The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics
Ed. by Paul Gravett

It’s interesting how the golden age of crime comics pretty neatly overlaps with that of noir cinema, peaking in the 1940s and 1950s. For comics, the body blow of the formation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954 effectively put an end to things. So it feels right that the comics reproduced here are in black and white, even though I’m not sure if that’s how they were all first published. Johnny Craig’s “The Sewer,” for example, from Crime SuspenStories #5 (1951), was. I think. originally in colour. But in any event, it feels right in black and white because that’s how we imagine all crime stories of the period.

The pieces collected here by editor Paul Gravett aren’t all from the golden age, but they look like they might be. Neo-noir and noir are indistinguishable visually. Even the fashions remain much the same. And. if anything, I think the stories were better back in the early days too. For some reason, I suspect fandom, Gravett bookends the material with two relatively recent stories by Alan Moore which I thought the two weakest pieces in the entire book. Neither is really a crime comic either. Nor did I think the entry by Neil Gaiman any better.

So it’s up to the old masters to carry the load. Luckily, they’re up to the task. The stories by Dashiell Hammett, Will Eisner, and especially Mickey Spillane are highlights, as is the aforementioned piece by Johnny Craig. They help make this a collection well worth checking out, even if you’re not a big fan of the genre. And one final thing I’ll note is how much fun I had sampling from a showcase of the letterers’ often invisible art. To be sure there’s some bad lettering in the mix – these were cheap pulps mostly, after all – but there’s a range of different styles here that show how key a role lettering could have in making a comic work. Sadly, noticing it so much here only made me aware of how it’s an art that’s in decline today, where so much lettering seems to be automated and generic.

Graphicalex