Number 1505: Gypped while talking to the dead!

Do you believe in mediums? Do you believe you can communicate with dead loved ones through a third party? Then you could be easy prey for swindlers.* All you have to do is read this cautionary tale from Joe Simon and Jack Kirby from Headline Comics #27 (1947) to see tricks of the phony spiritualist trade to separate you from your all-too-real cash.

For some reason, Jack and Joe liked stories featuring women who had learned hard lessons in life. In this tale the woman tells her story from prison, where she is serving a stretch for ripping off the gullible.

*I guess to minimize the risk of offending “real” mediums, the author tells us right at the start, “A great many spiritualists in this country are on the level...”

This is a chance for me to plug the book, Simon and Kirby Library Crime, published in 2011. It is still available. Ask your local comic book retailer to get it for you, or order it from an online retailer like Amazon.com. The story I have posted today does not appear in the book.

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Number 1481: “Bring me his corpse!”

Yesterday was the annual Great American Feast of Thanksgiving, when hundreds of millions of people consume huge amounts of calories: turkey, mashed potatoes, yams, pumpkin pie... Not only did I eat too much, turkeys are loaded with tryptophan, which puts people to sleep...including......me.............zzzzzzz-zzzzzzzzzz

Oh, hey, but we have a post today, don’t we? It’s about artist Bill Draut, who was part of the Simon and Kirby studio when they were doing comics in the late '40s. Draut was a longtime journeyman comic book man, drawing for DC into the '70s, working on various romance, mystery and war titles. His early work showed a fully formed Caniff-style, which was very popular in the forties. According to Lambiek.com, besides his later comic book work Draut also did model sheets for the G.I. Joe TV cartoon show. He died in 1993.

From Headline Comics #27 (1947), Draut does two stories, one a police procedural about a dead gangster, the other a story of a hot wife and a cold husband (real cold, as in dead.)

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Number 1410: Baby Face, you've got the deadest little baby face...

Lester Gillis, AKA Baby Face Nelson, died after a shootout with FBI agents in November, 1934. I heard the story of Baby Face early in my life from my father. It helped form my fascination with the early ’30s motor-gangsters who robbed banks and ran wild. The best account I’ve read of this lawless era is Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough. The book was made into a movie but focused mostly on John Dillinger (and got a lot of details wrong, including Baby Face’s death).

This particular version of the death of Baby Face, drawn by Jack Kirby for Headline Comics #23 (1947), is also loose with the details, editing the story considerably. But the thing that makes this particular crime comic so desirable is it is all Simon and Kirby, full of action, guns and gangsters,

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Number 789

Crime Does Pay Week: Dope is for dopes

Today is the final day of Pappy's Crime Does Pay Week:

Jack Kirby addressed the crimes of picking pockets and shoplifting in Headline Comics #31, "I Was A Shoplifter In An Organized Pickpocket Gang!" Gee, your honor, my mommy wouldn't buy me have a lolly when I was a little girl, and it turned me into a criminal! Kirby mixes a romance story--a genre he and partner Joe Simon created and perfected--in with a crime story. The power of Kirby's art propels this soap opera, even with ridiculous names for characters like "Mollie-The-Lift" and "Lightfinger Fred". Picking pockets may be an art, but nowadays, even in an age of high-tech security technology, so is shoplifting. I read just the other day that despite increasingly newer technology retail theft is a bigger problem than ever.

Drugs are covered in this optimistic and naïve story from Wanted Comics #13. It supposes if you shut off the supply, the drug problem will dry up. Over sixty years later we're still finding out how hard that is to do. The artwork by Mort Leav on this strip, especially its terrific symbolic splash, is excellent.

With the exception of last Sunday's post from Crime Does Not Pay #22, all of the stories I've presented this week are from comics dated during 1948. That must've been a helluva year. If Dr. Wertham was correct, the crime rates must've gone off the charts with the sudden surge of youngsters being lured into the criminal life by the popular comic books of the era.

"Crime does not pay, but crime comics do." --Fredric Wertham, Seduction Of The Innocent

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