Number 1347: It’s a jungle out there

Here’s another of my “Crime Wave” selections. You may remember a few weeks ago I told you that I had planned on introducing a new blog to show just crime comics stories, but decided I was too lazy busy to do it justice. So occasionally I'll be showing crime stories under this logo just so my plan won’t go totally to waste.

“The Jungle.” a story of a prison escape, is from Crime and Punishment #43 (1951). It’s drawn by the under-rated Robert Q. Sale, who worked in comics for a few years, and did excellent work for several companies. The Lambiek Comiclopedia gives Sale another name, Robert Q. Siegel, which I assume was his birth name. Also according to Lambiek, he died in 1962 at the very young age of 38. The story I had heard about Sale was for a time he shared studio space with Harvey Kurtzman, John Severin and Will Elder in the Charles William Harvey Studio.

Number 1324: “Go West, young bad man!”

This is the fourth and last posting of our Pappy's Crime Wave week. Today we travel back to the Civil War era, with two stories about William Quantrill and his guerrilla force that sacked Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863.

It was only natural that crime comics would use the Wild West as a source of stories. Comics followed trends. Western movies were very popular at the time. A lot of Western comics were published, with some thinly disguised crime comics set 100 years ago. It wasn't uncommon for different comics to draw upon the same bad men, and multiple stories were done on the most famous outlaws. All “true,” of course (see Monday's post).

Compare these two stories. “Will Quantrill, General of an Army of Murderers” is drawn by Bob Fujitani, from Crime Does Not Pay #64 (1948), and “Quantrill, the Killer’s Killer” is from Fox Publications’ Western True Crime #4 (1949), drawn by Johnny Craig. The latter story goes into some heavy moralizing: Quantrill is so evil the devil is afraid of him, so he wanders as a ghost! It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but that kind of preachiness is over the top and didn’t fool the anti-comics people.

Number 1323: Love is a crime

Can a girl from a slum with no prospects for the future find a better life? Can a girl without a father, who knows nothing of men, find happiness with a man who brings her along on a jewelry store robbery? Can a girl meet a hunky parole officer and find true love? Can I stop asking stupid questions?

This is day three of Pappy’s Crime Wave week. For more information visit the past two postings.

Poor Dotty. She is stuck in town in summer. As she so vividly narrates, “. . . the damp tongue of August licked the slum in which I lived!” So she takes up with Nicky, the local bad boy, and he leads her into trouble. Sometimes love comics like this, from Darling Love #1 (1949), could also be crime comics. Simon and Kirby were especially good at stories like this. “I Was Branded Bad” isn’t S&K. but it’s not bad, either. It just looks a bit generic to me. The artist is unidentified, but the publisher is actually Archie Comics, with a bit of distance between itself and the teenage books.

Because it’s a love comic, you know things will turn out well for Dotty, and she will find true love. There’s something for you to love, also. On the last page there’s a recipe for fudge!

Number 1322: Crime and/or Punishment

For day two of Pappy’s Crime Wave week (see yesterday's post for an explanation) we have the standard crime comic; i.e., what most people, especially censors, bluenoses and joykillers, meant when they pointed at something and said, “That's a crime comic!”

Crime and Punishment #1* came out in late 1947 and became the companion publication to the standard-bearer of the genre, Crime Does Not Pay. The publisher was Lev Gleason, the editors Charles Biro and Bob Wood, just like Crime Does Not Pay. We find the same kind of contents in the latter magazine as we do in the former...panel after panel of lurid criminal acts and in the last couple of panels some sort of moral and the criminal’s just due. He (or she in many cases) either ended up on the gallows, in the electric chair, or died a violent death by either cops or fellow crooks.

The contents of crime comics varied with American crime mixed in with crime in other countries. In this case we see Dan Barry’s great artwork on “Danny Iamasca, Dutch Schultz’s Triggerman” and Jack Alderman’s ink-heavy art on “The Butcher of Düsseldorf.” A note about crime comics: Their use of the word “true” doesn’t mean their version of truth got in the way of telling a good story. Truth may have figured in there somewhere, but not at the expense of cheap thrills. An exception might be made in the case of Peter Kürten, the Butcher of Düsseldorf (also called the Düsseldorf Vampire). His many crimes were so depraved the scripter and artist restrained themselves in telling the story. And that’s the truth.

C.H. Moore had a regular gig doing these informational pages. They were quite good. Moore used a style perfected by sports cartoonists in newspapers and also in the famous “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.”

*There’s internal evidence that the title of the comic was originally Obey the Law but was changed to Crime and Punishment during production.