indie box: Utopiates

Tags

black and white, bloodfire studio, drugs, indie box, Indie Comics, josh finney, kat rocha, utopiates

This week’s pick from the indie comics short box is Utopiates, a four-issue black-and-white series focusing on characters who take a drug that temporarily alters their personality and emotions, but with violent and disastrous results.

The first issue opens with a full page of Gen-X angst that sets up what, at first, appears to be a simple tale about a young man who takes a drug to escape the dull hopelessness of his life.

By the end of the first issue, it becomes clear this tale is not so simple. We learn that the drug is somehow giving people specific personality traits because it is composed of genetic material copied from specific people. I don’t buy that bit of pseudo-science at all, but playing along with this central idea of injecting genetics like drugs does make for some interesting developments. For example, the young man in the first issue starts killing people his drug dealer assigns to him, but when he injects some Jack Ruby DNA, he kills the wrong person. This doesn’t end well for him.

The second and third issue tell the story of a different young man who served in a war as part of a private military contractor’s invasion force. We learn that he and all the contractors were constantly hopped up on one of these genetic drugs to reduce their fear and increase ferocity.

This two-part story shows how the soldier does not adapt well to normal society after his contract is complete and he can no longer get his drugs. The robotic psych counselor the company forces him to see is useless, so the young man starts looking for a source of the drug. His path leads him to discover whose DNA he and his troops were injecting.

The fourth issue tells the story of another former soldier, a woman who becomes an assassin for hire much like the character in the first issue. It suggests that the mysterious drug dealer in all these stories is giving out these gene-drugs and manipulating people as an art form. I found that motivation a bit lackluster, but I suspect that if the series had continued, then writer Josh Finney would have given us more depth and detail about what makes the dealer tick.

I love the artwork in this series, with Finney collaborating with artist Kat Rocha to produce moody, dramatic pages that look amazing without color. I don’t know why the series ended, but it feels like it could be a treatment for an ongoing TV series with action, adventure, mystery, futurism, and a bit of social commentary. Finally, it’s possible that Finney took the name of the series from a 1964 book detailing research into why people take LSD. You can read a review and summary of that book in the University of Chicago archives.

The four issues of Utopiates make a fairly quick but thought-provoking read, and you can have them for about $2 a piece.

Collector’s Guide: Utopiates #1-4; Bloodfire Studio, 2006.

indie box: Queen & Country

Tags

big box of comics, black and white, definitive edition, Greg Rucka, indie, indie box, Indie Comics, Oni Press, queen & country, Tara Chace

This week’s pick from the indie short box of comics is the complete four-volume collection Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition. It’s also an entry in the big box of free comics series, because I wouldn’t have this collection if not for this blog’s readers. This espionage thriller featuring a British female spy comes from the mind of crime novelist Greg Rucka and an art team that changes with every major arc, giving each episode a unique look and feel.

The four volumes total nearly 1500 pages, which includes the entire single-issue series and three supplementary Declassified series, plus a slew of extras such as interviews, scripts, and sketchbooks. I loved it, with a few reservations, and it was maybe the third time I read the series.

Years ago, I sold a complete collection, and you can see photos of the interior art and full-color covers in my old post about the collection. I had discovered a few scattered issues in a used bookstore and gradually pieced together the set before selling it. With the Definitive Edition, it was great to read it all again in chronological order.

Still, you will find a few a gaps in chronology. Queen & Country is also a series of prose novels, and the comic-book adaptations sometimes skip a novel. “These events take place after the events in [novel]” comes up at least once. But, you get enough context from each story to follow along anyway, and a helpful flashback or two fills in the important gaps.

With the Definitive Edition, you won’t get the full-color covers, though the black-and-white versions are high quality. The page size is slightly smaller than a typical comic book, which occasionally makes the lettering a little hard to read. It was not as bad as the Tintin collection, which practically required a magnifying glass. I only struggled in a couple of stories, such as the first one where Tara’s thoughts appear in a cursive script that didn’t fare well from being shrunk.

The black-and-white art of the original series still looks incredible at this size, though some of the edges of panels disappear in the gutter — unless you want to test the limits of how far you can force the book’s spine open. A wider blank space in the gutter would have been a good thing. But, each of the four volumes is a sturdy paperback with a solid binding and high-quality paper.

Overall, it’s an awesome way to enjoy the complete series, and way easier and more cost-effective than trying to hunt down all the single issues one-by-one.

The art and writing are top-notch, with a compelling lead character who does some bad-ass spy stuff but has way more interesting internal and emotional conflicts than, say, James Bond. Tara Chace has depth, and she changes over the course of the series, and her world is turned upside down more than once. She has a strong supporting cast, and several merit standalone stories as leads in their own right.

Toward the end of the series, reading it one weekend as I did, I noticed there were an awful lot of scenes of people talking in offices, and pages of people having discussions that made a point but didn’t really advance the adventure. These were interesting for a while in the beginning, but by the end I was way more more invested in what Tara was doing than what some guys in offices were droning on about, and I skipped a few scenes.

You’ll probably feel the same way about the leading lady, and your mind might be blown at the cliffhanger ending of the series, and you might even want to pick up some of the novels afterward!

Collector’s Guide: Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition, #1-4; Oni Press, 2007.

indie box: A History of Violence

Tags

black and white, crime, indie box, Indie Comics, john wagner, vince locke

This week’s pick from the short box of indie comics takes us once again into the world of crime fiction. A History of Violence from John “Judge Dredd” Wagner and Vince Locke really puts the “novel” in “graphic novel”, telling a deeply detailed story in its nearly 300 pages. I read it years ago but didn’t see the film until this summer. The book was more satisfying, especially the ending, which is a visceral punch to the gut in print but completely re-written and watered down for the film.

So, let’s start at the beginning, because A History of Violence opens with murderous intent.

Pretty soon, the murderers stop for a bite to eat in typical, small-town America, where everything is quaint, peaceful, and family-friendly. But when they try to start trouble at the local diner, the dude at the counter decides homie don’t play that shit, and he totally destroys them.

Diner dude wastes these guys and becomes a local celebrity. There, the story gets bogged down with scenes of his resultant interactions with the yuk-yuks from Anywhere, USA as they fawn over him at little-league games and other scenes I could skip. But this shift in the hero’s calm, daily life gets kicked up a notch when the leader of a criminal organization recognizes diner dude in a newspaper article, and decides to visit.

This scene begins a gradual reveal of diner dude’s past, and how he came to be involved with the underworld in his youth and eventually assumed a new identity so he could live a pastoral life in Generic, USA. The middle third of the book tells that story as a flashback, and it’s almost as much fun as the part in the Godfather novel where we flashback to Vito Corleone’s rise to power in his youth.

The first time I read A History of Violence, I couldn’t put it down. But upon re-reading, I could have done without so many extended, dialogue-heavy scenes of regular folks standing or sitting around while having an interpersonal drama. It often feels like this could be a real barnburner of a tale if we could just cut some of the “normal folks chatting in a mild state of distress” scenes, and get into the absolutely fucked-up criminal world that really drives the plot and drama. And by “absolutely fucked up”, I mean pages like this:

Earlier, I implied I didn’t like the movie, but mostly what I hated were the changes to the ending. In fact, the film did a better job portraying the shoot-out on diner dude’s lawn where his son was involved, and the film had a somewhat tighter pace. Also, Ed Harris as the eyeless criminal guy totally rocks.

I’m a bit ambivalent about the art in this story. The panel layouts and the visual storytelling of both quiet conversations and brutal conflict are top-notch, but I can’t escape the feeling that that I am looking at a sketch of the story instead of the final version. The art is very scratchy, and while it has a visceral power, after a couple hundred pages I started wishing another inker would come along and tighten it up. On the other hand, this is a gritty and compelling story once you get into it, and a gritty visual style suits it well.

Fans of crime fiction should read A History of Violence at least once because, despite its flaws, it is a dramatic and emotional journey that not even the film could match, and it isn’t a story you will soon forget. The original edition is long out of print, but the 2005 reprint will run you about $20.

Collector’s Guide: A History of Violence; 2005 reprint edition, Paradox Press.

indie box: Down

Tags

down, Image Comics, indie box, Indie Comics, Tony Harris, Warren Ellis

Like last week’s pick from the short box of indie comics, this week features another crime story with a bad-ass female lead. Down is a four-issue series by Warren Ellis with art from Tony Harris and Cully Hamner, and its portrayal of a police officer infiltrating a violent criminal organization reminds me in some ways of one of my favorite films: The Departed by Martin Scorsese. Down isn’t quite as complex, as the fast pace and tight focus relentlessly blaze through the story up until the bitter end. But like The Departed, this story doesn’t end where you think it will.

Down puts our leading lady into the middle of a conflict between crooked cops and even more crooked gangsters, and every step of the journey takes her into increasingly questionable decisions about just whose side she is on. In her quest to get close to the criminal leader, she is forced to consider just how far she is willing to go to maintain her cover.

Down has a high body count and graphic violence, but I feel the real intensity takes place around just how much her experiences deform and re-define the protagonist’s conception of who she is and what role she wants to play in life. At some point, she realizes she has crossed a line she can never step back over and return to normalcy, and her only option is to choose a new path of her own design.

It’s one of my favorite of Ellis’ short works, and all the better because it doesn’t end with a big explosion, a convention he tended to over-use when he seemed to be cranking out a new series every week. It’s a fun read if you like crime fiction and bad-ass women, and you can get it for about $2 an issue.

Collector’s Guide: Down #1-4; 2005, Image.

indie box: Felon

Tags

crime, felon, Greg Rucka, indie box, Indie Comics, top cow

Today’s pick from the short box of indie comics is Felon, a four-issue series from the mind of Greg Rucka, who is known for both his crime stories and his preference for writing female lead characters. I have a few other Rucka gems to share with you later, but they all feature a detective as the main character, and this one follows the adventures of a remorseless criminal.

She’s a bad-ass without being an over-the-top action hero, and even though we are sympathetic to her because her crew screwed her over, she isn’t exactly role-model material. She’s concerned about one thing, and one thing only, and this focus on her goal is apparent from page one. She is released from prison and only has three words to say:

She sticks to this simple, direct goal through three issues of violence, and the plot is pretty straight-forward, even when a new heist enters the picture. But the drive, the unrelenting focus she maintains, and her subordination of any empathy or morality to the intensity of her avarice made a huge impression on me. Felon influenced my own stories about an unrepentant female criminal who constantly smokes cigarettes and blasts anyone who gets in her way, so I owe Rucka and company a debt of gratitude.

But it’s the fourth issue that really blows my mind. The third issue brings an end to the heist story, and you wonder what’s next, but then Rucka turns the world upside down. The fourth issue introduces a female detective who is on the trail of our leading lady, completely switches to her point of view, and shows how her focus on the case destroys her personal life. Also, the first three issues are full color, but the fourth is black and white. The titular felon only appears in flashbacks related by other characters, such as a scene that recalls one of her robberies and demonstrates just how cold she can be.

Felon is a quick read but a fun one if you love crime fiction and bad-ass women, and you can get it for about $2 an issue.

Collector’s Guide: Felon #1-4; 2001, Top Cow.

indie box: Scene of the Crime

Tags

crime, DC Comics, Ed Brubaker, indie box, Indie Comics, michael lark, scene of the crime

This week’s pick from the indie box isn’t even indie, having been published by DC Comics, but it has an indie feel and showcases the talents of two future superstars. Scene of the Crime is an early collaboration between Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark, who would later do an amazing run together on Daredevil at Marvel.

Scene of the Crime follows the adventures of a private investigator as he unravels an increasingly sinister and fucked-up story, and I wanted to love it. It would probably make a solid movie. But after the second issue, I was flipping through pages to see the big reveal. The narration in the captions starts in first gear on page one and never really accelerates, and the art is sometimes too clean when it could use more grit and grime.

Scene of the Crime faces a structural problem in that we as readers get hints that the investigator has some past tragedy, but we don’t get told what it is until the final pages. This makes it feel more like a postscript than something crucial to understanding the character’s motivations, and by the time we get there, the main story is basically over. So, did it really matter? It feels like it didn’t.

Despite its flaws, Scene of the Crime is a glimpse into the early days of a writer and artist team who eventually crafted tightly-wound, tense crime stories. The four-issue series shows the team has the ability to tell a complex tale of crime and mystery, and I see it as a stepping stone to later masterpieces such as the Brubaker/Lark run on Daredevil and Brubaker’s epic collaboration with Sean Phillips on Criminal, one of my all-time favorite comic book series.

Collector’s Guide: Scene of the Crime; DC Comics, 1999

Interview with 4 Seconds creator Paul O’Connor

Tags

4 seconds, Billy King, comic book scripting, concept art, digital comics, first issue, Indie Comics, interview, Karl Kesel, Paul O'Connor, think fast, thrillbent

Author Paul O’Connor joins us today for an interview about his newly launched digital comic book story 4 Seconds. You can read 4 Seconds for free at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent. Paul discusses with us the technical side of producing a story for Thrillbent’s unique reading platform, including how he invented a new scripting technique working with artist Billy King on the initial concept design and artist Karl Kesel on the final story.

Paul, what is 4 Seconds and how did it come about?

4 Seconds is an original comic story in digital form published at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent site. It is free to read right now, and I hope everyone will give it a shot. The story is self-contained and easy to complete in one sitting. It tells the tale of a petty thief who discovers she can see into the future… but only 4 seconds into the future! This proves to be just enough superpower to get her into trouble.

The story was born when I won Mark Waid’s open-microphone pitch contest at San Diego Comic-Con. I was super-excited for this job, because I am a big believer in the new way stories can be told at Thrillbent. There are dozens of stories at the site, many of them are free, and they all have something to say about how comic stories can be told beyond the printed page.

As someone who makes books, I’d love to hear about the technical side of creating 4 Seconds specifically for the Thrillbent digital format. What’s unique about Thrillbent compared to printed comics, or even other digital platforms?

Even during the pitch stage, it was important to me that I create a story best told (or perhaps only told) in the Thrillbent format. Thrillbent specializes in digital-native stories that expand the way comics stories are told. It is critical to understand that these are still comics stories. They aren’t motion comics, and they don’t have soundtracks or spoken dialogue. They are still words, pictures, and panels that the reader pages through at their own pace.

One way things are different is in the fluidity of transitions afforded by this platform. For instance, we can do actual fades, wipes, and pans, imparting a more cinematic feel to a traditional comics story. Likewise, this platform allows for new types of page architecture and panel borders, and new approaches to balloon placement and dialogue construction. In creating 4 Seconds, artist Karl Kesel and I tried to take full advantage of being in a paperless environment, and using this platform to tell our story in a more memorable way. 4 Seconds is built from the ground-up to be a new thing in familiar clothing.

Tell me how those possibilities came to life in creating a scene from 4 Seconds.

For example, we might have a “master shot”—say, a nighttime interior of the mansion of the villainous Anton Glass. Rather than show the entire shot at once, our story might reveal it in portions—first showing just that slice illuminated by the moody moonlight leaking through the floor-to-ceiling windows, then picking up the trail of bloody footprints on the floor, then finding the outstretched hand of a body lying just inside the shadows.

Across this, we place our characters, posing them for the critical moments of storytelling. And then we bring in dialogue balloons, captions, and sound effects. What Karl had to deliver were all the many individual panels, frames, and character poses that made up the story, which are then placed in the correct order for viewing via Thrillbent.

The results are equivalent to what might be many panels and pages in a paper comic, all playing out in the same narrative space using comic conventions of panels to parse time and focus reader attention on the sequential elements needed to tell the story. It’s still the same toolbox used in conventional comics, but there’s greater freedom of expression in how it’s used, particularly when it comes to isolating specific elements that you want the reader to see.

How was writing the 4 Seconds script different from comic scripts you’ve written for other media? Was it anything like a traditional comic book script?

This was a very different process. The Thrillbent format demanded that I take a new approach to scripting, and I also challenged myself to think in visual terms from the get-go. I deliberately went outside of my comfort zone of concentrating on dialogue and description and leaving everything else up to the artist. Instead, I wanted to provide a deeply thought-out visual blueprint for Karl, which he could (and did!) use as a springboard to make things even better in the penciling stage.

That meant I was doing scene-blocking and transitions—new things for me—and also figuring out how to break the rules as fast as I made them! To tie it all together, I invented a hybrid script form that offers conventional comics direction, dialogue, etc., but abandoned panels as the unit of storytelling in favor of frame advances. Determining how much information to add/change to each advance drives the pace of the story, and sometimes the challenge is as much about deciding what to retain from previous frames more than it is about what to add.

Thank you, Paul! 4 Seconds keeps the twists and turns coming right up to the very end. Revealing the story in frames like this means readers share Cassie’s experience of her world. They know something is coming in that empty space of the future, but they can’t see far enough ahead to be sure what it is. I found it drew me into the story and made me care that much more about what happened to her.

Read 4 Seconds for free at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent.

Queen & Country by Greg Rucka

Tags

collection, Greg Rucka, Indie Comics, Oni Press, Queen and Country

 
We discovered Queen & Country on the Totally Top Secret Fifty Cent Rack last year. Someone blessed us by leaving about 2/3 of the series there, and it was easy enough to fill in the rest with VF/NM copies at about a buck a piece.

We have read many of Greg Rucka’s crime and detective stories before, but this is our favorite. Rucka made his mark at DC with his work on Batman in Detective Comics, among others. We prefer his indie short stories like Felon for Image/Top Cow, and Oni Press titles Whiteout and Stumptown. Queen & Country, also from Oni Press, proved as enjoyable as any of these, if not more.

 

 
It takes a while to get into the series if you read it like a novel, due to Rucka’s insistence on action above introspection. We get right into the thick of things with the characters without much context as to who they are. Only as they begin to deal with the consequences of their spy operations do we begin to bond with them and see what they are made of.

 

 
Told in chapters over five or six issues at a time, Queen & Country brings in a different art team for each chapter. Each dynamically different style gives us a new sense of the characters, too. We see them conceptualized anew with each new story arc. You might expect that to throw off the flow of the title, but it only deepened our enjoyment. Rucka’s scripts show us his characters more than tell us about them in exposition. Each art team shows in a unique way.

 

 
We sold a nice collection of the series in single issues on eBay recently. You can find most of the series in stock as single issues and trade paperbacks. The Definitive Edition also collects these plus all the Queen & Country: Declassified spin-offs that delve into our secret agents’ past. It’s a great action/spy/adventure series we hope to read again!

 

 

Lili by Scooter Harris

Tags

art, Lili, painting, Scooter Harris, Studio Hadra

Original art by Scooter Harris of Studio Hadra, author of True Crime Theater.

Jack Kirby Crime: Tomorrow’s Murder!

Tags

crime, golden age, Jack Kirby, Prize

Prize published Treasure Comics from 1943-1947. It had all kinds of stories, from humor to adventure to fantasy. Lurking in the pages of the tenth issue you will find a crime story by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon: Tomorrow’s Murder! Kirby and Simon did not stay on the title for long but other greats like Frank Frazetta were also featured in it before its demise.

Collector’s Guide:
– From Treasure Comics #10; 1946

Strange Tales 71

Tags

Joe Sinnot, Paul Reinman, Steve Ditko, Strange Tales

Let’s set the time machine for 1959! Take a look this week at a stack of Marvel’s Strange Tales. You’ll find fast-paced science fiction stories with an occasional occult theme thrown in for good measure. (Strange Tales ran more horror in the early 1950’s, before the Comics Code Authority nonsense began.) Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby feature prominently alongside other masters of these classic short-form comics.

Collector’s Guide:
– From Strange Tales #71; Marvel, 1959.

“I Dared to Defy Merlin’s Black Magic!” with art by Steve Ditko; “I am the Man Who Will Destroy Your World!”; “When the Saucer Strikes!” with art by Paul Reinman; “I Fought the Man Who Couldn’t Be Killed!”; “I Am the Man Without a Face!” with art by Joe Sinnott.

Jack Kirby Crime: The Money-Making Machine Swindlers!

Tags

crime, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!
– From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline.

Jack Kirby Crime: The Capture of “One-Eye”!

Tags

Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!
– From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline.

Your Move, Creep!

Tags

action figure, light up visor, machine gun, robocop, weapon arm

 
Once upon a time, I had a job at a Title company with a system that gave intercom access to the whole place via your desktop phone. When things got tense, depressing, or just plain boring, I put RoboCop on the loudspeakers. Held him up to the phone, pressed the button on his chest, and thrilled the entire staff with his “realistic machine gun sounds.”
Ratta-tat-tat, motherfuckers!

Of course, this was 1997. Getting your ass shot off by your coworkers hadn’t become a national hobby yet. Back in the 20th century, a little RoboCop in the office made people laugh. Tension breaker. Stress reliever. Nothing but Good Clean Fun with a weapon arm, M-16, and an assault rifle.

In the real world, you have a lot more to worry about than the choking hazard of small plastic parts. One of the first times Dad was on TV, he was the first officer to approach the parked vehicle of a very disturbed man. The man had gone into his office and shot a bunch of people, did the high speed chase thing, then blew his brains out in a parking lot. The only upside of making a to-do list like that for your day is that you won’t have to make any more to-do lists.

Well, this is what happens when people keep things bottled up day after day, year after year. Instead, they should stop once a day to let RoboCop do the machine gunning. Let RoboCop handle the assault rifle. His visor lights up when he rat-a-tats. It looks cool as hell, and no one gets hurt.

Jack Kirby Crime: The Phony Check Racketeers!

Tags

crime, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!
– From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline.

Jack Kirby Crime: Underworld Snob!

Tags

crime, Eddie Bentz, golden age, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!
– From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline.

Jack Kirby Crime: The Masked Killer!

Tags

crime, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!
– From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline.

Jack Kirby Crime: Gun Moll!

Tags

crime, golden age, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!
– From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline.

Jack Kirby Crime: The True Life Story of Alvin Karpis!

Tags

Alvin Karpis, crime, golden age, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Justice Traps the Guilty, Prize

Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.

Collector’s Guide: The first three issues of Justice Traps the Guilty are now collected in a Kindle version!
– From Justice Traps the Guilty; 1947-1953, Prize/Headline.

Jack Kirby Crime: Alibi?

Tags

Charlton comics, crime, golden age, Jack Kirby, Jack Kirby Museum, Police Trap

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s work on Police Trap has been well-documented at The Jack Kirby Museum. The collaborators watched their publisher fall to pieces, and they found Charlton was willing to help continue the title. Police Trap #5 was the first Charlton issue, but it would only last through #6.

Collector’s Guide:
– From Police Trap #5; 1955, Charlton