The Informer #5
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeThe Informer #5 (December 1954) holds a specific, concrete place in Golden Age publishing history as the final pre-Comics Code issue of Sterling Comics' police-procedural series. Its cover date lands squarely in the same month the Comics Code Authority was formally adopted by the industry, making it a direct artifact of the transitional moment when freewheeling crime comics were being squeezed out. After this issue, Sterling retitled and relaunched the series as After Dark — carrying over the same characters and police-procedural format but now bearing the Code seal — making issue #5 the last gasp of The Informer's pre-Code identity. As a short-run, five-issue series from a minor publisher, the complete run also represents the full flowering and abrupt close of a self-contained corner of the Dragnet-era TV-tie-in comics boom.
The issue contains at least two stories from police files. "The Cop" follows officer Kenny Cogan on his beat through his neighborhood as he encounters a dangerous situation. "The Case of the Waterfront Mob" features Detective Sergeant Mark Fabian investigating mob activity at the docks, where longshoremen become entangled with racketeers; the story includes a scene where children nearly drown in the river and a subsequent confrontation between law enforcement and the criminal element. A third story involves a railroad setting where injured men are taken to a hospital and a legal dispute emerges regarding compensation.
Detective Sergeant Mark Fabian and his partner Pat Polo pursue a mysterious fugitive named Mike Reeves to a rooming house near the Brooklyn Bridge after an anonymous tipster warns that Reeves is dangerous and wanted by Miami police. When Reeves bolts and nearly gets hit by a subway train, the detectives bring him in for questioning—but he refuses to speak, remaining eerily silent even as a burning cigarette scorches his fingers unnoticed. As the truth about Reeves emerges, the entire precinct is gripped by fear of an invisible threat they never saw coming.
Kenny Cogan walks the beat in his old neighborhood as more than just a cop—he's a symbol of law and order, flesh and blood caught between duty and the weight of his badge. When a late-night robbery at a local deli turns violent, Cogan finds himself fighting for his own life and for those who depend on him, setting him on a relentless path to bring the thugs responsible to justice. It's just another day's work for a cop who refuses to let his community down.
Detective Sergeant Mark Fabian arrives at the waterfront to investigate the death of a longshoreman named Larry Burns, whose widow reveals he was killed by the mob for breaking their rules and giving work to a blacklisted man. When fear keeps the dock workers silent, Fabian goes undercover as a day laborer to get inside the operation and uncover who's really pulling the strings. The case plunges him into a dangerous web of racketeering and corruption that runs deep through the piers.
Luke the Spook, a down-on-his-luck con artist, hatches an elaborate scheme in East Hominy, Kentucky—he'll fake a crippling back injury from a train accident to squeeze a fortune out of the railroad in a lawsuit. But when a fortune teller tells him he must perform a suspicious midnight ritual to win the case, Luke's own superstitious nature becomes his worst enemy.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The Informer ran for exactly five bi-monthly issues from April 1954 through December 1954, published by Sterling Comics Inc. (with early issues carrying the indicia of a related entity, Feature Television Productions). The series was built squarely around the cultural cachet of the NBC radio and TV phenomenon Dragnet, with covers explicitly billing themselves as being 'From the Files of the Police Dragnet' and centering a recurring protagonist, Detective Mark Fabian, whose first-person narration echoed the flat, procedural voice of Jack Webb's Sgt. Friday. The cover and interior art across the run — including issue #5 — is attributed to Mike Sekowsky, though Grand Comics Database annotations note ongoing scholarly debate over specific story credits, with researchers Ger Apeldoorn and Nick Caputo disagreeing on whether certain interior pages were drawn by Sekowsky, Ross Andru, Howard Nostrand, or Howard Post.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Publisher and run: Sterling Comics Inc., five issues, April 1954 – December 1954 (bi-monthly).
- Issue #5 cover date: December 1954 — the final issue of the series under the title The Informer.
- Cover art: Attributed to Mike Sekowsky, who served as the primary visual architect of the series throughout its run.
- Recurring lead character: Detective Mark Fabian, a police sergeant whose first-person narration deliberately mimicked the style of the Dragnet radio and TV franchise; his partner Pat Polo also appears across the run.
- Dragnet inspiration: All issues carry the cover tagline 'From the Files of the Police DRAGNET,' reflecting the publisher's intent to capitalize on the popularity of Jack Webb's hit franchise.
- Series renamed after this issue: The numbering from The Informer #5 continued directly into After Dark, a Code-approved successor title from Sterling, with the same characters and police-procedural format but bearing the Comics Code Authority seal.
- Pre-Code status: Issue #5 is the last issue of the series published without a Comics Code seal; After Dark #6 (May 1955) was the first to carry it.
- Modern reprint: The complete five-issue run, including issue #5, was collected in Gwandanaland Comics #100 ('The Complete Informer,' April 2017) and issued as individual print-on-demand reprints under the Classic Comics Library banner.
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