Black-jacked and Pistol Whipped

[rjpb]

Dark Horse has put out a great compendium of brutal stories from Crime Does Not Pay, which doesn't seem to be getting much comic shop attention - so I thought I'd give a heads up here in case any pre-code crime fans missed it. It has a violent Pete Poplaski cover depicting artist Bob Wood murdering his girlfriend with an iron, done in the style of the early issues of the comic.

 

The editors did a great job of selecting some of the more compelling stories from the first six years of the comic. While the best Biro covers of the run appear in the first couple dozen issues, the interior art and story telling tended to improve just after that, and the bulk of the reprints are from 1946-48, when the comic was hitting it's stride, and they are every bit as violent and graphic as the early covers.

 

The reproduction quality varies a bit - the colors are good, but as the stories were likely reproduced from original copies, the crispness of the line art sometimes suffers from the uneven production values of GA books. I highly recommend this collection to anyone even remotely interested in pre-code crime.

 

[Scrooge]

Thanks. I believe this one skipped under my radar and I have a Xmas list to build up :thumbsup: