40S CRIME COMICS [EXPANDED]

Here's (above) Fredrick Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent, the book that provoked censorship of the comics and ended what a lot of fans consider a golden age of newsstand comics. I love those comics myself but I have to admit that Wertham had a point.

If you're a parent you don't want your kids to read comics with stories like this (above).  

   There used to be lots of crime comics and the most popular of all was Lev Gleason's Crime Does Not Pay. I like to think the edge that title had was its two artist/writer/editors, Bob Wood and Charles Biro. They favored a more cartoony style than the other crime comics, and Wood really did seem to understand the criminal mind.

I thought you might like to see samples of the work of some of the CDNP artists. We'll start with Rudy Palais (above and below) who drew the most gruesome stories. 

Here (above) Palais shows a woman kissing a man to death.

And here (above) he has a man kill a baby. 'Pretty gruesome stuff!

This one's (above) by Dick Briefer who also did the Frankenstein comics. I can't believe a story like this ever appeared in mass market comics.

Hmmm...I've seen this artist's work (above) before but I don't know his name. I'm guessing that the editors had had a hand in the continuity here and Bob Wood's knack for injecting humor into horror is evident.  

Now you can understand why Wertham thought crime comics had gone too far. They really had. Censorship was inevitable.  

Here's (above) one of my favorite CDNP artists, Bob Q. Siege. His anatomy is either very bad or very good, I can't figure out which. For a year he shared an apartment with Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder. I think I can see the influence. 

Last but not least is Charles Biro (that's his work, above) who was an artist as well as an editor.  He drew a lot of the covers. He wasn't an exceptional draughtsman but he knew what to draw and sometimes that can be almost as useful as knowing how to draw...well, sort of. Can you count the perspective cheats in this picture?

Bob Wood and Charles Biro were friends as well as co-workers. They shared hobbies: drinking and gambling. . . hobbies that were to prove fatal for Wood. 

Wood had a good feel for crime...maybe too good a feel. He psyched himself into the criminal mentality so effectively that he actually murdered somebody in real life.

That's all I have to say about that comic but I'll take the opportunity to speculate about the excessive censorship that followed the excessive media that brought it about. My guess...and it's only a guess, with no facts to back it up...is that the mob had a hand in magazine distribution and paniced at the spotlight Wertham was throwing on that trade. 

 According to this guess the mob helped to push through unnecessarily stringent censorship, the heavy-handed kind that was inflicted on Barks later stories for Western Publishing. That kind of thing crippled magazine creativity for decades to come. Once again, that's pure speculation and I could be wrong. 

"CRIME DOES NOT PAY"

Dark Horse just published an anthology of stories from "Crime Does Not Pay," for my money one of the best adult comic books ever. I skimmed my friend Mike's copy of the book, and I got the impression that the book's stories were chosen for the writing, and not the artwork, but maybe I'm wrong. Jack Cole used to draw for this comic, and so did Paul Gustafson.

You never heard of Gustafson? That's a sample of his work above. He had a real cinematic style. How do you like that second panel where we see ordinary pedestrians waiting for a light to change from the vantage point of some evil force lurking in the shadows?

The comic was edited by Charles Biro and Bob Wood in the early forties. In real life, Wood lived the life he wrote about and ended up beating his wife to death with a steam iron. He went to prison for it, and was murdered by another inmate.

"Crimes by Women" looks like a pretty good title too, to judge by the cover. There were a lot of crime titles in those days.

Look at that policeman (above)! He looks like he was drawn by Kirby, but I think the drawing is credited to someone else.

"Murder Incorporated" (above)  looks like an interesting comic....

....as does "Crime Reporter!" I wish I could read these comics.

Geez, here (above) we have the shocking immediacy of seeing a man shot at point blank range from the point of view of the shooter.

I hate to seem like a prude, but maybe these comics were too strong for kids. They make crime and sadism look exciting in a way that EC comics never did.

How do you like the far away look (above) on the stabber's face? 'Probably an editor's change.