Real Heroes No. 7 cover, “CHENNAULT and His FLYING TIGERS,” with a leaf carrying “Reel Real Heroes”

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

The cover carries REAL HEROES in black display letters across a stars-and-stripes ground. A yellow circle at the upper right reads “7 Full Length TRUE WAR STORIES and 7 other COMIC FEATURES”; the price 10¢ sits in the corner beside it and “No. 7” below it. A strip of four panels runs under the masthead, each panel a scene from one of the contents with its title lettered beside it: FIVE AGAINST DEATH, LOUIS PASTEUR AND THE UNSEEN ENEMY, U.S.S. LEXINGTON GOES TO GLORY, LAST MESSAGE FROM CORREGIDOR. The lower two-thirds is a single illustration — a uniformed man in a garrison cap, drawn head and shoulders, before the nose of a fighter aircraft painted with the shark’s-teeth marking, three more aircraft in formation below and mountains behind — with CHENNAULT and His FLYING TIGERS lettered in yellow across the sky. A yellow box at the lower left lists 14 THRILLING FEATURES including ARMY AIR CHIEF ARNOLD, GENE TUNNEY, ROBERT E. LEE—THE GENTLEMAN FROM VIRGINIA and MUTINY IN THE CLASS ROOM.

The picture identifies no one; the display lettering does. Nothing drawn on the figure names him, and no photograph appears on the cover, so the caption supplies the identification the image does not. What read as two yellow star-shaped devices are drawn on the shoulder loop of his tunic; the archive does not treat comic-book cover art as insignia evidence and does not use it to fix a rank or a date. On the cover, Corregidor, the Lexington, Robert E. Lee, Louis Pasteur and Gene Tunney are set out as one list, at ten cents, under a title that tells the buyer in advance which of them are heroes.

The second photographed page is the leaf bearing the folio 54, a film column headed “Reel Real Heroes” in yellow letters on a drawn strip of film. A standing subhead states the premise — “True Incidents from Today and Yesterday Provide Films With Patriotic Thrills” — and eight films are then noticed across three columns, each ending with a bracketed studio abbreviation as printed: A Yank at Eton, Bambi, Eagle Squadron, Flying Tigers, United We Stand, Wake Island, Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Young Mr. Pitt. Two stills are reproduced, one captioned as showing Tina Thayer and Mickey Rooney, one of helmeted men at a gun with its barrel raised. Every notice is favourable; no adverse judgement appears anywhere on the page, so the column operates as a recommendation list rather than as criticism, and the archive calls the items notices rather than reviews.

The notice that places this object in this collection is the one for Republic’s Flying Tigers: “The American Volunteer flyers in China are now a part of the American Air Force fighting there, but their great deeds of bravery as the Flying Tigers will never be forgotten. Here we see them bringing down Jap planes and attacking supply trains in all-out Flying Tiger style.” China is named once, as the place where the American flyers are; no Chinese person, unit or ally appears in the sentence, and the enemy is named with a slur, which is retained in the transcription under the archive’s transcription rule. Cover and column do the same work from two directions. China is the setting in which Americans are heroic, and it is offered that way to a ten-cent children’s readership.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

FRONT COVER (IMG_6089):

[masthead, black display letters over a stars-and-stripes ground:]
REAL
HEROES

[yellow circle, upper right:]
7
Full Length
TRUE
WAR
STORIES
and 7 other
COMIC
FEATURES

[upper right corner, outside the circle:]
10¢

[below the circle:]
No. 7

[strip of four panels below the masthead, left to right, line breaks as printed:]
FIVE AGAINST DEATH
LOUIS PASTEUR AND
THE UNSEEN ENEMY
U.S.S. LEXINGTON
GOES TO GLORY
LAST MESSAGE FROM
CORREGIDOR

[main illustration, yellow display lettering across the sky:]
CHENNAULT and His FLYING TIGERS

[yellow box, lower left:]
14 THRILLING FEATURES
INCLUDING
ARMY AIR CHIEF ARNOLD                    GENE TUNNEY
ROBERT E. LEE—THE GENTLEMAN FROM VIRGINIA
MUTINY IN THE CLASS ROOM

[no publisher imprint, date line, price code, stamp, signature or pencil note is visible anywhere on the cover as photographed]


LEAF BEARING THE FOLIO 54 (IMG_6090):

[folio, top left:]
54

[title, yellow letters on a drawn strip of film:]
Reel Real Heroes

[standing subhead, left:]
True Incidents from Today
and Yesterday Provide
Films With Patriotic Thrills

[caption under the circular still, centre:]
Tina Thayer is the would-be sophisticated
sixteen-year-old who has Mickey Rooney
baffled in “A Yank at Eton” (MGM)

[caption at the upper right, under the photograph of gunners:]
The defenders of Wake
Island are honored in a
film about their glorious
last-ditch stand (Para:)

[left column:]
YANK AT ETON, A  We’ve had many stories about boys coming to this country and becoming good Americans, but this film has Mickey Rooney learning the ways of English boys and making good too. He is teamed again with Freddie Bartholomew who played with him in Lord Jeff. (MGM)

BAMBI  How does it feel to be a baby deer and grow up in the forest? Walt Disney tells us in his beautiful production of Bambi and strangely enough you imagine your own first experiences with rain and snow and learning the names of things must have been very like Bambi’s. Bambi meets the most delightful friends in the forest—Thumper, the rabbit, Flower, the skunk, the Wise Old Owl, and hosts of others. And then there are his loved ones—his mother; Faline, the little fawn who later becomes the mother of Bambi’s children; and the Giant Stag. This is a lovely film. (RKO)

EAGLE SQUADRON  Although the story of this film is fiction the men it celebrates are real indeed—the young Americans who joined the R.A.F. and fought for freedom long before Pearl Harbor. Moreover the best parts of the film are the actual pictures of bomber raids, a Commando expedition, the rescue of a pilot from the Channel by the Mosquito fleet. Robert Stack and

[centre column:]
Diana Barrymore play the main story roles. (Univ.)

FLYING TIGERS  The American Volunteer flyers in China are now a part of the American Air Force fighting there, but their great deeds of bravery as the Flying Tigers will never be forgotten. Here we see them bringing down Jap planes and attacking supply trains in all-out Flying Tiger style. (Rep.)

UNITED WE STAND  The history of what happened between the first World War and the present one has been assembled from newsreels and while the resulting film doesn’t tell the whole story it does show one thing very dramatically—that if the democracies had stood together from the first, Hitler couldn’t have gobbled them up one by one with so little cost in men and guns. It also brings home the necessity for real unity among the United Nations in order to win

[right column:]
the war and the peace. (Fox)

WAKE ISLAND  Always in the minds of men there has been greater virtue in battling for a lost cause than in the mere winning of a fight. So it was at Valley Forge and the Alamo, with Custer’s Last Stand and the Lost Battalion: and now—Wake Island. This film ,[?] celebrates magnificently the defense of this tiny outpost by a handful of Marines and workmen. (Para.)

YANKEE DOODLE DANDY  A grand American personality, George M. Cohan, author of patriotic songs we all love, becomes your friend in this film through the captivating performance of James Cagney. Brash and boastful as a young man, he grows into a generous, lovable character. The singing and old-fashioned vaudeville dancing are extremely entertaining. (Warners)

YOUNG MR. PITT, THE  In the days of Napoleon, Britain had a young Prime Minister who had to fight appeasers at home and the threat of invasion from the continent, a danger few but himself would believe in. Robert Donat plays William Pitt in this splendid historical drama. (Fox)

[no running head, running foot, imprint, stamp or annotation appears on page 54]

[not part of page 54: a leaf lying beneath the copy at the far left of the frame shows the folio 36]

Historical context

The Flying Tigers of the cover were the American Volunteer Group, which flew in China under Claire Chennault and was succeeded there by regular United States forces. The China Air Task Force was activated on 14 July 1942 under Brigadier General Claire Chennault; on 19 March 1943 it was disbanded and replaced by the Fourteenth Air Force. The film column on page 54 reports that succession as current news — “The American Volunteer flyers in China are now a part of the American Air Force fighting there” — which places the printing of this page after the middle of 1942. The publisher named in catalogue records for the series sits in children’s publishing. The Parents’ Institute’s main publication was Parents’ Magazine, and George J. Hecht was its founder and publisher; its comic True Comics was successful enough to spawn imitators, among them DC Comics’ Real Fact Comics. Catalogue records for the series place Real Heroes with the same publisher; nothing on either photographed page does, and the fetched source does not mention Real Heroes.

What is not known

• No date, indicia, imprint or publisher line appears on either photographed page. Catalogue records for the series give No. 7 as November 1942 and the issue as 68 pages at 10 cents, but the archive reached those records only through search-result summaries — a direct fetch of the Grand Comics Database issue page (comics.org/issue/2515) returned HTTP 403 — so they are not listed as sources and the month is not asserted here. The indicia page, which would settle date and publisher from the object itself, was not photographed.
• The place of publication is not established. Nothing on either photographed page names a city, and the source the archive fetched for The Parents’ Institute does not give one. An earlier draft of this record stated New York and pinned coordinates there; that assertion has been removed. The geo entry now records China, the place named in the notice that puts this object in the collection; other places, among them Corregidor, Wake Island and Eton, are named elsewhere on the two pages.
• The publisher name — Parents’ Magazine Press, a division of The Parents’ Institute, Inc. — rests on catalogue records for the series, not on anything printed on either photographed page.
• The cover artist is not identified on the cover and is not established. A search result attributed the interior Chennault story’s drawings to a cartoonist named Harry Ramsey; that page was not fetched, the claim is unverified, and in any case an interior story artist is not necessarily the cover artist.
• The page-54 leaf is catalogued as an interior page of this issue on the collector’s statement and on its having been photographed with this copy. There is internal evidence consistent with that — the column head “Reel Real Heroes” is a pun that works inside a magazine called Real Heroes, and the folio 54 fits the extent reported for the issue — but nothing on the leaf names the issue number, and the column presumably ran in more than one issue, so the attribution to No. 7 specifically is not fixed by the object.
• The colour comics leaf at the right edge of IMG_6090 is read as the facing recto of this same open copy: page 54 is a verso, so the spine lies to its right, and full-resolution crops of the upper and lower right corners show the paper of page 54 running continuously into a gutter valley with the adjacent leaf rising on the far side, with no cut edge between them. This is a reading of the photograph, not a certainty; the copy was not examined in hand.
• The leaf bearing the folio 36 and the colour page at the left edge of IMG_6090 are read as other printed matter the copy is resting on rather than as part of it. That too is a reading of the photograph.
• The binding method is not visible in either photograph — no staple, wire or stitching appears — and the object was not measured, so no dimensions are given. The cover stock cannot be distinguished from the interior stock in a photograph. An earlier draft asserted “saddle-stapled”, “cover on newsprint stock” and “roughly 7 x 10 in.”; all three were genre assumptions and have been removed.
• The creases, chipping, paper loss and soiling on the cover are described as damage. How the damage was caused — reading, storage, handling — is not established by the object.
• What read as two yellow star-shaped devices are drawn on the figure’s shoulder loop. Whether the artist drew a correct insignia is not established, and the archive has not used the drawing to fix Chennault’s rank or the issue’s date. An earlier draft stated that the insignia was illegible; a 5x crop shows the devices, and that statement has been withdrawn.
• The dating floor used here rests on the page’s own sentence about the American Volunteer flyers having become part of the American Air Force, read against the fetched China Air Task Force source. The archive did not fetch a source for the United States release date of Republic’s Flying Tigers, so that film’s release is not used as evidence. The Young Mr. Pitt is a British production; no United States release date was established for it, and an earlier draft’s blanket claim that the noticed films were “all 1942 releases” has been dropped.
• In the Wake Island notice the printed text reads “This film , celebrates”, with a space before the mark. An independent re-reader judged the mark possibly a stray ink speck or broken type rather than a set comma. A 3x crop of the line shows a mark of the same weight and baseline position as the period after “Island.”, so it is transcribed as a comma and marked [?]; the alternative reading is recorded here.
• Only two leaves were photographed. The other thirteen features named on the cover, the indicia, the interior Chennault story that the cover advertises, the back cover, and any price stickers, inscriptions or ownership marks elsewhere in the copy are not recorded here. The copy was not collated, so whether it is complete is not known.
• Whether the fourth cover panel caption is complete is not fully certain: the cover is trimmed close at the right and “LAST MESSAGE FROM / CORREGIDOR” runs to the edge of the printed area. It reads as complete.
• The photograph caption for the Wake Island still ends “(Para:)” with what reads as a colon rather than a period, while the Wake Island notice below ends “(Para.)” with a period. Both are transcribed as printed.