The Flintstones at The New York World's Fair - JW Books...aka Warren!

I know I'm stretching the subject matter of this blog by including this standard-size, color comic starring the Flintstones, but this is such an odd item with ties to Warren that I wanted to include it.

Jim Warren was looking to put himself on the comic-producing map in 1964, so when he heard that the New York World's Fair was looking to produce a souvenir comic book for the fair's patrons, Warren jumped in and arranged a meeting to pitch his idea to the fair's organizers. Problem was, he didn't have any ideas, and he knew he'd be competing with fellow bidders DC and Marvel, who were pitching Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and other superstars.

Quickly, Warren came up with the idea that instead of trying to come up with own character that could compete with Superman(!), he would license the world's most famous stone-age family and basically just be the packager of the book. The fair's organizers liked the idea and gave Jim the contract--so here was Jim Warren, publisher of one black-and-white horror movie magazine, beating out the combined might of DC and Marvel comics!

Warren put the book together using Western Publishing's artists and writers, and the book ended up selling in the hundreds of thousands over the next two years. For some reason, the book is listed as being published by "JW Books, a subsidiary of Warren Publishing", but it doesn't say that anywhere on the cover. Warren, talking about the book in The Warren Companion, regretted not promoting his own name better, one of the rare times Warren missed a chance to promote anything.

The book is 72 pages and features all the most famous characters from the HB stable, like the Jetsons, Top Cat, Snagglepuss, etc. And as a bonus, Jim Warren himself makes an appearance in the book:

That's Jim on the far left. The sales success of the book (not to mention being rewarded for his chutzpah) helped Jim get the confidence to try another comic book publication, a little thing called Creepy.

So we have Fred Flintstone to thank for the next twenty years of horror mags!