Number 1354: The homicidal maniac

Looking at this Zebra story from Green Hornet Comics I asked myself, “Superhero or crime comic?” Since the subject of the story is a crazed killer with a female accomplice, it seems more crime comic. I counted the panels (yes, I have been known to do things like that), and found that of 63 panels, the Zebra appears in only seven, including the splash. It fits into my Crime Wave series.

If serial killers looked like Maurice they’d be easier to spot. Maurice’s tongue lolls out and he giggles. He doesn’t care who (or what, check out the bug squash) he kills. It was not untypical for a Zebra story to regularly feature some grotesque villains. With Bob Fujitani's deft drawing in an Eisner-style, the killer is portrayed in all his psychopathic fury.

From Green Hornet Comics #26, 1945:

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Number 1337: Prince Valiant and the Island of Thunder!

As a Sunday comics Prince Valiant fan, even as a youngster in the '50s, I mostly scorned the Dell Comics version of Hal Foster’s weekly masterpiece. They were not reprints of Foster’s pages, but original stories. Looking at them now I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. I think artist Bob Fujitani captured Foster’s distinctive style.

This issue, the Prince Valiant one-shot, Four Color #900 (1958), was the last of the original adventures of Prince Valiant from Dell. They had begun in ’54 with an adaptation of the Robert Wagner/Janet Leigh movie version. Overstreet credits Fujitani with all of the artwork on the one-shots, but the Grand Comics Database has no information on a writer or cover artist for this issue.

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Number 1324: “Go West, young bad man!”

This is the fourth and last posting of our Pappy's Crime Wave week. Today we travel back to the Civil War era, with two stories about William Quantrill and his guerrilla force that sacked Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863.

It was only natural that crime comics would use the Wild West as a source of stories. Comics followed trends. Western movies were very popular at the time. A lot of Western comics were published, with some thinly disguised crime comics set 100 years ago. It wasn't uncommon for different comics to draw upon the same bad men, and multiple stories were done on the most famous outlaws. All “true,” of course (see Monday's post).

Compare these two stories. “Will Quantrill, General of an Army of Murderers” is drawn by Bob Fujitani, from Crime Does Not Pay #64 (1948), and “Quantrill, the Killer’s Killer” is from Fox Publications’ Western True Crime #4 (1949), drawn by Johnny Craig. The latter story goes into some heavy moralizing: Quantrill is so evil the devil is afraid of him, so he wanders as a ghost! It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but that kind of preachiness is over the top and didn’t fool the anti-comics people.

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