Number 2168: Just a harmful young lady

In March I posted a crime comics story featuring a female criminal. I have chosen another. (Look back through the history of this blog and I have showed several stories featuring bad girls. I will let you decide what that means about me. You are probably right.)

I don’t know if there was a female criminal named Mara Hite, who earned a death sentence in 1937. In crime comics if they didn’t really exist they made it seem like they did. In this story, illustrated by Syd Shores for Gangsters and Gun Molls #4 (1952), Mara is a murderer, even using the desperado tactics of traveling gangsters like Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde, shooting at cops from the window of a speeding getaway car. It is a timeworn tale, but the drawings by Shore make it worth a look.

Shores was an early comic book artist who worked with Simon and Kirby early on, and worked freelance in comics for many years until his death from a heart attack at age 59 in 1973. Gene Colan described Shores as a “big smoker,” and we know that smoking will kill you more surely than any gangster, male or female.

Number 2141: Check this out: “The Kissing Bandit”

Edna Murray was known as “the Kissing Bandit” for a kiss she gave a victim of a robbery she committed. She was an all around public enemy, whose associations were with criminals, as she is portrayed in this story from Avon’s Gangsters and Gun Molls #2 (1951).

Like most “true” crime comic book stories, there is a mix of some fact and some fiction. Some names are changed, but Edna’s is not. I have wondered in this blog if changing the names of criminals in crime comics was a way to avoid being sued by that person if they were still alive when the comic was published. But Edna lived until 1966, and she is named, so I guess my theory is still just that. Edna was involved with the infamous Barker-Karpis gang in that late Wild West era of the early 1930s. She went to prison. She was involved with Volney Davis (re-named “Owney” Davis in the story), who went to Alcatraz, and was eventually released. He died in 1979, not in a shootout with the police in front of Edna, as portrayed in the story.

The story is drawn in a striking Wallace Wood style by artist Sid Check (his name is on a teller’s window in the splash panel). Despite appropriating the style of someone else, Check was a talented artist about whom not much has been published. Alex Jay of the Tenth Letter of the Alphabet blog, has done an outstanding job of collecting what is known of Check in the public record. Check left comics about 1958. His comic book career began about 1950, and he was part of that talented group of comic book men, including Wood. Check was born in 1930, and died just short of his 72nd birthday in 2002.