Crime Does Not Pay: Blackjacked and Pistolwhipped: A Crime Does Not Pay Primer: edited by Denis Kitchen, John Lind, and Philip Simon; written by Bob Wood; illustrated by Charles Biro, Jack Alderman, Dan Barry, George Tuska, Carmine Infantino, Dick Briefer, Bob Montana, Fred Guardineer (1943-49; collected 2011): Once upon a time, there were mass-market comic books that featured stories that didn't involve superheroes, and these comic books sold millions of copies a month. That is, each title sold that amount. It was the late 1940's and early 1950's. Superheroes were on their way out after World War Two. Crime, horror, and romance comics were on their way in.
A juvenile delinquency flap in the U.S. and Canada would ultimately do in comic books when they seemed poised on the brink of becoming, as they would in France and Japan, something with a much broader readership base than children. Superheroes would come back. And some of the finest American comic books ever created would die on the vine.
Crime Does Not Pay was the most popular comic book of the late 1940's, selling as many as five million copies a month (for the sake of comparison, the best-selling monthly American comic book now clocks in at around 125,000 copies a month). Its violence and its creepy narrator, Mr. Crime, looked forward to the violent, brilliant EC comics of the 1950's and the creepy narrators of EC's horror books, the Cryptkeeper being the one who remains in the popular consciousness thanks to HBO's Tales from the Crypt series of the 1980's and early 1990's.
These short tales, all 'based on a true story', still pack a kick today. Their graphic violence would get them targetted by censorship groups looking to protect children from violence in the media. And as a terrible bonus, the head writer of the series, Bob Wood, would himself be involved in a lurid murder trial for his killing of his lover with an iron and, once released from jail, would eventually be murdered himself. Wood's downfall occurred after Crime Does Not Pay had been forced off the market.
Anyone who thinks today's kids are exposed to an unprecedentedly violent media universe would do well to read this compilation. Heads are mashed into flames, brains are blown out, babies are killed in their cribs -- and at the end of each story, we're informed that crime doesn't pay because these criminals were finally caught and/or killed. But I don't think most readers were there for the moral uplift at the end. Boy, though. Boy, wow. Highly recommended.
Dick Briefer's Frankenstein, written and illustrated by Dick Briefer, edited by Craig Yoe (1940-1953; collected 2010): Briefer's Frankenstein was the first on-going horror character in comic-book history, making his (its?) bow in 1940, in stories with a strong flavour of the misanthropic adventures of Marvel's (then Timely's) humanity-hating Submariner.
Briefer's first Frankenstein, his origin relocated to 1940, was somewhat like Shelley's original -- a highly articulate monster who worked to keep his creator alive while simultaneously wreaking havoc on everyone and everything else. In one gonzo bit of business, Frankenstein creates a crocodile-headed monster to fight his original creation. As this battle will take place on top of the Empire State Building, I'm thinking he should have gone with something other than a crocodile hybrid.
Over the next 13 years, Briefer's monster would be rebooted twice, once as the lovable star of a humour comic book, once as an inarticulate, murderous, lonely brute. Yep, that's pretty much 90% of the history of Frankenstein riffs all in one comic-book series. Briefer, a chameleonic artist, altered both art and writing to suit each phase of his creature's comic-book adventures, though in all three cases, the creature's nose would be located freakishly high on its face.
A terrific snapshot of a little-known series, impeccably produced by Craig Yoe and his people -- though I'd have traded the over-sized pages for smaller pages and more stories. Highly recommended.
