Crime Must Pay The Punishment

Saturday Leftover Day.

Alex Kotzky is one of my favorite realistic artists of the fifties (and beyond). Until recently I was not aware that he did a story for Lev Gleason's company. Crime nd Punishment was the second crime title, started after the success of Crime Does Not Pay. I looked around at the Digital Comics Museum, but this seems to be the only one he did. Although there is an uncredited story four issues later, that might be his as well. The spalsh page has the same feel as the horror stories he did with Jack Cole for Quality.

Missing EC

Saturday Leftover Day.

By 1956 the once mighty Lev Gleason empire was crumbling. His crime books Crime Does Not Pay and Crime And Punishment had not survived the arrival of the comic book code and the reslting backlash for hooror and crime books. All he had left were a couple of kids books, some westerns and his long running romance book Boy Loves Girl. Over at he comics museum two scanners are uploading almost all of the issues of ths title (and it's predessor Boy Meets Girl from books donate by Jim Vandeboncoeur Jr. For the next to last issues, Gleason got himself some Leroy lettering and called the book a New Trend book. Leroy lettering was used in all of the EC books which were called part of... you've guessed it, a new trend. All of these books had long gone, EC being one of the first casualties of the comic book witch hunt of the mid fifties. Even their comics code friendly follow up New Direction titles had stopped. But still Gleason must have thought there must be some fans out there would have been missing them.

Ig they did, they were treated by the standard romance fare of the period. But two of these stories were drawn by Bill Walton doing his best Alex Toth impression (even more than usual). The result is a remarkable book, I would love to share. The wo other stories in this book, one of which is drawn by romance regular An Brewster, have been inked in the same sober Toth style, which makes me think that Mike Peppe was involved in the inking of all these stories, maybe even an editor. His style is visible in other books of this series as well, but never more so than in these two stories.

Looking into the Gleason books I found two other Bill Walton stories with Leroy lettering in an Alex Toth style in Crime And Punishment #72 from April 1955. These are from about a year earlier and even has Leroy lettering in the balloons. So there may be even more out there, although all of th Walton stories I have seen in Boy Loves Girl in 1955 and 1956 didn't.

Company Man

Friday Comic Book Day.

After leaving the Timely bulpen in late 1949, Gene Colan worked for a couple of companies, before returning to Stan Lee to start an impressive run as a war and horror artist. Some of these stories are known at the Grand Comic Book Database and some are not. The two stories from Gleason's crime titles Crime and Punishments and Crime Does Not Pay are noted I am showing today, but just not often seen. I am topping it off with another story not often seen, a sample of Colan's work for DC's romance books. By the time this story was done in the mid-fifties Colan was already doing jobs for Lee again at Marvel, under a pseudonymn that was supposed to keep his editors at DC from knowing he did so. Although how they could miss it with his unique style, I don't know. One of the first stories he did for Lee, by the way, was a western that was signed by Dick Ayers. I should dig it out sometime and show that too.