Ade Bethune -- comic book artist

The Ade Bethune Collection has a Google alert running that sends an email whenever Google indexes a page that either 1) links to the Ade Bethune Collection web site or 2) contains Ade Bethune's name.  This week's email included a post from the Women in Comics wiki. The post is primarily a listing of women who worked during the golden age of comics (1938-1955), and includes Ade Bethune's name. However, what is really interesting is the origin of the list--it is from the appendix of a book written by David Hajdu called The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. The book describes the rise of comic books as a medium for popular culture, and the resulting backlash against them in the late 1940s-early 1950s by church groups, civic organizations, PTAs, and McCarthy-ites in the Senate, among others.  The Appendix, in which Ade Bethune's name appears, is a list of "the artists, writers, and others who never again worked in comics after the purge of the 1950s."

One of Bethune's Treasure Chest covers

Including Ade Bethune on this list of names associated with "purged" comic books seems to imply that she was producing the kind of content that religious groups and others objected to.  In fact, Bethune's involvement with comics was as a contributor to Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact, published by George A. Pflaum from 1946 to 1972.  Treasure Chest was begun as a response to the undesirable comic books of the time. It was distributed to Catholic parochial schools throughout the U.S. and was meant to emphasize morality, faith, family, and citizenship. Treasure Chest contained primarily non-fiction stories about sports and folk heroes, saints, and other uplifting figures.

Ade Bethune drew a number of covers for Treasure Chest. Her first was for the April 5, 1949 issue and her last was for June 7, 1962. Other of Bethune's more than 20 front and back covers include those in April 1952, January 1954, February 1955, and March 1958. She also contributed stories to the comic book, including the series Jesus Spoke in Parables from 1951-1952.  Bethune also contributed to another of Pflaum's publications, Our Little Messenger.

Sketches for some of Ade Bethune's Treasure Chest covers and drawings for Our Little Messenger are in the Ade Bethune Collection.  More examples of and information about her work for children are in the exhibition "Seeing Things Through a Child's Eyes."