What is a 'Big Little Book' comic?

What is a 'Big Little Book' comic?

Mark Zaid (Owner of Esquire Comics) gives expert video advice on: What is a 'graphic novel'?; What is a 'pulp magazine' or 'pulp fiction'?; What is 'manga'? and more...

A Big Little Book comic is essentially almost what it says. It was one thing created in the early 1930s by the Whitman Publishing Company in Racine, Wisconsin, and it was about a 3x3 book that was also extremely thick. So it was little and it was big at the same time. And it dealt in those days primarily with spy thrillers, adventures and westerns. And the Big Little Book switched into super heroes as that genre took form and animation. Tom and Jerry and those types of cartoons were very popular in the 1930s and the 1940s, and even into the present day, although for the most part it stopped in the 1970s.