Crime Does Not Pay

It was 1942 and comic book creators Charles Biro and Bob Wood had a good gig and knew it. In an industry rotten with fly-by-night publishers who disappeared when it was time to cut checks to their artists and writers, they had the good fortune to be working for Lev Gleason. Gleason was a progressive sort who offered his talent a share of the profits, an unheard of gesture at the time. Happy with their work on his superhero titles Silver Streak and Daredevil, Gleason offered Biro and Wood the opportunity to develop their own book. A proposition like this could make the artists wealthy if their title proved popular.

Brainstorming at a bar one night, Biro recounted to Wood an unusual story: An unfamiliar man approached him and offered to arrange what Biro delicately described as an "indiscreet rendezvous" with a woman. Biro turned down the offer, but his artist's mind preserved the man's face to memory. He immediately recognized the face when he saw it the next day in a newspaper. The mysterious procurer had been arrested for kidnapping the woman he pitched to Biro the night before. Piqued by this brush with a more dangerous world, Biro recognized the morbid fascination all of us possess with the darkness that lay beyond the margins of our everyday lives. Perhaps a comic that depicted this shadow world would appeal to readers. Wood was enthused with the idea, and Gleason approved as well.

Another Saturday night downtown.

In a purposeful choice to preempt any criticism that their stories were unrealistically violent, Biro and Wood decided to restrict themselves to writing about the crimes of actual gangsters and murderers. The title they devised was another calculated maneuver that allowed them to denounce the same evils that their lurid illustrations reveled in: Crime Does Not Pay. The moral of that adage not withstanding, Biro and Wood knew that the word "Crime" did pay. Taking up about a third of the cover real estate, and dwarfing the predicate "Does Not Pay", The all-caps "CRIME" ensured the title would stand out from the crowded comic book rack.

If the title alone couldn't convince the reader to spend his dime, the cover art would. Biro was notorious for filling every inch of the cover with some sort of violence. The first issue of Crime Does Not Pay set the standard of mayhem the rest would follow. In the foreground, one hand stabs another, pinning it to an ace of spades and the card table below, a gun just out of reach. In the mid-ground a meaty-faced gangster is cornered against the bar. He holds a girl in a headlock with his left arm and cradles a submachine gun in his right. One body is splayed christ-like across the bar. On the stairs, another man drops his revolver and clutches his chest as he absorbs a burst of automatic weapon fire. Just for good measure, Biro squeezes one more body between the two hands in the foreground. In the background two men crash through a banister, still grappling mid-air as they fall to the floor.

Our humble narrator.

The covers would get even more explicit, rendering blood and trauma in graphic detail. Instead of the bloodless chest wound, cop and criminal alike would be cut down by dripping red headshots. Men, women, young, and old, no one was safe from the garish four-color torture, beatings, drownings, scaldings shootings and stabbings. Biro and Wood also introduced a new character, Mr. Crime, to serve as a sort of spectral narrator. Mr. Crime would float unseen through the stories, encouraging the wanton mayhem, until finally turning on the criminal when his inevitable comeuppance arrived.

Blood and gams.

NOT a manufacturer-endorsed usage.

subtle...

The greatest crime in the eyes of 50's cops? Wasting their time.

Knocking out Gramp's teeth is one thing.
But making Grandma cook you a steak?
That's. going. too. far.

Who can refuse free ice cream?

If I drew this, I know I'd sign it real big too.

Within a few years, Crime Does Not Pay's circulation exploded to almost a million issues a month. With the sales of superhero comics headed the opposite way, rival publishers began to lose any distaste they previously had about publishing such bloody and sensational matter. And how did they lose it. With the embargo on bad taste broken, the market was awash in crime titles, each trying to out-shock the other. Crime Does Not Pay's stories were suddenly quaintly obsolete. For the first time, mainstream newsstands carried comics that featured unabashedly twisted and sexually violent plots. Emblematic of this period were the "headlight covers", presenting a scantily-clad, top-heavy heroine, often sadistically restrained in a transparently sexually-charged posture.

"All Top" indeed.

I'm not sure what to focus on here: The missing bra strap?
The reflection running over the edge of the mirror?
Her choice in evening wear, a green tarp?
The fact a mirror that large would shatter
under its own weight?

No symbolism here.

Not even the paragon of corn-fed American virtue,
Betty Cooper, was safe.

If the lurid stories and art didn't make it clear enough, the ads for hernia trusses and home gunsmithing courses should have made it clear that publishers didn't intend these books for children. But distributors and retailers didn't segregate their comic titles based on the audience. There were of course, the strictly under-the-counter or plain-brown-wrapper mail order adult titles—but parents assumed what was on the easy-to-reach comic book shelf was appropriate for children. What they didn't know was retailers were forced by publishers to carry a fixed menu of their titles, or none at all.

Phantom Lady,  in particular, was a
favorite target of Wertham.

In 1954, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, published his highly influential book, Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham and his published works deserve their own post one day, but the condensed version is as follows: Wertham conducted or quoted interviews with individuals who were deemed by the standards of 1954 to by mentally and/or sexually abhorrent, focusing particularly on adolescents. He asserted that exposure to "crime comics", a term Wertham had an unusually broad definition of, had a negative effect on a child's mental development. Critics would later point out that Wertham's studies were made at institutions that specialized in children already diagnosed with behavioral problems. This skewed sample aside, a book-burning moral panic ensued. Wertham was called to testify before a committee of Seantors, wringing their hands over the crisis of juvenile delinquency. The comics industry was strongly encouraged to start policing itself, a la the Hayes Commission of Hollywood, or risk facing government censorship. So was born the Comics Code Authority (CCA), a set of rules that barred anything that may pollute an impressionable child's mind, from a mild double entendre, to a bloody shootout, to a graphic depiction a brain-eating zombie's picnic.

By the last issue, there was a noticeable
difference in the covers. 

Most publishers saw the writing on the wall, and immediately dropped their crime titles. Some limped on with their neutered books, only to fold within the year. EC Comics (another topic deserving its own post) was particularly hard hit. Crime Does Not Pay ceased publication in 1955. Charles Biro left comics entirely to join the advertising world. Bob Wood however would not find escape that easily.

Wood likely had problems with women, money, and drink before Crime Does Not Pay, but the cash it brought in, and its ultimate collapse no doubt exacerbated them. Post-CCA, Wood was reduced to to making sleazy comic strips for lowbrow and low-rent smut rags. One day in August of 1958, Wood caught a cab and confessed to the driver he had just killed a woman who was "giving him a bad time." Wood openly admitted to his crime and shared his plan to drown himself in the East River after a nap. He even suggested the cabbie could make a few bucks selling the story to the newspapers. After dropping off Wood at his hotel, the driver alerted the police. The cops found Wood in his room, clothes still covered in blood. He led police to the scene of the crime, where they found, among the empty bottles, the battered body of a woman. Wood had bludgeoned her with a steam iron as the coup de grâce of his 11-day drinking binge. Wood got a shockingly brief 4-5 year sentence for first degree manslaughter. Released three years later, the stretch in Sing Sing did little to reform his ways. Unable to repay debts he owed to men you really, REALLY don't want to owe debts to, his dispatched corpse was found dumped just off the Jersey Turnpike in 1962.