Adolphe Leslie de Griponne Barreaux was born Adolphus Barreaux Gripon on January 9, 1899 in Charleston, South Carolina. His father, George Barreaux Gripon, was born in 1870 of French and African American ancestry. His mother, Georgiana Little, was born in 1873 of French and African American ancestry. The father worked as a wheelwright.
In 1915 there was an outbreak of typhoid fever in Charleston, so Adolphus Gripon was sent to live with relatives in New York City, where he assumed the name "Adolphe Barreaux."
In 1916 he attended DeWitt Clinton High School where he became active as an artist on the school newspaper.
In 1919 he graduated high school and worked as an artist for the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Company in NYC.
In September of 1919 he left NYC to attend Yale University School of Fine Arts (Class of 1923) in New Haven, Connecticut.
In July 1920, after completing his freshman year at Yale, he submitted a short story entitled "Hunch" to the pulp magazine Breezy Stories, which was accepted and published in the February 1921 issue.
In June of 1922 Adolphe Barreaux completed his Junior Year at Yale, but instead of entering his Senior Year he quit school and returned to NYC to seek his fortune as an advertising artist.
In 1924 Barreaux opened an art studio where he made portraits of celebrities. Throughout the roaring twenties he kept his name in newspapers by providing columnists with gossip, jokes, and editorial essays.
In 1929 he became a partner in an advertising agency with Raymond Thayer (1886-1955) a cartoonist who regularly appeared in the humor magazines Judge and Life.
By 1931 the Great Depression devastated the advertising industry, so Barreaux and Thayer ended their partnership, after which Barreaux opened a private studio. In 1933 Barreaux became a partner of Beach & Barreaux Advertising firm at 305 East 45th Street.
In 1932 Adolph Barreaux joined Harry Donenfeld and Merle Williams Hersey to revive The Police Gazette, a weekly newspaper printed on pink newsprint. Their first issues featured a new comic strip by Barreaux about the misadventures of a Broadway chorus girl named "Flossie Flip." In 1935 The Police Gazette was sold to another publisher, after which Adolphe Barreaux continued to serve as the art director for Donenfeld Magazines, which included erotic pulps Pep, Snappy Stories, Ginger, Spicy Adventure, Spicy Detective and Spicy Mystery. To handle this large volume of work Adolphe Barreaux opened the Majestic Art Studio at 101 East 46th Street, where he assigned a team of free-lance artists to produce all the pen-and-ink illustrations that appeared in Donenfeld's pulp magazines.
Because of his background in newspaper advertising, Barreaux knew that circulation could be increased by popular comic strips, so he convinced Donenfeld to include serialized comics in his magazines, although no pulp publisher had tried this before. This first experiment was “Sally the Sleuth,” which filled eight consecutive black-and-white comic pages in the November 1934 issue of Spicy Detective Stories. The experiment was successful enough for Majestic Studio to continue this strip for eight years, and to create similar comics for other pulp magazines published by Donenfeld, as well as in pulps that were produced by an affiliated publisher, Ned Pines, who produced the Thrilling Group, such as "Six-Gun Sandy" by Harold Detje for Thrilling Western, and "Ace Jordan" by Max Plaisted for Thrilling Adventures.
The reason there were affiliated pulp magazine publishers is that their distributors were all in business with ANC, the American News Corporation. ANC was the nationwide distribution monopoly that handled the billion-dollar industry of Prohibition booze. ANC distribution controlled the entire national network of distilleries, bottlers, label printers, warehouses, truckers, and longshoremen that kept speakeasies supplied with contraband alcohol from 1920 to 1933. Among the millions of quasi-innocent Americans employed by this outrageously-profitable organization were newspaper owners, newspaper distributors, newspaper printers, paper suppliers, newsstand dealers, and newspaper editorial syndicates, which supplied newspapers with the sensational supplemental contents that played a vital role in promoting greater circulation.
Newspapermen referred to comics as "Supplemental Editorial Content," but that term referred to a wide range of novelty features packaged by syndicates and supplied to newspaper editors. Besides comics, those features included cooking and sewing projects, crossword puzzles, trivia, poems, contests, useful tips, celebrity gossip, fictional short stories and most importantly editorial columns by political pundits like Arthur Brisbane (1864-1936), Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) and Will Rogers (1879-1935). All of these features were supplied to newspapers by "syndicates" because it was cheaper than producing them "in-house." The most powerful syndicates at that time were The McClure Syndicate, The Ledger Syndicate, The Bell Syndicate, and King Features Syndicate, but the competitive field was also open to newcomers.
Syndicated newspaper comic strips were so popular that the public even bought compilations of old Sunday comic strips, which were reprinted in color on newsprint, bound as magazines called "Famous Funnies" and sold at newsstands.
At the same time that Barreaux was using comics to promote sales of Donenfeld's pulps, Malcolm Wheeler Nicholson was a newspaper columnist who had struggled for ten years to promote the Nicholson Newspaper Syndicate. In a clever ploy to prove to newspaper publishers that his features could be just as popular as Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy, and Mutt & Jeff, Nicholson arranged with Science & McCall distribution to finance a new promotional scheme, in which he would duplicate "Famous Funnies" but fill his version with his own comics and then use the records of newsstand sales to convince newspaper publishers to subscribe to his syndicate. So in February of 1935 Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson invented the first American book of original comics, called NEW FUN. As the name indicated, NEW FUN did not contain reprinted "old fun."
Many of the features in NEW FUN were drawn by freelance artists that worked with Adolphe Barreaux at Majestic Art Studio, such as Jack Warren, Paul Jepson, and Lyman Anderson.
The resulting sales from Nicholson's scheme were not big enough to fulfill his dream of owning a successful newspaper syndicate, but on the other hand, the distributor, who had provided the credit to produce NEW FUN, and was the first to add up the receipts, realized that it had earned enough profit to warrant additional issues. Another result of Nicholson's experiment was that three months later the George Matthew Adams Syndicate had taken over rights to some of the comics in NEW FUN, such as "The Enchanted Stone Of Time" by Adolphe Barreaux, "Rod Rian Sky Police" by Paul Jepson, and "Loco Luke" by Jack Warren.
This innovative periodical was slow to catch on, but eventually NEW FUN became successful enough to spawn a hundred copycats and alter the course of American popular culture. When Adolphe Barreaux opened the Majestic Studio he was following the example of the agencies that had employed him to produce ads for newspapers, but he wound up inventing the first "comic shop," which would later compete with similar studios run by Harry Chesler, Lloyd Jacquet, Jack Binder, Samuel Iger and Will Eisner.
On December 30, 1937 Harry Donenfeld, William J. Delaney, and National Allied Newspaper Syndicate orchestrated a hostile takeover of the Nicholson Publishing Company by demanding repayment of operating credit. By June of 1938 Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz had control of the company, renamed DC Comicsincluding its most valuable property "Superman" created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
At this same time Donenfeld moved Barreaux's art studio to his own company headquarters. Majestic Studio was then listed at 126 East 46th Street, which is the side entrance to 480 Lexington Avenue, where D.C. Comics was located on the same floor in the same shared office space and same telephone number.
The February 1938 issue of The Comics from Dell Publications included "The Enchanted Stone of Time" by Adolphe Barreaux. The feature continued for six issues.
During the 1940s the Majestic Studio was busy producing materials for the booming industry of comic books. Adolphe Barreaux worked on "The Black Spider," "The Raven," "Tad Among the Pirates," "Flip Falcon," "Patty O'Day," "The Blazing Scarab," and "The Dragon's Teeth."
In the late 1940s he illustrated children's books, such as "Seven Round the Mountain," "A Treasury of Humor for Boys & Girls," and "A Treasury of Good Night Stories."
In 1949 he became Editor-in-Chief of Trojan Magazines, which was also owned by Donenfeld. That same year he became editor of the pulp magazine Hollywood Detective (Donenfeld).
In the 1950’s the Majestic Studio produced the Trojan Comics line Western Crime Busters, Youthful Romances, Attack, Kit Carson, and Girl Friday. Barreaux and Donenfeld eventually became co-owners of Trojan Comics.
In 1953 the pulp and comic book industry suffered such hard times that Trojan Magazines and Trojan Comics declared bankruptcy and Adolphe Barreaux closed the Majestic Art Studio.
In the second half of the 1950s he became an editor at Whitestone, a subsidiary of Fawcett Publications, where he worked until his retirement at age sixty-five. Ironically, it was Donenfeld's lawsuit that had forced Fawcett to cease their own profitable line of Captain Marvel Comics.
Adolphe Barreaux died in NYC at the age of eighty-six on October 23, 1985.
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MAJESTIC STUDIO ARTISTS from 1935 - 1953
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1935
Lyman Anderson
Adolphe Barreaux
Ray Burley
Harold Detje
Monroe Eisenberg
Clem Gretter
Paul Jepsen
Henry Kiefer
Jay McArdle
Max Plaisted
Ray Ramsey
Paul Stone
Joseph Szokoli
Jack Warren
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1936
Adolphe Barreaux
Henry Kiefer
Max Plaisted
Pete Costanza
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1937
Adolphe Barreaux
Henry Kiefer
Max Plaisted
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1938
Adolphe Barreaux
Henry Kiefer
Max Plaisted
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1939
Adolphe Barreaux
Worth Carnahan
Henry Kiefer
George Papp
Harry Parkhurst
Max Plaisted
Charles Quinlan
Ray Willner
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1940 - 1949
Adolphe Barreaux
Worth Carnahan
Howard Ferguson (lettering)
Henry Kiefer
Newton Alfred
Jon L. Blummer
W. C. Brigham
Ken Brown
Jim Chambers
Will Ely
Elton Fax
Tom Hickey
Rex Maxon
Jay McArdle
Charles McCann
William Meilink
Al Savitt
Harry Smilkstein
Paul H. Stone
Joseph Szokoli
Frank Volp
Wally Woo
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1950
Adolphe Barreaux
Howard Ferguson (lettering)
Henry Kiefer
Henry Kiemle
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1951
Gerald Altman
Adolphe Barreaux
Howard Ferguson (lettering)
Henry Kiefer
Ray McClelland
Vince Napoli
Keats Petree
Max Plaisted
Bert Tiedeman
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1952
Adolphe Barreaux
Howard Ferguson (lettering)
Henry Kiefer
Ray McClelland
Vince Napoli
Keats Petree
Max Plaisted
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1953
Adolphe Barreaux
Bob Cohen
Bob Correa
Howard Ferguson (lettering)
Henry Kiefer
Bob McCarthy [McCarty]
Ray McClelland
Vince Napoli
Al Tyler
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