Number 1282: The Claw and the Clawites

The Claw, here making his appearance from Daredevil Comics #27 (1944), was billed as “The World's Worst Villain.” The thought struck me when looking at him, he may not have been exactly the world's worst, but he was the tallest. I'm sure that if the Claw was around today some sharp sports agent would find a way to get him a multi-million dollar contract playing professional basketball.

I also like the little devils that do the Claw's bidding. But someone, for lack of a better name, came up with “Clawites.” It has a certain ring...the Claw and the Clawites. Could've been a rock band from the era in which I grew up.

Artwork on this tall tale is by Bob Q. Siege, who also worked for editors Charles Biro and Bob Wood on Crime Does Not Pay.

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Number 1199: Homicidal hobo

Frank the Tramp is so bad he doesn't know how many people he's killed. “I guess hundreds —” he says to himself. “I kinda forgot —” Whew. Now that’s a bad guy. Frank avoids detection for a long time the way real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas reportedly did, by traveling around and varying his methods of dispatching victims. As Frank puts it in his final attempt at murder, “I've killed people all sorts of ways, but never with a live wire!”

In my opinion this story from Daredevil #22 (1943) is really only interesting because of Frank, not because of Daredevil, who just steps in when necessary. Certainly not by Daredevil’s kid gang, the Little Wise Guys, even though Frank’s crime spree is stopped because of their suspicions. Frank’s two wives are there to build up the story and provide Frank with victims. The critics of comics, crime comics especially, were sensitive to this sort of thing. Biro followed a criminal’s career, right up until the criminal’s bad end. That wasn't anything new in fiction, but in four colors, sold to children, it caused alarm.

This story is by Charles Biro* and drawn by Norman Maurer.

*According to David Hajdu in The Ten Cent Plague, Biro also used Virginia Hubbell as a ghost-writer, but the Grand Comics Database credits this story to Biro.

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Number 1129: Charles Biro and Bob Wood's eye a-peel

As I mentioned a few days ago, Bob Wood, who partnered with Charles Biro to create and edit Crime Does Not Pay, a few years later was convicted of killing a girlfriend. The story is told in the trade paperback, Blackjacked and Pistol-Whipped: Crime Does Not Pay, from Dark Horse Comics, along with over 200 pages of crime comic book stories from that magazine.

These two stories predate Crime Does Not Pay. They're from Daredevil #11 (1942), which was published soon after war was declared against Japan, and I've included a centerspread board game called "Slap the Jap." Sorry for the racist content, folks. It was wartime, and it's interesting, an elaborate game for a comic book.

Biro's early stuff was as lurid as he could make it. He knew what got attention on newsstands, and he hewed to primary colors to make his stories stand out. Quality Comics was doing much the same thing. Someone once commented that coloring like this is "like taking a potato peeler to your eyeballs." Even so, for emphasis I've given the coloring a little extra push to make it really bright. If any eye damage occurs, well, sorry. You've been warned.

I have shown both these stories before, a few years ago, but these are brand new scans.

Bob Wood's story of The Claw, despite his drawing, has a lot of energy to it, though, just as Biro's tale of a murderous horror movie star does. That kind of energy went into Crime Does Not Pay when that publication began with a date a month later than this issue of Daredevil, July 1942 to the Daredevil date of June.

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Maybe Karen Deserved It?

After all, how much more thoughtless can you be than to have a picture of yourself framed with the inscription, "All my love, Karen," and give it to a blind man?

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