COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Crime Smashers 1 Universal
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Grade:
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7.0
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Page Quality:
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CREAM TO OFF-WHITE
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Certification #:
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0967135002
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Owner:
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GAM
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
A panel from Crime Smashers #1 is referenced in the “Seduction of the Innocent” (SOTI) as illustration #20 with the caption “A girl raped and murdered”. The comic is also referenced in the text on pages 19-20.In the text passages, Fredric Wertham, the author of the SOTI, describes a story from Crime Smashers #1 (the story name is Sally the Sleuth in “Death Bait”) and its “brutal near-rape scenes”. Wertham details the Sally the Sleuth story as follows:The story begins like this: “Late one night, in the suburbs of a large city, the moon looks down on the figure of a lone girl as she walks along a block of slumbering homes… Anything can happen at this hour!” Forthwith it does. For example:1) The girl walking along with a dark figure, his arm stretched out toward her, lurking behind.2) The girl falling over, her breast prominent, her skirt thrown up to reveal black net panties, the “attacker” a black, shadowed figure learning over her.3) He “drags her into the gloom,” holding his hand over her mouth and tearing off her coat.4) He has her on the ground behind some bushes.5) A girl, murdered, and presumably raped, is shown on the ground with her clothes disordered and torn.6) Another girl being choked from behind. Screams: “AI-EEEK!!”7) “The Strangler” locks her in a warehouse, saying: “I’ll kill you just like I did the others – then I’ll crawl down the trap door and get away under the dock – Ha! Ha!”In actuality, the story is significantly different than Wertham’s account. Sally, the main female character portrayed in the story, is an undercover cop that is quite capable of defending herself. In Wertham’s version, as detailed above, you would think that Sally, the woman in the opening scene, is stalked, raped and killed by the attacker but that’s not what happens in the story. Instead, the attacker flees from Sally during the attack as her fellow police officers close in. Sally gains enough information from this initial attack to ultimately outwit the perpetrator and, in the end, dispatches him with her “single shot lipstick revolver”. A young woman is killed in the story but the only panel associated with that incident is the one shown in SOTI where the milkman discovers the body. In my opinion, Wertham overdramatized the story to make his point about brutality in comic books. Besides the cover scan, to give a better overall flavor for the story, I’ve included a scan of the entire page that contains the panel that’s referenced as an illustration in the SOTI. To read the full story, check out the digital comic museum web site (www.digitalcomicmuseum.com). This web site provides free online versions of many golden age comic books.
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