120 CRIME COMICS
comics, unlike once-popular genres (such as the We s t e r n or romance comics) largely
absent in current decades. At present, crime stories, especially of the grim but visually
stylish noir variety, are one of the few genres that can compete with superhero titles in
both mainstream and alternative comics.
As a broadly defi ned genre, crime stories encompass traditional British whodunits,
perfected by such writers as Agatha Christie, as well as American hard-boiled detective
stories indebted to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, in addition to narratives
centered on the police or other crime-fi ghting agencies, such as Ed McBain’s infl uential
87th Precinct novels, which treated a squad of policemen as a collective protagonist. Th e
crime genre also includes the roman noir, associated with writers like James M. Cain,
Cornell Woolrich, or Jim Th ompson, which often marginalizes or eliminates detectives
and the police altogether in order to explore the twisted psychology of criminals and to
lead readers into a sordid underworld milieu: each of these variations on the larger genre
has been appropriated by comics, sometimes with little imagination, but often with cre-
ative regard for the ways in which comics might distinctively employ these models. Th e
artwork in crime comics has especially drawn upon and extended visual sources ranging
from Sidney Paget’s illustrations for Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes
stories in Th e Strand, to the lurid covers of American pulp magazines, to the evocative
shadows and canted angles of both classic and contemporary Hollywood crime fi lms.
With a few exceptions, the tone of crime comics has also borrowed heavily from the
tough slang of literary and cinematic gangsters, gun molls, cops, and private eyes, as
well as the nerve-rattling sound eff ects of screeching tires, tommy-guns, and screaming
victims.
While many superhero comics invoke the conventions of crime fi ction (presenting
Batman in Detective Comics, for instance) and ostensibly depict their heroes as crime-
fi ghting upholders of the law, the fantastic elements of superhero narratives otherwise
distinguish them from more realistic crime stories, which (following the model estab-
lished by Edgar Allan Poe) are usually set in a recognizable world defi ned by human
limitations and rational explanation rather than super powers or supernatural events.
However, writers have often located superhero storylines in a crime fi ction milieu, as
when characters like Marvel’s Daredevil or Th e Punisher battle underworld mobs.
Any survey of crime comics must therefore acknowledge that many superheroes solve
crimes perpetrated by villains who are obviously criminals, though it seems reasonable
to place such examples outside of the (fl exible) borders of the genre. Still, a number of
comic books and graphic novels function as innovative genre hybrids, blending crime
narrative conventions with other genres, and thus often illuminating the elements of
both genres.
Perhaps because of their full arrival only in the late 1930s, comic books have rarely
imitated the classic ratiocinative detective story, pioneered by Poe and perfected by
Doyle, Christie, and their many imitators between the 1890s and 1930s. Structured
as a puzzle, the whodunit relies on a principle of fair play, providing readers with the
clues necessary to match wits with a genius detective. Tales encouraging readers to solve
