If Not Superheroes, What? Part VIII - Crime Comics

Even though superhero comics sometimes deal with the more mundane aspects of crime - meaning crimes involving targets on a human scale, performed by perpetrators on a human scale - the predominant characters of these stories remain more central. Criminals may reappear or disappear, as subsequent writers may deign appropriate, but, in general, superhero comics tend to answer the question "What did Insert Name Man do next?"

Crime comics, on the other hand, working, as did the other genres in the age before the standards of continuity required that everything interconnect whether this improved the stories or not, could examine a crime itself as a story, as viewed through the eyes either of a perpetrator or of the victim, rather than the man in costume. More possibilities exist, in some ways, when characters need never reappear.

The crime in crime comics, furthermore, serves a different function in terms of the story than it might in the superhero comics. In a superhero comic, a crime exists to give the hero something to prevent, decipher, or avenge. In the crime comics, on the other hand, the crime exists as a theater of human perversity, showing the depths to which throwaway characters can sink when they follow impulses which they should have tried harder to contain. The crime in crime comics plays the role of hubris in classical Greek theater, where a tragic flaw would bring the hero down because he deserved it and an orderly universe did not allow his sins to go unpunished.

Crime in superhero comics provides a scenario in which some character can play out fantasies of power or heroism and thereby reach the reader through his connection to such wants or virtues. Crime in crime comics, on the other hand, provides a morbid thrill that comes with watching our fellow men misbehave, but with a further reward at the end when we see that, in spite of the finesse with which he attempted to step beyond his station through disreputable means, it all comes back to ruin him in the end.

Origins

History and popular entertainments created the lurid crime story as a genre before it became the substance of crime comics. A number of historical factors brought crime more and more into the public mind. Fear of the advance of foreign subversion after the Bolshevik Revolution inclined many to anticipate bomb-throwing fiends behind every shadow; then, as if enough paranoia didn't already infest the popular consciousness, the Volstead Act created prohibition and the wave of crime that went with it.

With the new culture of crime came a new culture of policing, no longer local but at a national level. Criminals became celebrities in their own right, as did the local and federal policemen who contended with them. Legend and fraud abounded on both sides of the equation, and decadent episodes like Edgar Hoover using federal employees on government time to write adulatory biographies of himself fit into this pattern.

After patterns of crime shifted away from the bootlegger culture and the overstated menace of bomb-throwing Stalinists, the interest in crime remained, and played a central role in the fundamental premise of both pulp heroes and superheroes. Indeed, the crime element itself sufficed to make a comics premise work, without the recurring personalities or extravagant posturing involved with the superhero and the pulp hero.

The Pretext of Verity

Just as the romance comics would, crime comics frequently proceeded with claims that each story originated in real events, torn from the front page of newspapers or from authentic police files. While some might argue that newspapers and police files contain large doses of fiction masquerading as fact, in the case of the crime comics we can view this less as a deplorable fraud and more as a convention of the form. Even in other media, after all, crime dramas often made similar claims. "Dragnet," for instance, featured disclaimers saying the episode featured real events but changed names to protect the innocent (and, perhaps, the producers as well).

A bit too much of the fantastic, both in methods and outcomes, marks crime comics for anyone to take truth claims at face value. Especially the tendency to inflict poetic justice on characters stands as a particularly unlikely aspect of the stories featured within. Without delving too far into the cynical, one can note that the anonymity of cities provides considerable leeway in which someone can commit a crime and, perhaps, never see due punishment in the world of the living.

The crime comics, however, lived in a world where crime and punishment travel together, almost as if a moral equivalent of a physical law requires it. Something like the Law of Conservation of Karma shapes events in this kind of story, partially because the writers of crime comics did have some kind of moral underpinning, and partially because the story resolves more neatly if the villain doesn't simply get to exit and walk into the sunset of a happy ending after some atrocity that might fill several forensics files.

Movie-Gangster Chic

The legendary Depression-era gangster, with his peculiar (and sometimes Hollywood-manufactured) mannerisms and styles, had become a silly and easily mocked cliche by the time the EC crime comics hit the racks in the early fifties.

Comics, however, often viewed this as a memorable and entertaining era with easily recognizable criminals and easily adaptable events. Kirby's crime comics, a product of the seventies, somewhat explored the Prohibition-era crime mythos (and, perhaps, incorporated a small piece of it into a segment of New Gods for the "Orion Gang" sequence).

With the gangster in the pin-striped suit already an amusing cliche thanks to overuse on the big and little screens, affected versions of the style could provide considerable comedic appeal (such as in pieces like "Guys and Dolls"). Nor did the crime comics fail to exploit such opportunities.

Given that a crime comic could illuminate the human condition in equal detail when set in the present day (of publication) or set in the movie-gangster era, or, indeed, when set among supposedly-modern types who fail to grasp that the movie gangster era ended decades previously (as in the scanned image, above), this element occurred occasionally without becoming an important genre convention. The absence of such a standard served the form well, in that casting a form (crime comics) after another form (mid-twentieth-century gangster films) would needlessly limit the choices of settings and characters available to artists and writers.

Karmic Rewards

Crime comics would, when comics in general came up to the bar to answer charges of contributing to the corruption of youth, play a central role in taking flak for bad role modeling and gratuitous violence. Nonetheless, many of the crime comics dabbled in a moralistic world view where ill-intentions and bad deeds came back to bite the malefactor.

Arsonists might die in the very houses they had set alight. Killers might find themselves murdered by the hired goons they had sent out to deal with their enemies. Frameups might turn around to snare the schemers who planned them.

Critics of comics as a popular entertainment frequently overlooked (or dismissed as irrelevant) the general inevitability of the downfall of evildoers in crime comics, pointing instead to formidable figures that counted the numbers of shootings, knifings, and miscellaneous applications of lethal or semi-lethal force that a theoretical average American consumer of comics might encounter across a career of reading comics.

Perhaps, as the concerned psychologists of the day claimed, the "crime never pays" resolutions of these tales involved no more than a conceit or convention used to stamp the otherwise graphic and lurid material within a crime comic as (more) legitimate or (more) respectable. Or, perhaps, the flow of the story implied such a resolution rather than the desire to provide edifying examples to young people; a story about a criminal rampage lacks the same impact, the same emotional payoff if, in the end, the killers just whistle as they drive off into the sunset.

Wanton Gold-Diggers

Women who drive men to steal to feed their insatiable desire for material things, and women who, themselves, steal, form the backbone of one category of crime story in comics. To some degree one could view this as a misogynistic element, although it details an almost-inevitable consequence of defining men as good mates because of their ability to provide more and better stuff.

The wanton-gold digger of such stories has no patience and no sense of "enough" when it comes to material demands, and, as such, brings about the downfall of the man or men who court her, or, occasionally, herself.

However, when a story wanted to represent a gold-digger in a particularly loathsome light, it might invert the concept and introduce a situation where a parasitic male used a wealthier female for her assets, meaning, by fifties standards, a marriage or relationship where he got all the benefits and she got all the burdens. And, indeed, a number of pieces involve younger men preying on older women, or good-for-nothing males abusing their heiress spouses by adopting a life of dissipation, and the like.

Given the specimen of crime comics available to me, mostly Gemstone EC reprint pieces, I would identify the most peculiar gold-digger story as one involving a case of fraternal twins, male and female, where the brother, seeking the money of his female twin who married well while he mostly led a life on the streets, panhandling for booze. Imagine, if you will, a man who burns his sister and brother-in-law to death in their home, then adopts a life in drag to impersonate his dead sister, until giving himself away before a detective by adjourning to freshen up in the wrong restroom.

With the gold-digger story, the sleazy miner for other peoples' money either suffers exposure of the plan, as in the last story, or dies from some consequence of the original crime committed to get the money, or, in rarer cases, leaps to his death thinking the cops have come for him when the insistent knock at the door really belongs to someone telling the crook he has inherited a fortune. Even before the Comics Code Authority made rules defining how stories must come out, few folks seem to have gotten away with someone else's money.

(Im)Perfect Crimes

Radix malorem cupiditas est: Evil, one might translate, comes from the desire to possess material things. Shortcuts to acquire wealth and the things wealth can purchase frequently embroil the impatient or greedy in schemes that do great harm to others, and, in their ultimate failure, to the seeker after wealth.

Such an assemblage of flouted murders, botched robberies, unsuccessful framings, and miscellaneous aborted misdemeanors could easily provide material for a true-crime show called "America's Most Clueless and Pathetic Excuses for Criminals," but here represent another central convention of the form. As well, within the parameters of a theme and variations, crime comics sought to explore the various ways that criminal plots could fail.

In a number of these stories, we see the criminal spending much of the story in self-congratulation over having come up with a foolproof plan. We see detailed description of how a killer or robber might create an impermeable alibi; how to clean an evidence trail so that the relentless hounds of the law either have nothing to work with or, even better, have a false trail to follow; and, sometimes, how to run across town on foot in under five minutes to get home in time to bludgeon one's wife to death with a fireplace poker. However, although the spouse-killers, robbers, and miscellaneous assassins credit themselves with great attention to detail, something remains behind to betray them, even where writers must contrive the betraying clues.

Creative Alternatives to Divorce

A significant fraction of the stories in crime comics dealt with creative alternatives to divorce. Beyond the requirements that the unwanted spouse cease to exist and, in the process, pass on any available wealth to the widow or widower, few constraints existed in such ad hoc alternatives to remaining married. Frequently, though by no means in all cases, the target of homicide had some flaw, such as obesity, drunkenness, age, jealousy, or another trait that one would tend to agree that divorce might handle well; but some barrier, usually money, made divorce impractical.

Often in divorce-murder stories some party intends a clever substitution, and in these pieces we might see some of the strains imposed on the Willing Suspension of Disbelief on the reader's part. After all, how likely can we consider it that someone would succeed with a plan to replace one's murdered wife with a girlfriend modified by cosmetic surgery? Or how often might we expect two spouse-slayers to succeed by attempting to pass themselves off as both couples?

In this particular crime, we see the normal unraveling of plans where someone has left behind a clue that ultimately brings the law on them. But another resolution frequently appears where the replacement beau or belle proves to show all the loathsome traits of the original, setting the stage in the last panels for the criminal(s) to fall victim to the same fate contrived for others earlier in the story.

The Talent

My own research pointed to pieces readily available via impulse purchase in a comics shop - therefore, Gemstone's pre-Code EC crime comics reprints gave the specimens from which to analyze the genre. This will naturally slant any analysis of who made crime comics favor the credited talents appearing in these collections.

In such a canon, we can expect the name of Al Feldstein to appear, as a ubiquitous EC figure. F. C. Aljon also appears in some credits, notably in a number of pre-1950 stories. Johnny Craig also delineated some of these tales. Jack Davis, who continued for decades after the demise of EC, also contributed the occasional crime story. The material suggests artist-writers, though the lack of credits on many pieces makes identifying either somewhat problematic, and, furthermore, unkindly leaves some creators' names mostly forgotten except for the most in-depth collectors of pre-1960 comics. And, as well, the small available sample naturally biases names towards those who signed their works in EC crime comics which happened to make it into Gemstone reprints.

That crime comics should appear in such numbers and enjoy sufficient visibility that senators from Tennessee and concerned Canadian citizens can become involved in a common movement to restrict their sales, ban them outright, or encourage their publishers to clean up their act, one might expect that the genre enjoyed considerable penetration, many titles, and a variety of publishers, a scenario which implies gleaning a comprehensive list of the significant figures who worked in crime comics might daunt the casual researcher.

Particularly from EC material, we can infer some writing credits from their general creative business practices. While artists sometimes wrote their stories, frequently the stable of EC editors crafted the tales themselves. Al Feldstein thus remains a main suspect for EC crime comics, although for a time writers like Otto Binder and Ray Bradbury occasionally contributed pieces in various genres (and Bradbury almost certainly wrote the occasional crime story, after taking EC to task for pilfering his stories in science fiction comics, then entering in a gentleman's agreement where he received pay when EC adapted his work, gave him a cover credit, and also had him write a few new pieces in their science fiction and crime titles).

The End of the Form

The invention of adolescence in the twentieth century - meaning the creation of a social role distinctly different from child or adult but, in some ways, retaining many of the most unpleasant features of both and few of the benefits of either - also meant the beginnings of the definition of youthful crime as something different from supposedly normal, or adult, crime. By the late forties, the phenomenon of "juvenile delinquency" had come to attract much attention from academics, police officers, parents, and concerned citizens in general.

Fewer people lived on farms and more in cities, meaning more young people had resort to a complete public education before having to enter the world of work (whereas one might expect, in one's early or mid teens, to leave school and return to work on the farm before). Combine this with child labor laws and one has a population, in a generation, lacking something to do. Young people, therefore, devoted their windfall of disposable time to popular entertainments, and, sometimes, to making trouble.

A combination of such factors meant that the old methods of child-rearing might face some considerable flaws in the face of a new reality for which they intended to prepare young people. Widely-distributed popular entertainments could plausibly play an insidious role in misshaping personality; or, with simultaneous factors interpreted with a less causal relationship, one might note that some youngsters had, indeed, become much more troublesome about the time they started listening to Elvis records.

Grownups started looking for causes, and made a case that the popular entertainments of the day perhaps played an important role in bringing about undesirable behaviors. Recalling that comics, circa 1950, had a much more significant penetration than they would fifty years later, playing the role of one piece in a standard set of juvenile paraphernalia, we can understand the logical processes that would lead to the hostile scrutiny of concerned adults in the fifties.

If it seems remarkable to us that comics - and, in some ways, comics far less salty than some material readily available circa 2001 - could cause such a stir, we need only ferret out some details from history books to note that indeed the material had enough of an impact to invite a flurry of activity. The infamous author of Seduction of the Innocent, Dr. Frederic Wertham, cited the more graphic comics (specifically horror and crime) as cofactors in the delinquency cases he had studied since the end of the Second World War, and claimed that the material, in showing callous disposal of human life and the methods of crime, offered poor examples for young minds to imitate. He believed they did, to some extent, though reanalysis of his career suggests he did not implicate comics as a four-color narcotic that could instantly corrupt a stable personality into a tendency to homicidal crime sprees.

Wertham, furthermore, did not operate in a vacuum. Public concern reached such a point that Senate hearings in the United States investigated the content of comics, especially of the aforementioned varieties. Senator Estes Kefauver headed the committee involved with this particular investigation, which began with the results already settled and testimony brought in mainly to build the credibility of already-established conclusions after the form of a number of such investigations of the era. One might note Kefauver's previous, high-profile role in hearings into organized crime. Nor did the movement contain itself to small towns in rural America, for local efforts involved policemen in various cities "suggesting" that merchants remove certain pieces from their inventory. And, for a brief period, the genre of crime comics might have enjoyed a complete de jure ban in Canada, though within about a year the material reappeared on Canadian shelves, the futility of the ban becoming obvious.

All the pressure, although sometimes couched in the language of outright bans on entire genres on comics, mostly concealed a movement intent upon persuading the comics industry to police its content through self-regulation, and after failures to achieve various (certainly unConstitutional) legal remedies, industry heads did come together and craft the original Comics Code, whose strictures expressly banned horror comics and so regulated crime comics that that form disappeared from the marketplace.

Given the hyperbolic publicity that attended these comics-related events, we need not show much surprise that legend would bring these happenings down through the decades with the somewhat dubious claim that Dr. Frederic Wertham had, single-handedly, slain the comics medium. Such oversimplifications ignore factors such as a) the general failure of superhero comics in the aftermath of World War II; b) the bottoming out of comics sales based on the aging of the readership; c) the loss of military contracts to provide soldiers with reading matter, including comics; and d) the advent of television, which forced all mass media into a competitive, zero-sum game where each would attempt to get some of that small chunk of disposable time consumers might spend away from the numbing radiations of the cathode ray tube. Nonetheless, these campaigns did weaken an already tenuous comics market, much in the sense that an injury and an infection can come together to slay a patient although neither necessarily has the horsepower to do so by itself. We see the result in the end of crime comics, the demise of horror comics, and the loss to the industry of EC Comics, a company that raised standards in some ways to the point that conventional material wouldn't necessarily catch up with the baseline they laid down even decades later.

The Remnants

One may note, as an obvious remnant of the crime comics, the Comics Code Authority emblem that marks many mass-marketed pieces, particularly the output of DC Comics and Marvel Comics. In a sense, this seal of approval marks their grave. However, within the pages of existing comics, and not just on the covers, some echoes of the crime comics still occasionally appear, if one may judge from a common storytelling approach and other shared elements. Most survivals appear to attach to a sub-variety of superhero comics.

A few of the comics concepts that ultimately oriented themselves towards an "urban" approach - meaning, principally, pieces of the Batman franchise, plus Marvel concepts like Daredevil and Punisher during significant moments in their history - took to material that sometimes resembles classic crime comics in the eschewing of the fantastic for a more reality-based view of crime.

Furthermore, material like Frank Miller's Sin City has a reputation for attempting a film noir approach to detective fiction. However, this material more represents the appropriation of genre conventions from outside (film noir) than the continuance of a comics-native interpretation.

Perhaps, for the most part, the surviving traces of crime comics do survive in books dealing with the urban superheroes. Unfortunately, the noise created by the superheroic conventions - outlandish costuming, amazing deeds, and a scale that makes normal human virtues and vices seem too trivial to notice - drowns out precisely those elements which drove the classic crime comics. A story about human beings destroying themselves through the ethical lapses that can result in basic crimes - robbery and murder among the most popular to the form - can have meaning, but only insofar as a writer allows someone besides the titled superhero to occupy center stage in such a story.

Nonetheless, such pieces can show up in surprising places. Specifically, a recent issue of The Incredible Hulk featured a story in which the central plot thread read like a classical crime comics formula: The Killer Shrike, a disposable supervillain from the 1970s, attempted to escape his past by leaving his normal haunts with his girlfriend, long enough to knock over a few cash registers in towns they passed through, theoretically to use the proceeds to start a new life in some new town. Leaving his girlfriend waiting in their van while he attempts a heist, he encounters the Hulk (who plays, at moments, a role almost Eisner-like in its use of the titled character as a focus around which the main character can act). Just when he believes his deeds to have a) brought in the cash and b) put the Hulk out of Shrike's hair, the Shrike realizes he has brought down a wall on the van containing his girlfriend, destroying both her and the Shrike's ill-considered scheme to get a new start on life.

From such examples, we might consider that the crime comics did not precisely die as become one of a series of available story types usable by comics writers in other genres as the opportunity permits. While the superhero monoculture tends to focus on other things, occasional fill-in stories can demonstrate that the form and formula still have vitality and impact, at least when the Spandexed stalwarts who normally monopolize the stage step aside in order to allow a story to develop.

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Column 251. Completed 12-May-2001.

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