Quality Comics fared better than most companies in the transition from Golden Age superheroics to Atomic Age potpourri, even though the company had to survive a severe implosion in 1950.
In researching an article for Comics Buyer's Guide, I developed an intriguing statistic about that implosion and the resulting revival of Quality's fortunes. The results of this resurgence included three of the best crime titles of the 1950s.
The intriguing statistic: Of Quality's 30 titles in the first half of 1950 — all bi-monthlies except for Police Comics and the ill-fated Modern Comics — the company cancelled 22 in the second half of the year. The cancellations included all 14 romance titles, although three were revived in 1951, along with one more in 1952.
I didn't count Police Comics among the cancellations because the title continued, albeit with two significant changes: Police went from costume heroics, led by Plastic Man and The Spirit in #102 (Oct. 1950), to hard cop stories with #103 (Dec. 1950), and it temporarily went from monthly to bi-monthly.
It wasn't a surprising shift, since crime comics had become popular in the late 1940s after Lev Gleason's infamous Crime Does Not Pay pretty much had the urban crime field to itself in the 1942-45 period. I don't recall Fredric Wertham singling out Police Comics for criticism, but he probably could have and would have (If you read his 1954 anti-comics screed, Seduction of the Innocent, its surprising how few titles and characters he actually referred to by name).
Much more than most crime comics, the covers of Police look more like they belonged on pulp magazines, which were on their last legs in the 1950s. For my money, these were some of the best covers of the Atomic Age, especially because many were done by Reed Crandall. They're all shown in the Photo-Journal. Quality's original creation, the hard-boiled private eye Ken Shannon, was featured on all but #127 (Oct. 1953), when T-Man took over for the last issue. That was understandable, because Ken Shannon's own title was gone by then, but T-Man was still going strong.
These issues of Police are wonderful period pieces. I'm still looking for six of the 25 issues. I wouldn't say these are rare, but they are popular enough to be pricey. There was a certain wonderful Fiction House feel to them, so much that the blurb on the cover of #104 (Feb. 1951) could have added "Molls" to the enticing phrase "Mobs, Murder and Mayhem... all in a day's work as Ken Shannon, Private Eye, tackles the case of The Handsome Hunk of Homicide!" For some reason, Fiction House didn't produce urban crime comics — although they did have pulp crime magazines — but doesn't that sound like the way Fiction House would have done it? But then, if Fiction House had been into crime comics, Police would surely have been the title they would have chosen, right?
By the by, there's a big plug for a new Blackhawks radio show in Police #104, in a full house ad for Blackhawk #37, but I couldn't find any reference to the show in either Tune in Yesterday, by John Dunning, or The Big Broadcast, which are possibly the two best detailed listings and references on the Golden Age of Radio.
Police must have been a big hit, because the title ran monthly from #108 (Oct. 1951) through #124 (Feb. 1953). That was quite a distinction for Police on the crowded stands of the era — with more than 3,160 issues that year, 1952 was the high point in total comic book issues produced from the l930s through the 1970s.
All of these Ken Shannon issues of Police are fun. I love the story titles: "Death and the Derelict," "Museum of Murder," "The Headless Horse Player," "Murder With a Bang"... you get the feeling. Police #103-107 were all 52 pages, so I especially recommend them since they were among the few crime comics with four different crime-busting characters. The others were T-Man Trask (as he was first known), Inspector Denver, and Dan Leary, State Trooper.
After Quality killed off 22 of its 30 titles, it inexplicably bumped up the page count of the surviving eight to 52 pages for almost a year. However, when DC abandoned the 52-page format late in 1951 on almost all of its titles, Quality followed suit at the same time, but Ken Shannon and T-Man were still to be found in every issue.
In 1951, Quality published only 84 issues compared to the company's high-water mark of 153 issues in 1950 during its nearly two decades of existence through 1956. The company's two new titles were spinoffs from Police — Ken Shannon and T-Man.
Ken Shannon lasted only 10 issues (Oct. 1951 through April 1953), perhaps because crime and horror comics came under steadily increasing fire in the 1952 period. Like rival DC, Quality eased off on extremely violent cover images more than a year before the Comics Code symbol began appearing early in 1955. Those 10 issues of Ken Shannon, all shown in the Photo-Journal, are all highly collectible and I recommend them.
What I can't figure out is how character-driven crime comics such as Ken Shannon apparently weren't as successful as generic crime comics such as Gleason's Crime Does Not Pay and Crime and Punishment. All of the Ken Shannon covers were cool, especially #1, #5, #7, and # 8. Several have outright horror themes, such as "The Vampire Mob" in #6.
T-Man apparently was much more successful than Ken Shannon, possibly because its anti-communist themes fit in well with the McCarthy era. Of the 38 issues from #1 (Sept. 1951) through #38 (Dec. 1956) — which ties several others for Quality's last issue — the Photo-Journal shows only the first 25. That's too bad, because most of the issues from #26-38 were among the more daring of the early post-Comics Code period.
T-Man's adventures took him all over the world in pulpy alliterative style: "Thunder in Thailand" in Police #127, along with "The Panama Peril" in #4, "Violence in Venice" in #5, "Terror in Tokyo" in #12, and so on. Almost every issue is a nifty period piece. They do vary in quality, so I recommend a look-see before you buy, unless you're trying for a complete run.
The pre-code story "Girl with Death in Her Hands!" in #2 became "Girl with Doom in Her Hands!" when it was reprinted in the post-code #30 (Dec. 1955). Quality published a lot of reprints from 1954 to 1956, and it's always fun to compare the original with the censored version.
This is a guest article. The thoughts and opinions in the piece are those of their author and are not necessarily the thoughts of the Certified Collectibles Group.
