Number 1442: Shanghai Chicken

The Grand Comics Database credits Wallace Wood with penciling and inking the lead story from Fox’s Inside Crime #3 (1950). Even before I read the story I saw that Wood had done the splash page, the inside front cover, pencils, inks and lettering, but his familiar style only pops up occasionally in the nine pages to follow. Fox was notorious for either slow or non-payment, and my guess is it was a story done quickly, probably by at least one other artist than Wood, and maybe even more. Wood worked with several other artists during his career. At one time his main collaborator was Harry Harrison, although I’d have to depend on someone else to tell me if Harrison worked on this story.

Johnny Devine, the “Shanghai Chicken” was a real person, an Irish immigrant who became a crimper, a man who provided men for ships’ crews by the practice of shanghaiing (kidnap). The story, set in the 1860s, has anachronisms, and very little or no research was done for the drawings. So far I haven’t been able to track down the origin of a nickname like “Chicken”, which in context of the times doesn’t mean a coward as it does today. When I googled “Shanghai Chicken” I came up with some tasty recipes for a Chinese dish.