Number 1746: “Right through de head.” The Crime Cult and the Higgins Gang

Gang Busters was a popular radio program. It was licensed by Dell, and later by DC for comic book adaptations. These two stories, reprinted in Dell’s Four Color #24 (1943), were originally published in Popular Comics, issues #72 and #73.

Dan Gormley, who drew the stories, is better known to me as a funny animal artist. I was unfamiliar with his crime comics work, but he signed both stories.

Both stories have panels where a victim is shot through the head. (Shot through “the skull” in “The Higgins Gang” story.) I think the same writer wrote both, and he also used a “Yow!” in both stories. John Stanley was known for his use of that word, but are these early work by Stanley? I won’t go that far. They seem too formulaic for an inventive writer like Stanley. And as far as catching crooks goes, the detective, Chief Winston, seems more lucky than good.

An obligatory “Crime does not pay!” message is inserted into the last panel of each story.

My one other Dan Gormley posting. Just click on the thumbnail.

Number 1562: Easter with Oswald and the prehistoric egg

It’s Easter Sunday, and so I scrambled to find a story with an Easter egg (ho-ho). Lame joke aside, I present this epic adventure of Oswald the Rabbit, his buddy Toby, and their adventures in a babeland inside the Earth, from Dell’s Four Color #143 (1947).

Sexy little cartoon girls in an all-female society were not what I was expecting in a kiddie comic from the 1940s, but the unexpected is to be expected in any comic book written by John Stanley. Stanley pulls out the stops in this story, extending the idea of a pretty young queen with the addition of an old queen, and even an old old queen. Stanley had one of the most inventive minds of any comics creator.

Art is by Dan Gormley, a prolific comic book artist about whom not much is known. At least we know what he looked like thanks to this photo from Frank Young’s Stanley Stories blog.