Number 1572: Tough-talkin' and straight-shootin' — Good night, Irene!

Irene Shrader  (sometimes spelled Schroeder), took up with Glenn Dague, who had left his wife and children for her. What interested me about the story is that a part of it (the part that got the pair the electric chair) took place near my son’s home in Western Pennsylvania. This article from The Lawrence County [PA] Memoirs is one of the better articles I’ve read about the pair.

There is a way crime comics presented women as criminals, which was to show them tougher than their men. The males were portrayed as being followers, even wimpy. The women robbed and killed without mercy and ordered their significant others to do the same. This version, drawn by George Tuska for Crime Does Not Pay #57 (1947) has a fairly standard panel-by-panel description of Shrader/Schroeder and Dague’s short but murderous career. Lots of tough dialogue and action to match. There is also Irene’s speech in the final panel where she says to Dague, “We were wrong in goin' bad, Glenn! It doesn’t pay!” Considering Irene’s psychopathy I doubt she ever expressed such a thought. Part of any psychopath’s mental make-up is to blame their victims rather than themselves.

Shrader/Schroeder has the dubious distinction of being the first woman executed by electric chair in Pennsylvania, and only the fourth woman in America executed by that method.

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Number 1422: Brother Rats

Another sensational crime further sensationalized by Charles Biro and George Tuska, from Crime Does Not Pay #49 (1947). (Thanks to Darkmark for the issue number correction.) The DeAutremont brothers were Oregon lumberjacks who tried to rob a train in 1923, killed three men, and then fled.

It took four years, forensics work and wanted posters to bring the brothers to justice. All of them were caught, all were sentenced to long terms in prison. The panel of the calendar leaves shows 1942, by which time all three brothers were serving their sentences. The sequence that follows, of Hugh DeAutremont as a soldier in the U.S. Army serving in the Philippines and being recognized, actually happened in 1927. It is a reminder that when you see the word “true” in a crime comic, better doublecheck the story. You can read more about the DeAutremonts here.

I posted this story several years ago, but these are new scans:

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Number 1388: Tough guy Tuska

A story about George Tuska has gone around for a long time. (It is also in semi-fictional form in The Dreamer by Will Eisner.) A woman — memory tells me it was Toni Blum — who wrote scripts for the artists in the comic shop bullpen was the subject of talk by the guys. Tuska liked her. Bob Powell apparently said something sexually insulting about her and Tuska got up from his board and punched Powell to the floor. In another report I read, Tuska, who was a big guy — and Powell was not — stood over Powell and said in the voice of Lennie (Lon Chaney Jr in Of Mice and Men), “You shouldn’t ought to have done that, Bob.” True, or exaggerated? I dunno. Good story no matter the truth? Hell, yeah!

Tuska did the artwork on this lead story from Crime Does Not Pay #56 (1947). Cover by Biro.

Tuska, in my opinion, was at the absolute top of his illustrative skills when he did stories for Charlie Biro at Crime Does Not Pay. Biro was a demanding editor who made the artists draw everything, and that was even though the stories were burdened with text, captions and overloaded speech balloons. Still, Tuska managed to get all of the characters and violence into the panels. And speaking of violence, the sensitive among you need to be warned of some of the panels: a knife slices a cheek, a woman is shot.

Violence like that was part of what inflamed adults about crime comics being sold to children. Something a bit more subtle in this story is the message about being a squealer. Guys who tell on criminals meet a bad end. Remember that, kids.

 More classic Tuska: Butt Riley! Click on the picture.

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Your eyes will pop!

Another thing to cause concern amongst crime comic critics of the era is this ad from the same issue of Crime Does Not Pay: additional reading material from a third-party publisher. Five books, four of them concerned with crime. I don’t know for sure about the kids in 1947, but I sure would like to read them, and get the “hidden secrets, helpful information, inside ‘dope’.” That could be interpreted as ways to commit crimes. But there is one book, How Detectives Catch Crooks, that would be especially helpful. We still have that today: television programs about crime-busting through forensics, showing police methods, have helped some criminals.

It’s human nature to want to know about “Big-shot Gangsters, their crimes, careers and deaths!” and I’m no different. But I don’t plan to emulate them. I don’t commit crimes because I’m not a criminal, no matter how many books I read or TV shows I watch about crime. I suspect that’s true about most people, or despite all the crime-saturated entertainment the crime rate would be a lot higher than it is.

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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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