Number 2591: H. H. Holmes...the gallows got him

Over 11 years ago I first showed this story of the notorious serial killer, H. H. Holmes. At the time I neglected to mention it contains one of the most egregiously violent panels in crime comics. In the panel Holmes kills a child with a knife. The action is done in silhouette, but the dead mother is in the foreground, with blood dripping from her dead mouth. I wonder if that panel might be the reason that Fred Gardineer did not sign the splash panel with his signature, something he was otherwise known to do?

H. H. Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett, in 1861. He is the murderer known for the torture castle in Chicago. It is hard to tell what is true and what is exuberance from yellow journalists sensationalizing Holmes’s murderous lair. Holmes padded his own image as a killer. He lied about his body count, claiming to have killed people who were actually still living.

Besides the gruesome violence mentioned, something in the last panel gives me pause. When Holmes is hanged he is wearing the same clothes as he was wearing in court when he was sentenced. Maybe, with his status as a murderer to live up to, he did not want to be hung in some ugly old prison clothes. Holmes was only 34 years old when the gallows got him, and perhaps he wanted to look stylish.

From Crime Does Not Pay #53 (1947):

Number 2408: Crimebuster busts Iron Jaw

“C.B. (as Crimebuster was usually addressed) didn't have super powers. His costume consisted of a hockey uniform, plus a cape he'd grabbed almost as an afterthought. He wore a mask only on the cover of his first issue — he had a secret identity, but never used it. His sidekick was nothing but a small monkey. ” Quoting Toonopedia.

Crimebuster seemed like a smart young man, clever and agile enough to escape Nazi saboteurs, crime bosses, hitmen, and even the worst villain of all, Iron Jaw. Iron Jaw is in this story from Boy Comics #10 (1943) with Crimebuster, in another battle with his Nazi foe. As Don Markstein explained in his Toonopedia entry, Iron Jaw, who began his career in Boy Comics #3, was “killed” in Boy Comics #15 but returned years later in Boy #60.

I found the cover on Heritage Auctions. It shows how good editor Charles Biro was at making his comics stand out on magazine racks crowded with comic books.

Number 2398: Short in the saddle

Luke Short’s name seems almost too good to be true. Short, an old West character who shot several men and killed many, if not most of them, was a short man. Maybe that is why men who were apt to pull their guns in a fight took him for an easy target. They were short-sighted.

Luke Short was something of an entrepreneur; he opened gambling dens, taverns, got into the boxing game as well as horse racing. But he also shot and killed people. Everyone has their flaws, I suppose. Short lived at the same time as well-known people like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson (who wrote a biographical tribute about Short after his death), but I had not heard much about him until I did a bit of research on this story from Crime Does Not Pay #29 (1943). The crime comics tried to justify showing crime and violence by having the criminal in the end get justice by being executed. They could not do much with Luke Short because he died of kidney disease, not a noose. A court found against him once for a shooting; he was fined $150 and released. You’d be selling Luke Short short if you assumed, as I did, that he was a typical Western bad man.

P.S. The Western novelist, Luke Short, used the name as a pseudonym. His real name was Frederick Dilley Glidden,

The Grand Comics Database has no idea who wrote or drew the story.

Number 2367: The funny side of murder

In its early days Crime Does Not Pay could be funny. As funny as crime and murder can be, that is.

Here we have two stories and a page of “gag” cartoons. (“This’ll Kill You!”) The cartoons were drawn by Dick Briefer. In one panel he drew himself with editors Biro and Wood. “The Poison Dove,” also by Briefer, looks like slapstick on the first page, but loses its funny very fast. “The Corpse That Wouldn’t Stay Dead” has some dark comedy about a barkeep and cronies attempting to bump off a homeless person (in those days called a “bum”) for insurance money. The problem is the victim keeps coming back. It is drawn by Jack Alderman. In those days Alderman had a stiff (ho-ho) art style and he used lots of ink and shadows to add to the noir qualities of his stories. The laugh it invokes in me is that Alderman drew Tweety and Sylvester stories for Dell in the late '50s.

The stories are from Crime Does Not Pay #29 (1943).

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Today is the thirteenth anniversary of Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine. I have been going through some old files I saved on CD, and I found some artifacts from 2006 of what I had originally intended for my blog. I was going to do a horror comics blog, and it was to be called The Grim Reader’s Horror Comics. I stole...errrr, appropriated some prospective headers from a Mexican comic book, and then had second thoughts. First, at that time I did not have enough material to scan for an all-horror comics blog. However, I had a couple of boxes full of golden age comics in varying degrees of bad shape, just right for scanning and presenting. A year later or so the idea of a horror comics blog, The Horrors Of It All, was brought to life by Steve “Karswell” Banes, and a very fine job he has done of it.

Here are the re-purposed and original images from a Mexican horror comic from 1987, Sensational de Terror. It’s a small comic book, 4 1/2 inches by 6 inches. It is missing now. I can never find it when I am looking for it. It hides from my sight by having larger comics put on top of it.