Number 1518: Bad example

Joe (also called Jack) Slade has either a bad reputation as a Western outlaw, or he wasn’t that bad, depending on who you listen to or what you read. If you google the name you get a couple of versions of the life and career of Slade. The story about Slade I’m showing today is strictly in the bad man camp. But that isn’t the reason I’m showing this story from Desperado #1 (1948). It has to do with the declaration by publisher Lev Gleason, shown here, as to an internal self-censorship code for their line of comic books.

As you can see, there are specific instructions to follow, like number 10, “blood must not be seen flowing from the face or mouth. . .” Then you turn to page 3 of the story and what do you see? Blood flowing from a face. The story is excessively violent; killings pile up, and despite instruction number 2, “sadism or torture . . . will not be accepted,” on the final page a panel shows a half-nude man tied to a tree in a snowstorm, kept alive “in the freezing air” while pleading for death. In the history of comic books and the late forties-early fifties response to calls for censorship or outright banning of crime comics altogether this response from a publisher, with its “much needed form of self-imposed censorship,” may be the most extreme fubar in evidence. Had Dr. Wertham seen this story and the attendant message he may have devoted a chapter of Seduction of the Innocent to the hypocrisy.

Oh yeah...one more thing as long as I’m complaining. I hate the gimmick of the gun telling the story. Anthropomorphizing an inanimate object — another outrage!

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.

Number 1239: The inside joke

There’s an inside joke in this Steel Sterling story. Charles Biro wrote his buddy, Bob Wood, into the story as “Pig-Pan Wood.” His face, we are told on the wanted poster, “resembles that of a pig.” I wonder if Wood had any foreknowledge of this alleged joke, or what he thought of it.

About 15 years later Wood killed a woman in a hotel during an alcoholic binge. That tale is told in Blackjacked and Pistol-Whipped, Crime Does Not Pay. It’s an excellent anthology of lurid stories from the Biro-Wood edited Crime Does Not Pay comic book, which had its own nefarious history. These pictures of Bob Wood and Charlie Biro are from the book:

If anyone had a pig-pan it wasn’t Wood.

I found a real Pig-Pan — the resemblance is striking, you must admit — while surfing through some local mugshots. Yes, I entertain myself, not only by reading comics, but gawking at ID photos of people who end up in jail with their pictures posted on the Internet. The man whose photo this is was charged with “failing to register as a sex offender.”

From Zip Comics #11 (1941), by Joe Blair and Charles Biro:

Number 1129: Charles Biro and Bob Wood's eye a-peel

As I mentioned a few days ago, Bob Wood, who partnered with Charles Biro to create and edit Crime Does Not Pay, a few years later was convicted of killing a girlfriend. The story is told in the trade paperback, Blackjacked and Pistol-Whipped: Crime Does Not Pay, from Dark Horse Comics, along with over 200 pages of crime comic book stories from that magazine.

These two stories predate Crime Does Not Pay. They're from Daredevil #11 (1942), which was published soon after war was declared against Japan, and I've included a centerspread board game called "Slap the Jap." Sorry for the racist content, folks. It was wartime, and it's interesting, an elaborate game for a comic book.

Biro's early stuff was as lurid as he could make it. He knew what got attention on newsstands, and he hewed to primary colors to make his stories stand out. Quality Comics was doing much the same thing. Someone once commented that coloring like this is "like taking a potato peeler to your eyeballs." Even so, for emphasis I've given the coloring a little extra push to make it really bright. If any eye damage occurs, well, sorry. You've been warned.

I have shown both these stories before, a few years ago, but these are brand new scans.

Bob Wood's story of The Claw, despite his drawing, has a lot of energy to it, though, just as Biro's tale of a murderous horror movie star does. That kind of energy went into Crime Does Not Pay when that publication began with a date a month later than this issue of Daredevil, July 1942 to the Daredevil date of June.