Walter Gibson’s Copy of Super-Magician Comics V2 #1, at Auction

Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: street and smith, walter gibson

Blackstone the Magician’s comic book career took some fascinating twists and turns, and includes Shadow creator Walter Gibson.

Harry Blackstone Sr. (1885-1965) was one of the most famous and successful magicians of his or any era. At the age of 13, Blackstone was inspired by seeing legendary magician Harry Kellar perform in Chicago in 1898. Blackstone’s career spanned more than four decades, during which he toured extensively throughout the United States and Canada. He helped to popularize magic as an entertainment form in the twentieth century, and he was very effective at marketing himself with the help of Shadow creator Walter Gibson among others. A magician himself, Gibson wrote extensively about magic, including ghostwriting articles for Harry Houdini and Blackstone, and writing comics and a radio show based on the fictional adventures of Blackstone. It was Gibson who suggested that Blackstone get into the comic book business with Shadow publisher Street & Smith, and the result was Super-Magic Comics #1, soon retitled Super-Magician Comics.

Walter Gibson, and Harry Blackstone

In his 1985 book The Blackstone Book of Magic & Illusion, Blackstone’s son, Harry Blackstone, Jr., described how the original Street & Smith Blackstone comic book series came about. “Since the average run of a comic book was 200,000 copies in those days, Gibson made the proposition particularly attractive to the publishers by offering to have my father buy 50,000 of the press run at five cents per copy (the newsstand price for a comic book in the 1940s was ten cents). My father, in turn, would offer these comics as a premium to children at his matinees, and the theatre managers would pay half the newsstand price of the comics distributed for this promotion. For an additional nickel a ticket, the theatres’ business was increased and the books thus cost my father nothing. Gibson wrote the first issue on the train from Boston to New York, and the Street and Smith editors were delighted with the adventures he had concocted.”

While the younger Blackstone’s book asserts that the title change to Super-Magician Comics was “to put more emphasis on Blackstone”, it’s likely that the first Super-Magic Comics issue ran into some objections from rival comic book publishers after that first issue. Most notably, David McKay Company had been publishing a successful monthly comic book series titled Magic Comics, featuring the highly popular comic strip magician Mandrake, among other King Features Syndicate strips, since 1939.

Blackstone’s feature in Street & Smith’s Super-Magician Comics lasted until the March 1946 cover-dated issue, when a fictional magician called Nigel Elliman was abruptly created to replace him in the series. Per a 1972 letter, Gibson states that he had a contract dispute with Street & Smith at that time and “quit and went on the road with Blackstone the Magician for that season and part of the next,” which seems a likely reason for Blackstone’s exit from that publisher. What would follow was a historically unusual sequence of events for a comic book property of that era.

As we’ve seen here many times (1) (2) (3) over the years, Gibson used his well-known knowledge of the history of magic to a great effect during this series, typically pairing a given location throughout the world with a relevant but often obscure bit of magical lore based on that location.

Of the 10 Universal copies on the CGC census, three grade 7.5 and two grade higher. Additionally, this copy is labeled as coming from the estate of Walter B. Gibson. An example of Gibson leaning into his greatest strengths with the history of magic, there’s a Super-Magician Comics Vol. 2 #1 (Street & Smith, 1943) CGC VF- 7.5 with cream to off-white pages up for auction at the November 5, 2026 Golden Age Century Comics Showcase Auction VI #40378.

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