CRIME COMICS 121
mysteries were often used as back-up material in early comic books, such as the “Who
Dunnit?” series in Crime Does Not Pay (Lev Gleason, 104 issues, 1942–55) or “Let’s
Play Detective” strips in Timely’s (the forerunner of Marvel) superhero anthology All
Winners Comics (1941– 47), which provided solutions in upside-down panels. Th e
generic gimmick of having the reader guess along with the detective was briefl y reprised
for Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle’s Whodunnit? (Eclipse, 3 issues, 1986 – 87), but has
rarely structured major comics stories, more often preoccupied with sustaining action
than with unraveling mysteries. Perhaps confi rming this preference, and in contrast to
their rich history in other media, sporadic adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories
into comic books have been largely undistinguished and short-lived: among the longer
running series, Cases of Sherlock Holmes (Renegade and Northstar, 20 issues, 1986–90)
was an oddity that reproduced the Holmes tales as text, accompanied by black and
white illustrations (infl uenced by the 1940s fi lms starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel
Bruce) by artist Dan Day; arguably, the best Holmes-derived comics series, Gary Reed
and Guy Davis’s punk-era Baker Street (Caliber, 10 issues, 1988–92), featuring a female
team, only alludes to the great detective and his world. Perhaps the most successful
use of the fair play detective story in comics appeared long after the literary models
inspiring it: Mike W. Barr’s Maze Agency (Comico, Innovation, and Caliber, 28 issues,
1988–97) was modeled upon the once extremely popular detective stories featuring
and “by” Ellery Queen (writing partners Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee). Each issue
provided a discrete case for its main characters (private eye Jennifer Mays and amateur
sleuth Gabriel Webb) to solve along with readers, while the series maintained forward
momentum through a developing romance between the crime-solving team. For the
most part, however, crime comics have preferred the grittier and perhaps less playful
forms of the genre.
Rather than borrowing from the Golden Age of detective fi ction, then, Golden
Age crime comics drew upon more immediate sources, such as the Warner Bros.
gangster cycle of the early 1930s, pulp magazines like Black Mask (home to the
innovators of the hard-boiled style), and Chester Gould’s infl uential Dick Tracy
newspaper strip, which began in 1931. Th ough largely forgotten today, other news-
paper strips like Wa r o n C r i m e (which provided heroic accounts of FBI agents) were
reprinted in the early comic book Famous Funnies in 1936, and Jerry Siegel and
Joe Shuster were creating their own G-Man strips for comic books like New Com-
ics and More Fun Comics before they introduced Superman in 1938. (Th e 1936
appearance in Funny Pages of the masked detective Th e Clock, created by George
Brenner, perhaps initiated the blurring of superhero and detective fi gures in comics
most successfully embodied a few years later by Batman, and in the following decade
by Will Eisner’s Th e Spirit.) Prior to Batman’s arrival in #27 (1939), the fi rst two
years of Detective Comics indeed centered on detectives, including the tough Slam
Bradley, another creation of Siegel and Shuster who lasted well beyond many of the
other early gumshoes soon displaced by the growing roster of superheroes rapidly
dominating comic books.
