic literature. He was married to Rita Hillman. He began his collection with such American painters asRaphael Soyer andPreston Dickinson, and expanded it to includeimpressionist and other painters. He eventually established the Alex Hillman Family Foundation, a private foundation inManhattan, to oversee the collection.
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