Crime Does Not Pay #24

History

The series grew out of a profit-sharing arrangement Lev Gleason struck with writer-artists Charles Biro and Bob Wood in 1941, when the pair were brought in to edit Daredevil and Silver Streak Comics; Gleason encouraged them to develop new titles and offered them a share of proceeds. When Silver Streak's sales softened, Crime Does Not Pay replaced it by continuing its numbering from issue #22, with Biro reportedly conceiving the core concept — ripped-from-the-headlines true crime stories where cops, not superheroes, were the protagonists — in discussions with Wood at a Broadway bar. By issue #24, with Mr. Crime's introduction, Biro and co-writers including Bob Wood and Dick Wood (credited as 'Ivy' in the GCD) had fully established the book's distinctive voice, pairing sensationalized gangster biography with an ironic undead narrator whose design openly drew on the advertising character Mr. Coffee Nerves, created in 1936 by cartoonists Milton Caniff and Noel Sickles.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearance of Mr. Crime: the ghoulish, top-hatted spectral host who narrated the series for the remainder of its 1942–1955 run.
• Mr. Crime was designed by Charles Biro and depicted as a gremlin-like figure in a white top hat labeled 'Crime,' addressing readers in a joking, conspiratorial tone.
• The issue is the third published in the Crime Does Not Pay series, which launched in July 1942 by inheriting the numbering of Silver Streak Comics at issue #22.
• Cover by Charles Biro — a pre-Comics Code image colloquially known as the 'head on fire' cover — is widely cited as one of the most visually extreme covers in Golden Age crime comics.
• Interior stories dramatize the true-crime exploits of Prohibition gangster 'Legs' Diamond and the Millen-Faber case, alongside a Billy the Kid western segment.
• Mr. Crime's storytelling role as a supernatural frame narrator directly prefigured EC Comics horror hosts (e.g., the Crypt Keeper) and has been compared to Rod Serling's framing device on The Twilight Zone.
• Contents of #24 were reprinted as early as circa 1944 in Complete Book of True Crime Comics (Wm. H. Wise & Co.), one of the earliest known comic-book reprint collections, and again in Crime Does Not Pay Archives Vol. 1 (Dark Horse, 2012).
• The cover of #24 was also reproduced in multiple scholarly and historical collections, including Take That, Adolf!: The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War (Fantagraphics, 2017) and Cryptology #1 (TwoMorrows Publishing, November 2024).

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