| Slot: |
All-Famous Crime 9 |
| Item: |
All-Famous Crime #9 Universal |
| Grade: |
CGC 7.0 |
| Cert #: |
1156987010
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Owner Comments
All-Famous Crime #9 is referenced in Fredric Wertham’s “Seduction of the Innocent” (SOTI) in the text on page 181 and as illustration #32.
In this section of the SOTI, Wertham describes how comic books interfere with the normal sexual development of children and provides the following example “There are individuals who suffer from the truly dangerous perversion of wishing to hurt or kill couples making love to each other. The comic-book industry obliges by describing such cases in detail. So, the child who never had such an idea before will learn from it; the one who had any idea at all, however faintly, will have it nourished and given form. One picture shows a couple in an automobile, both the young man and the girl with blood streaming all over their faces from bullet holes in their heads. In the story the murderer was never caught.”
In addition to the passage on page 181, Wertham included the panel with the bullet ridden couple in the illustration section of the SOTI. The panel is illustration #32 with the caption “The wish to hurt or kill couples in Lovers’ Lanes in a not uncommon perversion.” The lover’s lane panel comes from a story “The Case of the Crimson Killer” contained in All-Famous Crime #9 (a reprint of a story originally published in Law Against Crime #3). I have included a scan of the page from this story that contains the panel with the murdered couple. Although if you read the story closely, the red marks on their foreheads are meant to represent circles drawn with lipstick and not necessarily bullet holes. Throughout the story, the detectives trying to solve the crime refer to the murderer as the red circle lipstick killer.
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