This is kinda neat for the holiday season. Back in the forties and fifties, there was a comic book called Walt Disney's Comics and Stories that was, by far, the best-selling comic in the country. When Superman was selling a million copies of each issue, eight times a year, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories was selling between two and three million per month.
About half of that came through newsstand sales…and the high total was in part because there were newsstands that didn't carry a full display of comic books but made room for one. That one was Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. The rest of the sales came through an aggressive subscription push that included marketing via other Disney products (for a time, if you bought a Mickey Mouse watch, a subscription ad came in the box) and through more conventional, non-comic magazine subscription services. There was even a campaign that enabled you to buy a subscription to Walt Disney's Comics and Stories through your elementary school.
Subscriptions to the comic became a much-given Christmas gift…probably most coming from Grandparents. This website has dug up two of the letters that arrived in the mail to tell you you'd been gifted with a subscription to Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. These letters probably had a higher print run than any comic book published today.
And here's a "by the way" for comic historians: What company published Walt Disney's Comics and Stories for most of its run?
If you answered, "Dell," you're wrong. It said Dell on the cover insignia and Dell distributed the title along with all its other comics…but Dell was not the publisher. And if you said, "Western Printing and Lithography," you're also wrong. Western prepared the contents and printed the comics…but Western was not the publisher.
Walt Disney's Comics and Stories was published by K.K. Publications, Inc., a company set up by Herbert "Kay" Kamen, who was an outside licensing representative for the Disney company from 1932 until his death in a 1949 plane crash. When he sold Western on a licensing deal for the Disney catalogue, he also arranged for a partnership arrangement whereby they set up a separate company to publish certain items, including that comic and (later) the Red Ryder comic books. Western was a partner in the operation but the publisher of record was K.K. Publications. And don't feel bad if you don't know that because most of the people who worked on the comics didn't, either.