BLACK-JACKED AND PISTOL-WHIPPED: A CRIME DOES NOT PAY PRIMER

Original Series of Comic Books Edited (and Often Drawn) by Charles Biro and Bob Wood
This Collection Edited by Denis Kitchen of Kitchen, Lind and Associates
224 page, 6.5 x 10, color, Dark Horse, paperback with stylish flaps, $19.99

Although mostly a reprint of selected stories from the infamous landmark Golden Age comic book Crime Does Not Pay, the most intriguing aspect of this book is advertised on the Biro-style cover (ingeniously contrived by Pete Poplaski) which, apart from depicting a man attacking a woman by smashing her face with an electric iron, trumpets: The True Story of Bob Wood, The Killer Cartoonist. And we learn subsequently by reading Kitchen’s profusely illustrated essay at the beginning that the lurid cover actually pictures the murder for which cartoonist Wood was convicted in 1958.

The stories in the book sample the content of Crime Does Not Pay from 1942 (beginning with a story from its second issue drawn by Bob Montana) through 1948; why we get no stories from the book’s last years (it died with the June 1955 issue as a result of the Comics Code Authority) is a mystery, but it doesn’t matter. As a glimpse of the kind of comic book that inspired Fredric Wertham’s 1954 anti-funnybook crusade in Seduction of the Innocent, what we have here is more than adequate.

The early stories were clumsily drawn, but after a year or so, we started getting a few notables on the art — artists who would make names for themselves elsewhere: Carmine Infantino, Dan Barry, George Tuska, and Fred Guardineer, even Montana, as noted, and Dick Briefer. Lots of gruesome firearm violence, which grows gruesomer as the years flick by, but not much sex, surprisingly, given Wertham’s preoccupation with how pneumatic portraits of the fairer sex in comic books corrupted American youth.

Reproduction is startlingly uneven: the simple clean linear work of Infantino and Briefer (drawing in a nearly bigfoot manner) reproduces okay, but the more realistic highly feathered and noodled-over efforts of other artists are marred by blotched clusters of fine lines or lines that drop out altogether.

Again, no matter. Informative as the reprinted stories are, the prefatory history of Lev Gleason Publications and of the roles played by Biro and Wood is a solid secondary reason to own this volume. Their stories are available elsewhere in various guises but here, it’s all together.

Among the happier tidbits Kitchen discloses: Biro (like one of his characters, Crimebuster) had a pet monkey that sat on his shoulder as he worked, “and the way the monkey behaved was said to be a clue to Biro’s mood that day.” And Harvey Kurtzman’s acclaimed war stories for EC were influenced by the unemotional realism of Biro’s crime stories, which Biro may, or may not, have written all that many of. Kitchen alludes to David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague, in which Hajdu (who has not yet impressed me with the acumen of his observations) claims the principle writer of Crime was Virginia Hubbell.