Telecomics

Marvel's first foray into animation was famously the 1966 Marvel Super Heroes cartoon produced by Grantray-Lawrence. The show told stories about Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and Sub-Mariner mostly lifted very directly from the comics. In fact, much of the art was lifted directly from the comics using limtied animation of the very artwork drawn by Jack Kirby and the rest of the Marvel Bullpen. It's that limited animation that's often most remembered about the show. But it wasn't the first attempt to bridge the gap between comics and animation using artwork like that.

The idea of filming mostly or entirely static comics with voice actors prodiving dialogue over top of them actually dates back to the 1940s. in 1945, after a couple years of toying with the idea, Jim Hardy cartoonist Dick Moores and Disney animator Jack Boyd created a pilot around a character called Peril Pinkerton, but they weren't able to sell it to anyone. The same year, though, the Newspaper Enterprise Association did produce a show using the same concept, getting licenses to characters like Captain Easy. The show was only tested on a single station out of Hollywood for a brief period, and interest appears to have been minimal.

Red Ryder creator Stephen Slesinger, apparently working on the idea independently, created two demo reels in 1946 featuring Dick Tracy and The Little King. (These were never broadcast.) Slesinger had some legal challenges on copyright usage, so his first shows to actually air wound up being holiday specials, Gingerbread Man and Santa and the Angel, that were broadcast in December 1947.

The first syndicated show of this type was simply called Tele-Comics and debuted in 1949. The show was produced by singer Rudy Vallée's company amd tried to avoid some of the copyright problems of previous efforts by utitlizing all-new characters. However, in part because these characters weren't already known, the show didn't last long.

In late 1949, however, Moores and Boyd were able to get their idea purchased by NBC and it debuted -- now retitled NBC Comics -- in September 1950. Throughout all the iterations, the basic concept of filming static comics with voice actors speaking dialogue over top of them remained consistent. Even panning and zooms, which were common tricks Grantray-Lawrence used to imply animation when there was none, were all but absent. The show lasted until 1951, but had 165 15-minute epsiodes made, so it was run in syndication throughout much of the 1950s.

I can only find a handful of episodes of NBC Comics available online. This appears to be the earliest if you want to check out a sample... Shortly after show was canceled, producer Don Dewar was quoted as saying, "Television will probably never have completely animated cartoons unless Disney and other producers release their old ones, which isn't likely." Of course, both halves of that statement proved to be entirely untrue. Hanna-Barbera released their first animated series on TV, The Ruff and Reddy Show, only a few years later in 1957. The Huckleberry Hound Show came a year after that and even won an Emmy Award in 1960! Meanwhile, Disney included Donald Duck shorts in Walt Disney's Disneyland, which began in 1954. Warner Brothers later began full syndication of their Looney Tunes cartoons as stand-along shows in 1964.

While the telecomics idea didn't completely go away after NBC Comics was canceled -- in addition to The Marvel Super Heroes, Clutch Cargo from 1959 infamously used static images with the voice actors' mouths superimposed on the drawings -- even the limited animation of shows like Yogi Bear and Rocky & Bullwinkle proved to be more engaging. So telecomics remain a largely forgotten relic of the earliest attempts to bring comic characters to the small screen.

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