Someone at a Connecticut printing firm had the idea of reprinting newspaper strips in a small magazine and selling it for ten cents. Famous Funnies #1 went on sale in 1934 and is generally counted as the first American comic book sold on newsstands. It was, in fairness, mostly a bundle of other people's Sunday pages, but every industry starts somewhere.
It ran for more than twenty years, and in the 1950s it printed Buck Rogers reprints under a run of covers by a young Frank Frazetta that are now worth rather more than ten cents.
