"Keep yer yaps shut!" Lou Cameron's tough guys
Artist Lou Cameron has been featured in my blog, as well as Karswell's The Horrors Of It All several times. I've always thought of Cameron's Golden Age work as being primarily horror, but he did some crime stories, too. I have two of them, from Ace Comics' Crime Must Pay the Penalty.
Cameron's crooks are hardboiled, tough and murderous. They cause lots of mayhem. These are two violent tales, the sort of comics that got the industry in trouble. They were published in issues #40 and #41, which came out in '54, the year of greatest heat on comic books. The next year the Comics Code came out, and Crime Must Pay the Penalty lasted a few issues under the Code.
No matter in what genre he drew, Cameron was superb. He did comics for a few more years, then became a writer, an author of original paperback novels.
The "Holy Ca-ripes!" is an indication that Hank Chapman wrote the story.
ReplyDeleteHey, thanks, Darkmark, I'll keep that in mind when I see that expression in the future. Holy Ca-ripes, but I learn a lot from readers!
ReplyDeleteThat's some tough stuff! Good to see Cameron's work there. Comics' loss was his gain, though. Not that writing is easy, but it got him away from the chiselers he'd been dealing with before.
ReplyDeleteThanks for all these great stories, Pappy! I can't even keep up.
Kip, you can't keep up? I can barely keep up. Right now I'm working on postings for February 2012, just to try to stay ahead.
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