Number 1358: Boyoboy, it's the Little Wise Guys!

We have a theme week going, ”Boyoboy! Week” featuring kid gangs of Golden Age comics. Today we have the longest running of all, the Little Wise Guys from Daredevil Comics.

The group of youngsters first appeared in 1942, and lasted until publisher Lev Gleason closed his comic book line in 1956. This war-themed story is from Daredevil Comics #29 (1944), and Daredevil doesn’t appear until page 10 of the 16-page story. Oh, the ignominy —  the title character upstaged by a bunch of street kids!

The story features a torture scene, and off-camera more tortures and murders are alluded to. The cover, signed by Charles Biro, does not represent a scene in the book, but it is one of those covers sure to attract attention on the newsstand.

Drawn by Carl Hubbell, one of Biro’s regular artists, with script credited to editor Biro.

More Daredevil! First without the Little Wise Guys, and then one with them. Click on the pictures to go to the posts.

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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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