Fredric Wertham

Crime Does Not Pay (except when it does)

The comics that changed history. Brilliant cover by Charles Biro. (Click image for more Dark Horse summer releases.)

Dark Horse Comics is releasing a “best of” compilation of the seminal 1940s crime anthology series Crime Does Not Pay this July, according to information the publisher released to Comic Book Resources (and other comics news sites).

Crime Does Not Pay was a huge hit in its day, as spearheaded by editors and writers Charles Biro and Bob Wood. As the first “true crime” comic book, it spawned countless derivatives and significantly altered the course of comics. It was the first non-superhero genre to really take hold in America, and the first to expand readership to a somewhat older demographic. Today people are ordering hookers and heroin if their comic sells over 100,000 copies, so it’s amazing to think that Crime Does Not Pay at one point had sales in excess of 1 million. The publisher theorized that due to friends lending out copies, they had a readership of over 5 million people.

Parents and other concerned citizens didn’t approve of the graphic violence and often glorified criminals, and the entire crime genre of comics, along with the growing horror genre, became a target of political leaders. By the mid-’50s, the United States Senate formed a sub-committee to investigate the relationship between comic book and juvenile delinquency. The entire industry was publicly embarrassed and essentially shamed into self-censorship. Everyone reigned in their content at the risk of losing newsstand distribution, far and away the dominant. While there was definitely a need for some kind of content warning, what instead resulted was that an entire medium was sterilized and made safe for kids. Needless to say, Crime Does Not Pay and the genre it had created lost what made it appealing to readers and was canceled within months.

This story has been told before and will be told again, but the actual stories of the Crime Does Not Pay comics have rarely if ever been reprinted in modern times. I’m very excited to be able to get this as an affordable soft cover graphic novel. Usually these kinds of things are released in massive hard cover tomes that tend to be too expensive for the mildly curious and too unwieldy for reading without a lectern. There will also be great bonus content, like an illustrated essay by comics historian Denis Kitchen detailing how Crime Does Not Pay co-editor Bob Wood’s later life could’ve made for a story in his own comic.

Click through for the full product description: (more…)

BBC doc: The Comic Strip Hero (1981)

In 1981, coinciding with the UK release of Superman II starring Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman, the BBC television series Arena broadcast this great documentary about the origins of Superman and the comics industry in general.

Plenty of good stuff here:

  • great interviews with Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
  • a look inside the early ’80s offices of DC Comics with then-president Sol Harrison
  • footage of Will Eisner teaching art students who debate whether superheroes are played out
  • a pre-Maus interview with Art Spiegelman (with a GIGANTIC mustache)
  • the wonderful Trina Robbins
  • a young and charming Christopher Reeve
  • Kirk Alyn, the first actor to portray the Man of Steel, telling stories of making the Superman movie serials
  • a sputtering Fredric Wertham insisting comic books are evil, linking Superman to Nazi Germany
  • some hilarious interviews with a sci-fi guy pointing out the lack of hard science in Superman (you think?) and what would need to happen for Clark Kent and Louis Lane to have a baby (!)
  • a little kid with every licensed Superman product imaginable
  • and a frightening final moment with preserved Superman birthday cake.

It’s important to note how much the comics industry has changed since then. This is before Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, two superhero stories that injected new life into the genre. This was before the publication of Maus, which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and burst open the preconceived limitations of the medium to a lot of mainstream observers. This is before comic books could be found in bookstores, before manga was introduced to US readers. Before Hollywood’s technology became affordable enough and halfway convincing enough to pull off the special effects depicted in comics. (This was almost 30 years ago?! How?!)

Click through to watch all 5 parts through the power of YouTube: (more…)