The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics

Edited by Paul Gravett

Running Press. $17.95 USD (2008)

I don’t really recommend you follow my semi-ironic method of reading this book—in a glass repair shop after your car was broken into—but there are worse things to do in a paneled waiting room with a distracting fountain wall on one side and too-close restroom on the other, and there are worse ways to get over one’s anger and once again find charm in the outlaw.

I don’t know much about this Mammoth series except that there’s a wide range of them, from brain-teasers and conspiracies to pirates and poker. And lots of whodunnits and erotica. As far as comics go, there are also volumes of war, horror, fantasy, and comic quotes, though that last one could just be funny lines for I know. The esteemed critic and author Paul Gravett edited this volume a couple years ago and I just sort of happened on it in a corner of my comics shop.

The first hook for me, as it may be for others, is the presence of a couple hard-to-find Alan Moore-scripted tales. Gravett seems to know this, as they’re the first and last pieces in the book. The first, “Old Gangsters Never Die,” isn’t a story, it’s a lyric from a Moore musical side project, The Sinister Ducks, illustrated by Lloyd Thatcher, alternating high contrast ’40s film noir imagery with more of a wash style, the first similar to David Lloyd’s V For Vendetta interiors, the latter not unlike Lloyd’s covers for the same series. It’s not top Moore, but he’s really high on language and crime movie cliches, and Thatcher’s up to the task of depicting the bullet-riddled fall guys and gin joints and roulette wheels. The card bearing “the Ace of Flames” is a great touch. 

The second Moore piece here, “I Keep Coming Back,” drawn by his A Small Killing collaborator Oscar Zarate, is the more celebrated piece but to me a bit less satisfying: it’s like a nicely descriptive journal entry; sharp and immediate but that immediacy and lack of distance prevents Moore from saying much about the oddness of being in a famous Jack the Ripper haunt to talk about Jack or having completed a massive, yearslong book about him, From Hell. And let’s face it, as much as it’s nice to have these Moore rarities under one cover, they’re more comics about crime—or comics about, respectively, crime films and crime comics, than they are crime comics themselves.

Gravett (it may well have been the publisher) plays just a little loose with the cover, as well, which gives crime novelist Ed McBain top billing, although the work in question isn’t written by McBain at all but a story from an unnamed writer starring McBain’s 87th Precinct characters for a short-lived 1962 series. I wish they’d have credited the actual artist of that story, the great Bernie Krigstein. It’s not the same Krigstein style “Master Race” fans will recognize—it’s much looser, and he’s doing something strange with the eyes—but although Gravett reports Krigstein hated the story itself, he still tries hard to come up with some creative solutions, coming off very Ditkoesque with a silent page of the blind painter/murderer all rubber-limbed, ridiculous and yet unsettling. An earlier Krigstein-drawn story, “Lily-white Joe,” is at first glance more in line with Krigstein’s better-liked style, but it’s kind of a stiff, moralistic dud as a story—respectable, cowardly businessman bankrolls a racketeer and ends up paying with his life—while Krigstein’s art is severely disappointing, all hard angles, dead lines and too much negative space. It has to be hard for an editor to get the rights to reprint what he really wants to reprint, so one has to think there were some better choices than this that just weren’t available. Still, there’s already some Krigstein work inside, so what gives?

There are a few other choices that maybe could have been better. In addition to his bestselling Mike Hammer novels, Mickey Spillane wrote quite a few comics, so it makes sense there would be at least one of them included. In fact, there’s two, a “Mike Lancer” adaptation by Harry Sahle that’s trite but full of fisticuffs and gunplay, and the last serial from Spillane’s Mike Hammer newspaper strip that ran pretty much uncensored until such time as it was abruptly canceled (for a woman depicted bound in a negligee, seen here). It seems tame now.

Not tame but mawkish, and suffering from some of the stiffest art around from Terry Beatty is Max Allan Collins’ Ms. Tree story. Ms. Tree was an ’80s crime comic, rare enough just for that, but doubly notable for its female protagonist. Just as Hill Street Blues is almost unwatchable now, Ms. Tree is also overly earnest and clunky. To be fair, it could be that other stories might be a little more fun than this one, which hinges largely on whether Ms. Tree will bring to term the child she conceived with a man she found to be an evil criminal. Maybe if I wasn’t pro-abortion rights, I wouldn’t mind the story so much, but Collins doesn’t entertain any debate on the matter. Tree goes about her business, hiding out from killers, killing them, and then lecturing. 

There’s also something of a British bias here, unsurprisingly. Which is fine when you’re including fine talents such as Moore and Gaiman, or Paul Grist’s excellent done-in-one Kane mystery, “Rat in the House,” but less fine when unearthing Colin and Denis McLoughlin’s, “Roy Carson and the Old Master,” which was justly earthed. 

Much better ’30s and ’40s work comes, naturally, from those whose names and characters haven’t been forgotten, such as the fine P’Gell story here from Will Eisner’s The Spirit: slyly sexy and funny, and with the bonus being that arch-criminal The Octopus is behind it all. There’s also a “Stories of the FBI” type of Joe Simon/Jack Kirby tale here, “The Money-Making Machine Swindlers,” which is at least quite well-drawn if lacking any real quirks or explosiveness, and Jack Cole’s “Murder, Morphine and Me,” an hysterical story of a life ruined by crime, and it’s also famous for the out-of-context image of an eyeball being threatened by a hypodermic needle, used by Dr. Wertham in book, Seduction of the Innocent, about the dangers comics presented to ’50s youth. While this and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Johnny Craig story, “The Sewer,” shiver with nervous energy in every lurid image, the Dashiell Hammett/Alex Raymond strip, Secret Agent X-9, chugs along in the sequence reprinted here with an unstoppable narrative momentum, slowing down not for the bodies piling up or anything but shorthand notions of character. 

There’s a Neil Gaiman short, an oddity about an Arabian sect called the Shaninai, a female-led society where males are rare and prized like horses, sold as prostitutes to the richest of connoisseurs. It’s a nice piece, though not much of a crime story as far as having a clear resolution. Great mood, though.

Other modern stories fare well, such as “The Switch,” a deliciously cold tale of revenge on a cruel cop by Sanchez Abuli and Jordi Bernet from their Torpedo series. Carlos Sampayo’s and Jose Munoz’s Alack Sinner story, “Talkin’ With Joe,” is contemporary (late ’70s/early ’80s?) but suffused with the familiar tropes of American noir as seen through European eyes: booze, cigarette-filled ashtrays, jazz. But as Sinner tells a barkeep his story of a couple bent cops, it keeps going deeper and darker into an unbreakable web of cynicism and corruption and one honest man who can’t win but can at last, finally, look himself in the mirror again for taking his ultimately insignificant stand. 

It’s unclear why there’s nothing from the past 15 years reprinted here except the Kane story, especially when that period saw a resurgence in crime comics, led first by Frank Miller’s Sin City and then the Bendis/Oeming Powers and Brubaker/Phillips Criminal, all of which have a short story or two. No doubt Gravett is aware of them all, so perhaps he couldn’t get the rights. That, and a quibble or two about what’s in here, aside, this is a fairly remarkable collection.

—Christopher Allen