So it came to my attention earlier this week that I am not, in fact, the only person on Earth collecting Boy Comics. Needless to say, this came as a bit of a shock, but as I haven't been able to find any threads dedicated to Boy Comics on the forums, I figured I might as well start one since apparently there's at least some interest out there in this title by people other than myself.
Short story: About three years ago I decided to dip my toe into the Golden Age market for the first time. Up until that point I hadn't bought any GA books despite collecting since 1984; they always just seemed too pricey and foreign. But finally I got curious enough to check out ebay and on a whim I decided to try and buy a few random Golden Age books as cheaply as possible just to see what they were like.
What I ended up with were six issues of Boy Comics between #36 and #52, for the whopping sum of six dollars each. I was really surprised I could afford honest to god Golden Age comics and even more shocked when I read them and discovered they were totally awesome.
For the past three years, then, I've been trying to put together a low grade, complete run of Boy Comics as cheaply as possible. My initial goal was to get #36-up for under $10 an issue, something I did manage to accomplish (a few issues were more than $10, but averaged out I think I got in under the wire). Once that was done I started ponying up for the earlier issues and am now five away from a complete run.
Personally, I think the writing from Charles Biro is top notch in the Crimebuster strip, particularly from around #31-60 or so. The early issues for me aren't as interesting, as it's kind of more generic superhero stuff until Iron Jaw is killed off in #15 (spoilers!). After that point, though, Biro seems to slowly gain momentum as he turns the strip into a true crime series that happens to have a teenage "superhero" as the main character. By around #31, Crimebuster is in many cases almost more of a narrator than an actual player in the stories, and these are some great issues.
Once Iron Jaw comes back from the dead, things go downhill again for me, with the nadir being the issues where Crimebuster loses the cover spot to Iron Jaw and Sniffer, one of the most boring and unfunny strips I think I have ever read. Luckily, Crimebuster still managed to hang on long enough to finally return to prominence for the boy's adventure stuff in the early to mid 1950's; though these are a far cry from the hard boiled crime stories in the #31-60 range, the last dozen issues of the strip have their own charm in a Hardy boys kind of way.
I also want to mention that the art in many of these stories is very, very solid, with strong draftsmanship and storytelling; there's rarely anything flashy or eye-catching, but the artists, particularly Norman Maurer and later Joe Kubert, really know what they are doing.
Here are a couple of really terrible group shots of my Boy Comics collection. Here's #5-14, with a couple issues missing:
And here's #15-26:
Apologies for the craptastic pics, my camera is on the fritz so I had to use my phone. Hopefully i can get some good shots of these at some point.
So is anybody else out there a fan of Crimebuster and Boy Comics? Let's see your comics and hear your stories.