Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [51]
One new detective title, Crime Does Not Pay, a true-crime entry with more sex, violence, gore, and mayhem than ever seen in a comic book, made a huge splash during the war years. That America loved crime stories was hardly a revelation; the obsession with crime and punishment dated back to the Wild West and never abated. The country was fascinated by, and even glamorized, its outlaws, from Billy the Kid and the James brothers to Al Capone and Pretty Boy Floyd. That fascination had been exploited to great success in the cinema, through characters portrayed by Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and others, and in books and pulp magazines. Comics, including The Spirit, had presented a wide range of stories not involving superheroes, but since the target audience of these comic books was the young reader, publishers and editors self-regulated their books’ content. It was permissible to have beginning-to-end, panel-to-panel, sock-’em-up action, and people (usually the bad guys) could die over the course of all the violence; but there were limits to blood and gore, depictions of shootings and stabbings, and close-ups of fallen bodies. Sex, of course, was strictly off-limits, and artists could strip down their characters only so far, usually to what amounted to little more than their underwear, but it had better stop at that point. Artists were always happy to push their limits, but they knew when they literally had to draw the line.
Crime Does Not Pay went beyond those customary boundaries. Characters were sprayed by machine-gun fire at point-blank range; the pools of blood looked like small lakes. The more realistic and detailed the better. The comic’s first cover depicted, in extreme close-up and full color, a knife blade driven through a hand, pinning it to a table. Only two rules seemed to apply: The stories had to be true, or at least within screaming distance of it; and the criminals had to be punished, by prison or death, by the end of the stories. But between the beginning and retribution, it was anything goes.
Crime, it turned out, paid by the boatload. Crime Does Not Pay flew off the newsstands and drugstore shelves, with a huge percentage of sales going to soldiers overseas. Over the next decade, imitators would pop up everywhere, and they, along with a line of horror comics offering increasingly gruesome tales, would lead to a showdown between publishers and citizen groups, church organizations, and lawmakers, with predictable but disturbing results
The war provided an ideal link among comic book readers of all ages and backgrounds. Patriotism—and the deep hatred for Germany and Japan—swept over the country, creating an urgent need—a need for involvement, a need for bravery, a need for victory over the forces of evil—and who better to offer a temporary gleam of security than heroic figures in comic books? Comic book publishers understood this, and before the war was over, it seemed as if every superhero in the business had brushed up against the enemy. New heroes with such names as Mr. Liberty, the Defender, the Liberator, the American Crusader, and the Fightin’ Yank sprang up.
Few characters—or names, for that matter—pounced on the patriotic fervor like Captain America, the red-white-and-blue-clad superhero created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. Captain America Comics, issued by Timely, turned up in early 1941, before Pearl Harbor but at a time when frustrated Americans were impatiently awaiting their country’s inevitable entry into the war.
“Captain America