Does Crime Pay? #2: "The Fire Fiends of Missouri"

(Click here for the first post in this series and an explanation of what this is about; remember, SPOILERS AHEAD in this regular feature)

The second story in "Blackjacked and Pistol-Whipped," the excellent Dark Horse sampler of its Crime Does Not Pay reprint series, is credited only to artist Alan Mandel. "The Fire Fiends of Missouri" starts off well by using a cool flaming font for the title. This feature presents the harrowing tale of a 1927 St. Louis hotel arson that killed 7 women.

Clearly this is not just any ordinary fire, but something otherworldly. This calamity actually makes this poor soul run so fast his feet literally aren't touching the ground:

After some more coverage of the incident and its aftermath (including screaming newspaper headlines), a clerk who was involved in the tragedy develops a guilty conscience. Or is it something more that's bothering him? Could it be something else otherworldly? Could it be...GHOSTS?

The crumb confesses that the fire was the result of an insurance scam, and the conspirators all receive "prison terms for their heartless crime."

DOES CRIME PAY? No, not at all. The culprits get jail time--we aren't told how much, but probably a lot--and they don't even get their insurance money because the hotel isn't actually destroyed.

WHAT MAKES ME CRINGE TODAY: Page 3 of this story shows trapped women in the upper floors of the hotel, then a man below shouting at them to NOT jump out of the windows, and then, in one tall, disturbing panel, ladies doing just that despite there being nothing to cushion their fall below. One of the bloodied victims is already sprawled on the ground. For obvious reasons, this image may even be more disturbing today than in 1942.

WHAT YOUNG ME WOULD SAY BACK IN 1942: I'm glad that dope got sent to jail. He was a sissy, anyway. Imagine being scared a'ghosts!

You know, this story is brief, simple, and pretty grim, and it's tough to get many chuckles out of it. As crude as it is, though, it works. The next story in the book is even cruder and maybe more shocking. Look for #3 in this installment in a few weeks.

Does Crime Pay? #1 (first in a series)

I got a great book for Christmas, Dark Horse's trade paperback sampler of its archival reprint series collecting 1940s/1950s comic book "Crime Does Not Pay." I thought it would be fun to go through the stories in this volume and determine whether or not Crime does indeed Not Pay. I think a lot of things, and some of them actually turn out to be valid.

Why would I be skeptical? Well, comics like this one became targets for social critics, psychologists, and cranks who blamed the vivid portrayals of violence and illicit behavior for the corruption of America's youth. Even the series' logo indicates that we might be seeing just a bit more than a righteous series of cautionary warnings for impressionable readers. The title really looks like CRIME does not pay.

And sure enough, there is a lot of titillating material in these pages: gun play, blood, scantily clad women...and all of it is drawn in that Golden Age style that looks so crude to modern eyes, a style that makes the material seem even more lurid.

This book is so great that unless I offer some kind of structure to these posts, it will be way too easy for me to lapse into comments like, well, "This book is great!" So with each story, I will summarize what's going on and attempt to discern whether crime pays or doesn't pay in each case. I'll highlight a moment, if there is one, that even makes me cringe a bit today. I'll also ask what a 9-year-old version of me reading in, say 1949 would think.

Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!

First up is "Two-Legged Rats (September 1942, Bob Montana),"  the story of a false prophet in Corvallis, Oregon:

The self-proclaimed "Joshua the Second" lures many of the women of the area and forms a cult, mistreating them, demanding they bring him their money, and making a killing by predicting the outcomes of Oregon State football games.

OK, I made up that last one, but Joshua is doing enough other shenanigans to steam the menfolk. In one panel, a gent complains, "That fellow has my wife under a spell! She's broken all our dishes and I have to cook all my own meals!" A pipe-smoking neighbor chimes in with a "Same here!" Got to love the mid-20th century American male. Their spouses are spending the better part of each day with a raving lunatic with apocalyptic visions and a dominance complex, and they're bitching about having to fix a plate of franks and beans.

Things happen quickly in this ridiculously compressed 4-pager, and eventually Joshua is tarred and feathered, and presumably the men start filling up on beef wellington again before heading right back out to get drunk at the nearest saloon.

Perhaps my favorite moment in this one is the graphic swearing we are subjected to in this panel:

I promise to try to work *@!! into casual conversation when I can. It's unfortunate that it fell out of favor before George Carlin could give us the 8 dirty words you can't say on television.

This guy's misfire is the first in a frenzied chain of homicides and attempted homicides that closes the story. The "irate father" of a woman who joined Joshua's cult is unsuccessful in his assassination try, but two panels later, another woman's brother gets the job done. In the NEXT Panel, though, that same woman kills her brother!

Let's just look at the last two panels, as the tale ends with this puzzler:

Forget the shocking shooting in the back of her own brother. Forget the irony of Mitchell getting away with killing Joshua, only to be done in by the woman who was saving. The big question here is how does brunette Esther Mitchell become "blonde" in between panels?

DOES CRIME PAY? Well, everyone who harms someone else winds up either incarcerated or dead or otherwise punished--I imagine that off-panel those heartless women who made their hubbies cook a few dinners on their own were punished with at least a good, solid week of passive-aggressive neglect--so I suppose you could say no. Yet George Mitchell pretty much accomplished what he wanted to do and snuffed out a dangerous maniac, and her sister got revenge. As for "Joshua the Second," well, he had a pretty good run, with scores of female followers doing his bidding, and I ain't talking whist. So...it kind of does! I have to say yes and no in this story.

WHAT MAKES ME CRINGE TODAY: Actually not that much, as this short one is a comparatively tame opener for the book, but the tarring and feathering could have been a lot worse had Montana stretched it out over a few more panels.

WHAT YOUNG ME WOULD SAY IN 1942: Jeepers! She shot him right in the back! Ain't that just like a dame? I sure wish I know what that guy was saying when his gun flopped on him.