A brief history of crime comics and Crime Does Not Pay
The night was damp and dreary as two shadowy figures hunched over a table in the Broadway Tavern in New York City. They sipped their drinks and plotted.
The two men had been offered a deal that any man in their industry would have killed for, profit-sharing. And since their business was comic books, the newest popular medium to take America by storm, developing a hit could mean they’d be set for life.
Charlie Biro was a strapping bulldog of a man, a loud extrovert and showman, he was the life of any party. When hunched over his drawing board, he was often accompanied by his pet monkey, which liked to sit on his shoulder while he drew. His partner, Bob Wood, was Biro’s opposite, meek and mild-mannered. Both were alcoholics, free spenders, and womanizers. The two were hot off the success of their last hit comic which pitted their superhero, Daredevil, against none other than Hitler himself. Both men worked for Lev Gleason, owner of Comic House Publications. Gleason was a rarity in comics, a communist and a firm believer in rewarding success. He established a profit-sharing arrangement with his editorial team that gave them partnership status and creative control over their content. Gleason reportedly told Biro and Wood that “If you turn these books into something worthwhile, you will get as rich as I do.”
With these thoughts in mind, Biro recounted his previous evening out with his friend at the Hi-De-Ho Club where he was approached by a seedy man who wanted to see if he’d be interested in going to a room upstairs to “visit” a woman. Biro turned down the offer and continued with his evening only to see the same seedy man staring him down on the front page of the newspaper the following morning with a headline that read “Police Nab Oleomargarine Heir in Kidnapping.”
The realization that the man had actually kidnapped the woman he was offering had gotten Biro’s wheels turning. Wood agreed that this kind of sensational, true crime story would be the perfect recipe for their latest comic venture. Best of all, with the daily newspaper headlines, along with all the criminals and crimes of history at their disposal, they would have a constant supply of stories.
Crime Does Not Pay premiered in July 1942 taking over the numbering of one of Gleason’s existing comics, Silver Streak, with issue 22. The comic’s title was taken from a popular movie docudrama series produced by MGM and endorsed by J. Edgar Hoover. A sly swipe that, as far as Biro and Wood were concerned, meant that every movie house across the nation would be advertising their comic.
Initial issues sold well, approximately 200,000 copies each. Biro, with his knack for luring in readers with scenes of dramatic violence, acted as the primary cover artist. And with the word “Crime” several sizes bigger than the rest of the title, the comic quickly told readers what the series was all about. The formula for the stories was simple, dramatically telling “true” crime cases while heavily emphasizing the violence and, on the last page of the story, show the criminal paying the price for their misdeeds. Biro and Wood would break new ground with the series by paying close attention to characterization and dramatic sophistication in their storytelling.
If Crime Does Not Pay had one drawback for its editors, it was that at the end of every story the criminals were either killed or thrown in prison, which meant that every story in every issue demanded new characters. Biro and Wood eventually resolved this problem in the November 1942 issue, with the introduction of the ghostly Mr. Crime character. Dressed in a white sheet and top hat labeled “Crime” across the top, Mr. Crime looked like a ghoulish gremlin. He acted as the story’s narrator, much like the hosts of the mystery radio shows of the day, never seen or heard by the story’s characters, but along for the ride, egging on the criminals while weaving tales to readers with a joking, conspiratorial tone. He was a precursor to the Crypt Keeper and the other horror-hosts, who would fill a similar role in comics such as Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror at EC Comics a decade later.
Crime Does Not Pay was the first comic to target an adult audience and open the comic book market up to late adolescent and young males. Gleason would bill the title as “The Magazine with the Widest Range of Appeal” and sales continued to rise steadily throughout the 1940s. By 1948 the comic was selling over 3 million copies a month, making it the first non-humor genre comic to rival superheroes in sales.
While the series had remained essentially alone in the crime genre for a vast majority of the 40s, these sales figures could no longer be ignored. Before long a slew of imitators with derivative titles were flooding the newsstands including Gangsters Can’t Win, Lawbreakers Always Lose, Crime Must Pay the Penalty, and Justice Traps the Guilty. In response, Gleason and Biro ran an ad in Crime Does Not Pay that spoofed the recent wave of imitations by giving made-up titles for crime comics like Crime Doesn’t Pay Enough and Crime Just Can’t Win. Ironically, three years later, Marvel Comics would come out with a comic titled Crime Can’t Win. Biro and Wood also launched a companion title in 1948 called Crime and Punishment. By the end of 1948, so many publishers had entered the genre that, by one estimate “thirty different crime comics were on the stands” every month and, by 1949, roughly “one in seven comics was a crime comic.”
Part of the appeal of crime comics was the degree of realism they could offer their audiences. Thanks to Hollywood’s content codes, movies couldn’t depict violence to the degree or detail that the then unrestrained comics industry could. On top of that, after WWII, Biro and Wood brought in artists Dan Barry and George Tuska who added a more realistic illustrative style to the Comic House titles that set them apart from the superhero titles and the rest of the competition.
It was not long after the crime comic explosion that these comics became targets of concerned parents, clergy, and other groups who saw the stories as one of the root causes for illiteracy. This would lead to the formation of the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers (ACMP) in 1948 of which Gleason was a founding member. The ACMP was an effort in the comic industry to avoid regulation.
The ACMP wasn’t enough in the eyes of the anticomics movement. In 1954 Dr. Fredric Wertham’s book, Seduction of the Innocent, which, among many other unfounded claims, stated that comics were the cause of juvenile delinquency, led to the investigations by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Soon after the hearings, the comic industry instituted a strict self-censoring code administered by the Comics Code Authority.
In 1955, after nearly 15 years and 125 issues, Crime Does Not Pay was canceled shortly after the Comics Code completely sanitized all violence from the comic. Comic House would go out of business a year later. Biro would go on to work in the burgeoning medium known as television, employed as a graphic artist for NBC television until his death in 1972. Sadly, life would end up imitating art for Wood. His drinking eventually resulted in the brutal murder of his girlfriend with an electric iron in 1958. He would serve 3 years in Sing Sing Prison, ending his sentence in 1961. Once out, his gambling problem would lead to him becoming involved with the very people he once created stories about in Crime Does Not Pay and, eventually, his disappearance.
As for the genre Biro and Wood established, crime comics would be on the lam for many years only to reemerge once the heat was finally off. The early 90s would see a new resurgence for the genre, as titles like Sin City, Stray Bullets, and many others helped to reestablish crime comics’ dark throne in the industry. A throne that continues to lurk in the shadows to this day.
References:
- Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America by Bradford W. Wright
- The Illustrated History: Crime Comics by Mike Benton
- The Comic Book Makers by Joe Simon with Jim Simon
- Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones
- “Leverett Gleason” by Brett Dakin, Harvard Magazine