Famous first? Newsday (link via Journalista) marks the 70th anniversary of Famous Funnies and, apparently, the birth of the American comic book:

"The sounds of the American comic book have echoed through our culture for decades. While most of us today know it as the medium of the high-minded Man of Steel, the truth is the comic book was born under much less heroic circumstances.

"In 1933, Maxwell C. Gaines and two of his fellow employees at the Eastern Color Printing Co. in Waterbury, Conn., came up with the idea of packaging the color 'funnies' that appeared in Sunday newspapers into a book format."

But surely The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, published almost a century earlier, beats out Famous Funnies. Eh, maybe we have different definitions of "comic book."