Crime Does Not Pay

Publisher Lev Gleason showed shrewd business sense when he hired writer/artists Charles Biro and Bob Wood in 1941 to edit the two titles for which his company had their most success  : Daredevil and Silver Streak Comics.

In what was an unprecedented move at the time, he offered the two a profit-sharing plan and gave them exclusive cover credits on all of their books. Silver Streak found it’s sales dipping, so Biro and Wood had a novel idea for it’s replacement - a comic book which borrowed storylines from real crimes from the newspaper, with the police detective, or even the beat-cop, would be the real “superhero” of the stories. Now, this was not a completely brand new idea - there had always been detective stories in comic books, but those were often heavily-stylized characters with over-the-top scenarios - Biro and Wood would tell it like it really was, with sometimes the mundane stories of everyday heroes and criminals/gangsters would make for more believable and entertaining reading because the average-Joe could associate more easily with Officer O’Malley than with, say, The Shadow.

The idea worked. Well. Crime Does Not Pay debuted in July of 1942 with the issue # 22, taking over the numbering from the cancelled Silver Streak Comics. It was a slow burn for CDNP, after all this was the height of the first superhero craze, but by 1947, the book became so popular that it started boasting “More Than 5,000,000 Readers!” on the top of each issue. By then, the comic book industry had relaxed it’s standards as far as how graphically violent and overtly sexy (or sexist, even) the artists and writers were allowed to depict. It was, afterall, a very violent world coming down from WWII, and threatened to get even worse with the existence of the Atomic Bomb.

The people ate this stuff up! All-of-a-sudden, do-gooders running around in long underwear were passe, even silly. America had lost its innocence, and readers clamored for entertainment that reflected this; gritty, bloody, violent, complicated and, yes, more “adult.”

Crime Does Not Pay paved the way for the entire crime comics genre, and soon the racks were riddled with many like titles - some of them more extreme in content than CDNP!  One thing that the title ALWAYS had going for it was the enormous amount of talented hands that had a go at the book; besides Charles Biro and Bob Wood, who were often given writing and artist credits on things that they had absolutely nothing to do with, even a partial list of the gifted contributors reads like a who’s-who of industry leaders : Dick Briefer, Norman Maurer, Frank Giacoia,Jack Alderman, Carmine Infantino, Rudy Palais, Fred Guardineer, George Tuska, Joe Certa, Fred Kida, Bob Fujitani, Al McWilliams, Dick Giordano,Vince Alascia, Pete Morisi, Joe Kubert, Bob Powell… and many others.

Whether fact or fiction, word started to spread amongst American parents just how negative the images and ideas that their children were being exposed to through comic books, and generally forced the industry to “voluntarily” adopt a code wherein they would tone down the bondage, blood, bullets and boobs.

The Comics Code Authority Seal Of Approval was uniformly adopted by most publishers in 1954, and soon after Crime Does Not Pay, and others in the crime and horror genres, ceased publication altogether.

These “pre-code” books are getting hotter and hotter on the collector’s market at present. Don’t be left out!