Multiversity’s history column returns with a new installment themed around the month of June. The first item up for review is a major one – the debut of the crime genre. That will be followed by one of DC’s biggest blunders before concluding on a minor note from the 1990s enhancement boom.
Years after “Crime Does Not Pay” became a success, Charles Biro claimed the idea for a comic about true crime stories came to him after he had a conversation with man in a bar moments before the man was arrested for kidnapping. Biro’s details of the story were specific about who was the man was (heir to a culinary fortune) and what the man was offering (a chance to fulfill the girl’s “rape fantasy” while the man watched him). This story is at best embellished, and at worst an outright lie. A search of New York newspapers from 1941/2 turned up nothing similar to Biro’s tale, but a nearly identical crime did occur in New York in 1952 – long after “Crime Does Not Pay” and shortly before Biro’s first reported telling of the story.
Wherever the concept originally germinated, Biro and his associate Bob Wood did bring it to their publisher, Lev Gleason, in early 1942. Gleason was a communist idealist, which was not taboo at the time. He gave Biro and Wood a generous share of any profits and asked them to come up with a new book that had some social relevance. True crime had been a popular genre in novels and pulp magazines for over twenty years, but had not yet come to comics. Gleason liked the idea and converted one of his existing titles, “Silver Streak,” to “Crime Does Not Pay” at issue #22, cover dated June 2022. The uninterrupted numbering allowed Gleason to avoid paying a security deposit to the post office for lower subscription mailing rates.
Its origin story was stolen from someone else’s crime. Its genre was lifted from other mediums and called new. Its security deposit was denied to the USPS by a communist who believed in paying others their fair share. Is it any wonder that its title, “Crime Does Not Pay,” was also swiped? It was originally used by an Oscar-winning film series that began in 1935 and was still running when Gleason first used the title.
Gleason advertised it in his other two comics, “Boy” and “Daredevil,” by encouraging those readers to “show it to Dad.” Sales on the first issue came in a little over 200,000, which was below the break-even point for most comics of the era. Sales rose dramatically over the next year until it averaged 323,000 copies, which put it in profitable territory and on equal footing with “Boy” and “Daredevil.” For the next few years it remained the only crime comic on the stands and continued to do respectably.
Then, in 1947, sales soared and “Crime Does Not Pay” became the industry’s top selling book. Biro credited his writing and art direction for the success, even though most of his scripts were ghost written by Virginia Hubbell. There was not a key issue in the run to explain the sudden success, where the story hit a topical subject or the art transcended mediocre. Rather, most historians credit the success to an outside factor, namely the soldiers returning from World War II having outgrown Superman and Captain Marvel, whose sales were declining. Gleason did a survey of readers in 1948 and found 57% of his audience was over the age of 21.
By 1948, Gleason’s competition finally figured out what was happening and flooded the market with copycats. The number of crime comics jumped from 3 to 38 in twelve months. If you count Dell’s “Dick Tracy Comics” in the crime category, every comic publisher was putting out something in the genre. That was the year sales of “Crime Does Not Pay” exceeded 1 million copies per issue, peaking at 1.5 million in a tie with another Gleason book, “Crime and Punishment.” Assuming each issue would be read by a buyer’s friends and family, Gleason added a banner to the covers claiming the book had 6 million monthly readers.
Continued belowAnd just like that, the party was over. In 1949 crime was out and romance was in. As the copycats shifted gears to follow the latest trend, EC’s western-crime book “Saddle Justice” became “Saddle Romances.” In 1950 romance gave way to science fiction and horror. Gleason, Biro, and Wood were able to hold their faithful readers and while sales fell, “Crime Does Not Pay” remained profitable. It continued to entertain for a while longer, before finally being done in by Fredric Wertham, “Seduction of the Innocent,” and the Comics Code.
In the fall of 1975, writer David Michelinie pitched DC on a series about a group of humans who go into space in search of habitable worlds outside our solar system. It languished in development for about a year and underwent several name changes, but it was finally greenlit as “Star Hunters” for a June 1977 debut in “DC Super-Stars” #16 before transitioning into its own title. The series ran for 6 bi-monthly issues before being cancelled in the DC implosion.
During its development, a man named Charles Lippincott had a meeting with DC’s head, Jeanette Kahn about the comic license for an upcoming film, Star Wars. Lippincott later said DC was too old-fashioned for what he imagined and wouldn’t have chose them, but DC insiders point out that because the company had full ownership of the sort-of-similar book “Star Hunters” already in progress, no effort or serious consideration was put into pursuing Star Wars. Lippincott handed the license to Marvel instead, who was struggling financially. This is a story for another time, but the punch line is that the Star Wars license saved Marvel.
Hindsight’s 20-20, eh?
There’s not a lot to say about this one, but I didn’t want to let the 30th birthday of the lenticular comic cover go by without comment. Happy birthday to “ARComics Premiere,” the first comic to harness the technology during that crazy 1990s boom.
