Number 2265: Killing is a bad career choice

Si Reddy and Arnie Walsh are a couple of old-time gangsters who are in the business of murdering people for money. Their reputations would spread by word of mouth.  Murder for hire might be lucrative enough, but doesn’t include health or dental insurance. There's no pension plan; none that I know of, anyway. A killer could make out pretty well until it was time to cut and run. In this case Si and Arnie don’t get a chance to enjoy their retirement or old age. For a killer, premature death is an occupational hazard.

“Trigger-Men by Trade” appeared in Fox Comics’ March of Crime* #7 (actually #1, 1950). No writer is listed, but the artist is Wallace Wood. Grand Comics Database gives him total credit, and he may have done it himself, but I think the odds are that another artist or two helped him out. It seems most, if not all, of Wood’s jobs for Fox have something in common: the splash page is usually the best artwork in the story. Early Wood collaborator Harry Harrison explained the team’s dealing with the art director at Fox in an interview in Graphic Story Magazine in 1970: “We would slide in this ten-page pile of crap with a real good splash page for the first page on top. He would look at only the top page and count the other nine, flipping through them real fast. Nobody really cared about the quality. No one looked at these books; no one read the things very carefully.”

Also, Fox was a slow-payer, if he paid at all. He soon went bankrupt and Star Comics, run by L.B. Cole, picked up his inventory. Over the next couple of years Star reprinted many stories originally published by Fox, the self-proclaimed “King of the Comics.” This story does not have a GCD record of being reprinted.

*March of Crime was a play on words, in this case the newsreel series, The March of Time, shown in movie theaters from 1935 to 1951, and heard on radio from 1935-1945. Time, Inc., publisher of both Time and Life magazines, might have taken a dim view of a garish crime comic book using a variation on their title, which may be why the comic book only lasted three issues

Number 1027


The Lady and the Beetle


Comic book publisher Victor Fox had a reputation for being a sharpy in business. Fox went with trends like crime, jungle and love and despite the woeful company management Fox Features made their comics interesting and sleazy--to attract readers. They went out of business, anyway. Being a sharpy has a way of coming back on a businessman.

Phantom Lady was an established character with Quality Comics, created by the Eisner-Iger studio. To make a long story short--because the Phantom Lady's history with different publishers needs a genealogy chart to make sense--Phantom Lady was published by Fox when Jerry Iger's shop was producing comics for them, including eight issues of Phantom Lady, just before the demise of Fox Features publications. The numbering began with #13, so these two stories are from the first issue.

Matt Baker signed the artwork on the Phantom Lady story, but the Blue Beetle strip is signed Otis. I see occasional flashes of Baker in the Blue Beetle artwork--a couple of faces and some poses here and there--but it looks to me as if more than one, and maybe more than two artists worked over the strip. Since the inking looks consistent I'm guessing one artist inked the whole mess to give it some sort of cohesiveness.

The proportions were changed on the Phantom Lady strip. It was originally shorter, so artwork was added to the tops of the panels. Why was it drawn that way originally? I dunno.

From Phantom Lady #13, 1947:

Number 787

Crime Does Pay Week: Charlie Birger and the Birger-Shelton War

This is day two of Pappy's Crime Does Pay Week.

According to the Grand Comics Database this ultra-violent example of the art of the crime comic is drawn by a young Gil Kane, published in Murder Incorporated #1, in 1948. Victor Fox was the publisher, and his books of this era almost single-handedly define sleaze.

As for the actual comic book, the story has some element of truth; there was a Charlie Birger, and he did have a war with beer rivals, the Shelton brothers, in Illinois during Prohibition. They did use armored cars, and did use a plane for an aerial attack. Something not told in the story (nor told in another version in Atlas' All True Crime #28, from later in 1948, either) is that before they went to war, Birger and Shelton were partners in the beer biz during a time the Ku Klux Klan was heavily involved in the area. The KKK had decided Prohibition was a good thing. It was so lawless there that KKK members would go into private homes looking for alcohol, and take offenders to a special Klan jail! Between Birger and Shelton they managed to push the Klan out of the area, maybe the only time in the sorry history of the sorry-ass Klan that the tables were turned.

The cover of Murder Incorporated #1, artwork attributed to John Forte, has a cover slug that says For Adults Only. How much do you think that mattered when a kid handed over his dime?