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 2086: That girl is poison!

This is number two of our theme week, featuring comic book females of the forties.

We ended July with a story of a male poisoner, William Campbell, and now a tale of a female poisoner, Marquise De Brinvilliers, who allegedly poisoned her family members during the time of Louis XIV of France. As in the story, told in Real Crime Comics Vol. 5 No. 5 (1950), De Brinvilliers was arrested by a cop posing as a priest.

What isn’t shown is that the Marquise was tortured, beheaded and burned at the stake. There was also the major scandal of the Affair of the Poisons, touched off after her arrest, which led to the execution of 36 people. It is not covered in the comic book version. (You can read about it here). Our version is drawn by John Prentice. Prentice’s strong illustrative style shows even with the blobby printing of the comic book. A few years later, after the death of “Rip Kirby” artist, Alex Raymond, Prentice was given the job of continuing the comic strip. Prentice died in 1999.

I am also pleased by the poster-like effect of the cover by Prentice, which is either a re-drawing or a blow-up of a panel from the story.

Number 1037


The fine art comic book artist


Gerald McCann was a comic book veteran, another journeyman, who was also a painter, a fine artist. I don't have much information on him beyond his birth year of 1916. If McCann is still alive he's about 95-years-old by now, but nowhere online could I find a date of death. If you google Gerald McCann you can find examples of his fine art.

McCann did comic books across the genres, but specialized in crime and later in TV tie-ins. He had a fine artist's eye for panel composition. The two moody crime stories I've got here have a noir feel to them. McCann worked into the 1960s, at least, for Dell (Ghost Stories) and for ACG editor, Richard E. Hughes. Today I'm showing one of his later stories from a 1963 issue of Adventures Into the Unknown.

Here's a link to a Western story McCann did for Avon.

From Murderous Gangsters #3, 1952:








From Real Clue Crime Stories Vol. 6 #2, 1951:








From Adventures Into the Unknown #143, 1963:

Number 898


Boss Tweed


The story--to me, anyway--isn't that with his drawings cartoonist Thomas Nast helped bring down the New York Tweed political ring in the 1870s, but that 140 years later the kind of corruption practiced by Tweed and his Tammany Hall gangsters is still going on in places around the country.

This story doesn't show Nast, but mentions him. Here are a couple of his Tweed cartoons, which helped people of the time recognize the “boss”. Do you think Tweed really had that remorse filled soliloquy in his cell as shown in that last panel? In a perfect world, maybe.


“Boss Tweed”, attributed to Dan Barry-with-a-question-mark by the Grand Comics Database, is from the 1948 Real Clue Crime Stories, Vol. 3 No. 2.