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| Crime comics | |
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 Cover to an issue ofCrime Does Not Pay, one of the earliest crime comics | |
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Crime comics is agenre ofAmericancomic books and format ofcrime fiction. The genre was originally popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s and is marked by a moralistic editorial tone and graphic depictions of violence and criminal activity. Crime comics began in 1942 with the publication ofCrime Does Not Pay published byLev Gleason Publications and edited byCharles Biro. As sales for superhero comic books declined in the years afterWorld War II, other publishers began to emulate the popular format, content and subject matter ofCrime Does Not Pay, leading to a deluge of crime-themed comics. Crime andhorror comics, especially those published byEC Comics, came under official scrutiny in the late 1940s and early 1950s, leading to legislation inCanada and theUnited Kingdom, the creation in theUnited States of theComics Magazine Association of America and the imposition of theComics Code Authority in 1954. This code placed limits on the degree and kind of criminal activity that could be depicted in American comic books, effectively sounding the death knell for crime comics and their adult themes.
Petty thieves, grifters, and outright crooks have existed in American comic books and strips since their inception, while books and strips devoted to them and their activities are relatively rare. The comic stripDick Tracy was the first to focus on the character and plots of a vast array of gangsters.Chester Gould's strip, begun in 1931, made effective use of grotesque villains, actual police methods, and shocking depictions of violence. It inspired many features starring a variety of police, detectives and lawyers.
As edited and mostly written byCharles Biro (withBob Wood),Crime Does Not Pay was a 64-page (later 52-page) anthology comic book published by Lev Gleason Publications beginning in 1942 and running for 147 issues until 1955. Each issue of the series featured several stories about the lives of actual criminals taken from newspaper accounts, history books, and occasionally, as advertised, "actual police files." The stories provided details of actual criminal activity and, in making the protagonists of the stories actual criminals — albeit criminals who were eventually caught and punished, usually in a violent manner, by story's end — seemed to glorify criminal activity, according to several critics. An immediate success, the series remained virtually unchallenged in the field of non-fiction comic books for several years until the post-World War II decline in othergenres of comic books, including superhero comic books, made it more viable to publish new genres.
Beginning in 1947, publishers began issuing new titles in the crime comics genre, sometimes changing the direction of existing series but often creating new books whole cloth. Many of these titles were direct imitations of the format and content ofCrime Does Not Pay.
In May, 1947, Arthur Bernhard's Magazine Village company publishedTrue Crime Comics, designed and edited byJack Cole. The first issue (#2) featured Cole's "Murder, Morphine, and Me", the story of a young female drug addict who became involved with gangsters. The story would become one of the most controversial of the period and samples of the art, including a panel from a dream sequence in which the heroine has her eye held open and threatened with a hypodermic needle, would be used in articles and books (like Geoffrey Wagner'sParade of Pleasure) about the pernicious influence and obscene imagery of crime comics.
Later in 1947, the team ofJoe Simon andJack Kirby began packaging a pair of crime comics for the Prize Comics line.Headline Comics (with a cover date of March) was transformed from adventure to a crime theme. Published with a date of October/November,Justice Traps the Guilty was a full-fledged crime comic from the onset, and besides Simon and Kirby, featured art byMarvin Stein,Mort Meskin, andJohn Severin. At the same time, Simon and Kirby revitalizedReal Clue Comics forHillman Comics, giving the title a true-crime veneer and transforming it from a serial character-driven mystery title.
EC Comics began publishingCrime SuspenStories in 1950 andShock SuspenStories in 1952. Both titles featured, in the manner of the EC horror comics, fictionalnoir-style stories of murder and revenge with stunning art and tightly plotted twist endings.
In 1949, spearheaded by the campaigning of MPDavie Fulton, crime comics were banned in Canada in Bill 10 of the21st Canadian Parliament's 1st session (informally known as theFulton Bill).[1] TheCriminal Code defined crime comics asa magazine, periodical or book that exclusively or substantially comprises matter depicting pictorially (a) the commission of crimes, real or fictitious; or (b) events connected with the commission of crimes, real or fictitious, whether occurring before or after the commission of the crime and made it an offence to produce, publish or distribute them. The provisions remained in the Criminal Code until December 2018 when Bill C-51 was adopted during the42nd Canadian Parliament.[2][3] Previously, crime comics also could be ordered forfeited by the provincial courts.[4]
Mystery, crime, and horror stories appeared in a number of anthology titles from various publishers but it was not until the advent ofWarren Publishing'sCreepy andEerie in 1964 that the occasional crime story with a modicum of the style or violence that marked the comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s appeared.
Meanwhile, the genre had developed substantially in the hands of European and Japanese creators. In Europe, creators likeVittorio Giardino,Jacques Tardi,José Muñoz,Carlos Sampayo,William Vance andJean Van Hamme have devoted substantial portions of their oeuvres to crime comics, especially to stories concerned with the trappings ofdetective fiction andpolice procedurals, often with a cynical, existentialist bent. Japanese creators likeOsamu Tezuka (MW,The Book of Human Insects),Akimi Yoshida (Banana Fish),Takao Saito (Golgo 13), andKazuo Koike (Crying Freeman) have explored subject matter ranging from the criminal mind to Yakuza gangs in manga form.
American crime comics of the 1970s includedJack Kirby'sIn the Days of the Mob andGil Kane'sSavage.
In the 1980s,Max Allan Collins andTerry Beatty created theMs. Tree series about the adventures of a female private investigator. Collins would go on to write theRoad to Perdition graphic novels about 1930s gangsters.
Beginning in the late-1980s and 1990s, several American and British comic book writers have created notable work in the crime comics genre, sometimes incorporating noir themes and novelistic storytelling into realistic crime dramas and even into superhero comics. These writers includeBrian Azzarello (100 Bullets,Jonny Double),Brian Michael Bendis (Sam and Twitch,Jinx,Powers,Alias),Ed Brubaker (Gotham Central,Criminal),Frank Miller,David Lapham,John Wagner (A History of Violence,Button Man), andPaul Grist.
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