Number 2575: “...and a parrot called Snoopy”

Twilight was a short-lived character, and as a guess perhaps Twilight failed because of his costume. Furry and brown. It’s unusual, but also not colorful enough for super hero fans of the era.

How many characters of the early war years were in the armed services, and when the enemy struck the home front, dropped their uniforms for a (usually) colorful, masked character? Twilight, in that way, is not very original, but his parrot, named “Snoopy,” is colorful, at least.

Artist John Cassone did his usual superb job on the drawing. From Clue Comics #3 (1943).

Number 2511: Those murdering Fleagles

Jack Kirby did a short history of the infamous Fleagle Gang, bank robbers. They robbed a bank in Lamar, Colorado, in 1928, and it's where their life of crime began to catch up with them. The story hits the high notes of the bank robbery and aftermath and is fairly accurate judging by other sources I have read of the Fleagles’ history. A gang member was shot in the jaw by the bank president as the bank was being robbed. Later, a doctor was called to treat the wounded man. Apparently the treacherous Fleagles' solution for not having health insurance was to kill the doctor when his usefulness was over.

Jack Kirby is credited with the artwork, but no writer is given. The 1947 issue of Hillman Publishing’s Clue Comics (Volume 2, Number 3, whole number 15), was the last issue.

 

 

Hillman’s “obscene” crime

I have been re-reading Greg Theakston’s Complete Jack Kirby books. In a volume on Kirby’s output in June-August 1947, several crime comics stories by Kirby and Simon are shown. A point Theakston made about Hillman Publishing, where Kirby/Simon art was published for a time after World War II, was that in 1940 a newsdealer who carried a Hillman black and white magazine, Headquarters Detective, was raided by police and all copies of the magazine confiscated. There was a law in several cities, including New York, that publications devoted exclusively to crime were considered obscene. The newsdealer went to jail, and it took a Supreme Court ruling in 1947 that there was uniform freedom of the press, even for publications that were devoted to lurid crime stories.

Theakston made a claim I have never before heard: “By 1947, one of every three periodicals sold in the United States was a comic book. This is an important statistic to consider when examining the war against comics.” Theakston then added, “Who stood to benefit by the condemnation of the comic art form? Using ‘follow the money’ logic we can dismiss the actions of mothers and fathers, teachers and librarians. The real enemies of the comics were the other media. Comics had cut deeply into the sales of movies, magazines and newspapers.”

Theakston did not use any footnotes to guide us to specific evidence his claim was true. I know comic books were big sellers, but were they one third of all American periodical sales? That I don’t know.

Sadly, Greg Theakston is not here to ask. He died in 2019, at age 65.
 

Number 2480: The Flying Fool

In the postwar years Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were represented at Harvey Comics (Stuntman, Boy Explorers), but the Harvey titles by S and K were quickly gone because of a glut on the comic book market. Before going to Prize Comics and starting Young Romance, a big success, Kirby and Simon worked for a short while at Hillman, appearing in the well-established Airboy Comics with an aviation strip, “Link Thorne — The Flying Fool.” Seven episodes were printed in Airboy Comics before the pair left and other artists came in to take over.

Aviation strips had their heyday, especially after World War II. Some pilots trained to fly in the war continued flying as a civilian business. Among other strips I remember, Milton Caniff had a huge success with Steve Canyon, a popular aviation strip. There was also Johnny Hazard by Frank Robbins, which appeared in newspapers from 1944 until 1977.

You can tell that Kirby and Simon put some thought into the Flying Fool, including some action-packed fight panels. But they didn’t stick around for long. I hope it was not a bitter break-up, because love was in the air! GI’s were home from the war. Love conquers all, it is said. In the late ’40s if they weren’t drawing crime comics, Kirby and Simon put their hearts into  love.

 

Number 2409: A Kirby Killer: the story of the Tri-State Terror

Wilbur Underhill was, as the story says, a real person. He was a crook, ex-convict who escaped prison twice, a gangster who was wanted for various criminal acts in the early '30s. That was a golden age of crooks in cars, going from town to town robbing banks, shooting people...you know, all the usual psychopathic behavior. Underhill was known, among other nicknames, as the Tri-State Terror. I was surprised reading this Jack Kirby version of Wilbur’s story because while it compressed his story, it actually ends with the real story of Underhill’s death-by-cop; he was shot many times but got away from police and died on a bed in a furniture store.

I have been reading The Jack Kirby Collector #16 (1997), with a look at Kirby and Simon’s crime stories. Kirby liked drawing stories about gangsters. As writer Tom Field quotes Mark Evanier, speaking of Kirby’s crime stories from In the Days of the Mob from 1971, for DC: “‘He was a fan of that stuff. He had met a lot of people who knew the gangsters.’ Although Evanier and Kirby’s other assistant, Steve Sherman, did a lot of research on gangsters and the Depression to help enrich Kirby’s historical fiction, Evanier concedes, ‘Jack probably could have done these stories from memory and they wouldn’t have been much different.’”

In the Days of the Mob wasn’t given a chance to succeed, unlike the comic books Simon and Kirby were creating in the forties for Hillman and Prize, when crime comics were being produced to much notoriety and big sales.

“The Trail of the Gun-Loving Killer” is from Real Clue Crime Stories Vol. 2 No. 4 (number 16, 1947), and is credited to Jack Kirby as penciler, and partially inked by Joe Simon. Kirby is credited by the Grand Comics Database as inking pages 1, 2, 5 and 7. No writer is credited.

Number 2396: The Wolf Men of Bucharest

Hillman Periodicals, publisher of Airboy Comics, also published crime comics, but not horror comics. That doesn’t mean they didn’t use elements of horror in some of their stories, such as “The Wolf Men of Bucharest,” from Airboy Comics Volume 5, Number 10 (whole number 57, 1948). Here we have wolves who run with men who dress like wolves, all part of a criminal gang.

The Grand Comics Database says this is a “true story.” Just because I have not heard the story before doesn’t mean it is untrue, but wonder if the GCD believes the slug in the splash panel that says, “A True Story.” I am prejudiced by a character in the story called Dracu. That name sounds too good to be true, therefore I doubt it is true.

The GCD credits Maurice Del Bourgo with the artwork, but does not credit a writer.

Number 2386: The First Detective

Eugène François Vidocq (sometimes shown as François Eugène Vidocq), born 1775, was a self-reformed criminal (supposedly) who founded the French Sûreté Nationale. Later he founded the first private detective agency, which was at odds with the police agency he had founded. He even ended up arrested and in jail a few times.

He was a colorful historical character, made more colorful by writing a book about himself where he could shape the narrative to make himself sound braver, smarter, and more courageous. This colorful comic book biography from Hillman Periodical’s Crime Detective #3 (1948) follows the lead of Vidocq’s autobiography, and tells a tale of Vidocq in disguise, which I believe may or may not have happened. It is a crime comic, entertainment after all, and longtime readers might remember this blog’s admonition that the word “true” in a crime comic is a floating concept, with much fiction mixed in with the bare bones of the truth.

The artwork is credited to Mort Lawrence, who went on to draw more crime stories for Wanted, another “true” crime comic.