1. Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was an American pulp magazine writer, entrepreneur and military officer who pioneered the American comic book, publishing the first such periodical consisting solely of original material rather than reprints of newspaper comic strips.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was a 2008 Judges' Choice inductee into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was born as Malcolm Strain on January 7,1890 with English, German and Swedish Ancestry, in Greeneville, Tennessee.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson soon ran into money problems from their inability to collect on debts owed.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson spent his boyhood both in Portland and on a horse ranch in Washington state.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was a victim of a shooting that his family called an Army-sanctioned assassination attempt and the Army called the mistake of a guard who mistook Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson for an intruder at another officer's home.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson wrote nonfiction about military topics, including the 1922 book Modern Cavalry.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson wrote fiction, including the Western hardcover novel Death at the Corral.
In 1934, having seen the emergence of Famous Funnies and other oversize magazines reprinting comic strips, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson formed the comics publishing company National Allied Publications.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson 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.
Malcolm 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.
Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson suffered from continual financial crises, both in his personal and professional lives.
DC's 50th-anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great cites the Great Depression as "forc[ing] Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson to sell his publishing business to Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz in 1937".
Malcolm 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".
Son Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was born in November 1926, in Rye, New York, son Douglas in 1928, and daughter Diane in 1932.