The Dogg Zzone by 1900HOTDOG - Dogg Zzone 9000 - Episode 35, Who Murdered Golden Age Crime Comics?

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Seanbaby and Brockway hoof it with K Thor Jensen, on the run from the fuzz in this episode about Golden Age crime comics -- where crime was the main character! Sometimes the only character!

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Yeah 9000 Welcome to the Dog Zone 9000 The official podcast of 1900HOTDOG.com The Comedy Hilarity Website I'm TV Sean from the internet And this is how I talk like an asshole

At the top of every show And me is my co-host And Hilarity partner Robert Barakway IV Here's a Barakway fact You just, you haven't tripped balls Until you've tripped balls behind the wheel of a cop car No follow up questions

I don't even think we need any That's a whole story all by itself And Joining us today Someone I've known for many years Someone from internet 1.0 From shortandhappy.com A Twitter power user

Kate or Jensen Absolutely I think the best thing that happened to me today Was that I made some marinade for the steak And my daughter asked if she could drink it like soup Oh nice Wait this is important, did you let her? I gave her a small cup

Not the marinade that Had been in the steak I had to talk her out of eating the marinade That their raw meat Had been sitting in for 6 hours So like a cup of soy sauce Did she actually finish it? Did she down it? She did, it was a really great marinade

That's good parenting That's good parenting right there So let's all talk our marinades I like soy sauce, a lot of ginger Some cayenne, garlic That's the base And then I branch out from there in different directions Now what was yours that caused

Your 10 year old daughter, is that how old she is? They're 14 my kids now 14 So old enough to know better than to drink marinade Apparently not It was Vegetable oil, apple cider vinegar Pears

Hatch chilies Garlic, ginger, salt and pepper That does sound good I don't fucking need anything, that sounds great I'd drink that It was truly fine, and it worked as a marinade too I like to go with hooch Just straight up old timey hooch

With three X's on it Just delicious Breaks down those muscle fibers Sometimes I like to cover it in liquid smoke And then just put it in the microwave It feels like you're barbecued It's like a really lazy barbecue You know it's really great if you haven't tried it

As solid smoke Where it's just like a brick Is that a real thing? No It seems like you could Because liquid smoke is just smoke and water If you look at the ingredients you're like That can't be right

I want to make like a Metal Gear joke here But Sean you're the only one that knows about it I do skip a lot of cut scenes too So I'd still be like I'm not Is that a Metal Gear guy? Those are truly deranged games That are also awesome So at the top of the show

Thor do you have anything you'd like to plug Before we descend in the chaos And forget to ask I would previously be like buy my books Or buy a t-shirt or anything But you know what? I'm just happy to be here So let's make this a freebie Buy his books

Buy a t-shirt or something You've been one of the most prolific I don't like to say this word But content creators On the internet for many years I remember even back in Portal of Evil days I was working my ass off

Much as I do now But I never did like daily updates And you were doing daily updates What for like 20 years now It's quite absurd For a while I was working daily I think that the advent of Twitter Has kind of finally scratched that itch

For me I can just immediately Spew And it's perfect There's no value placed on it at all I'm literally just fucking around And like 16,000 people seem to like it You know, win-win

Yeah, you get some hits And it's very satisfying for me But now that I'm 45 now I've got kids, I've got a family It's less I'm not trying to make a living off of it Which is spectacular Because I can just fuck around

And you do get some good finds You do investigative Twitter reporting You'll find weird old artifacts Like what you do here on the site And boom And it's fun It's great to be able to share shit like that And that's what I love

Past all the cloudchasing on Twitter Is you're peeking into the lives of some Really weird people Which is also bad They dig up It's good and bad Part of the lifelong work of saying Look at this weird fucking thing

No, you have to look at it There was one me and my friend We're talking about today It was about ice tea and his wife And now he would suck on her titties Like their five year old kid And obviously That's very strange for a five year old

Or a grown man to drink milk From a human breast That's weird for many directions at once But yeah So ice tea comes on But if I die Known as the guy who loves titties, so be it I'm paraphrasing

Was it clarified that there was actually milk? Or was he just sucking recreationally? I guess All we had to go by was the tweet In the context of the tweet Which heavily linked how he was sucking On a boob to the five year old Which I

Want to say that implies that they're drinking Like if you're just letting a five year old Recreationally suck on a boob That's way outside my kink zone So in the context of the tweet Yes, he's drinking Further questions for ice tea Maybe not, but that's what

The internet was led to believe That's sensible Yes, so the comment section was I get the comment section, the replies Was madness And the When something goes like, you know, 10k viral I think what

It's five percent of the world is completely insane You gotta mute it, you gotta step away It doesn't belong to you anymore Nothing good will come of it And so like arguments For starting and Once you have something like a bodily function Involved, like breastfeeding

Then somebody will come in With just a real weird take That they have been studying their whole life Petition, gonna start like a change.org Petition about it That's what 10k gets you I'm the president of Breastfeeding until they're 25

Dot com You know how you'll see something And it just kind of lodges in your brain Like 15 years ago There was a clip from a British documentary About parents who breastfeed their children As they get older And there was an 8 year old girl

Who's still breastfed along with her like 12 year old sister And there's a scene when she turns to the camera And this bit of dialogue Will all, I will say this when I die I love milk It's better than any fruit It's better than a mango It's better than a million

Melons I was like that I will never forget I will forget my parents' birthday I will forget my children's names But that will always You could actually probably do an MRI of my skull And like find where that lives

He's thinking about that mango line I could tell you had cadence down This is just Tattooed on your soul I've actually heard that You really brought it back to me because of your perfect cadence It's Truly it's become part of me

It's going to be on your tombstone Well today This is the podcast for our golden age week Which is a fun 1900 hot dog mess around Where we just talk about Golden age stuff and I want to talk about A genre of comics that's Just dead as fuck

We'll never see it again But it was 15 years strong And very very weird It's crime comics The golden age we had superhero sci-fi And lady Lady

Lady was absolutely a genre And then just generic adventure Comics that was sort of all these put together But crime comics Was Ostensibly true crime Like real stories of real criminals Is how it started

The first one I want to talk about is called Crime Does Not Pay Which again The titles are just going to sound like Fascist propaganda at this point If you made a comic now called Crime Does Not Pay It would probably Have Tucker Carlson on the cover of it

Frank Miller joint Yeah they got Frank Miller To write like right wing propaganda And Don Junior's publicist Would buy every copy And anyway The comic itself I love it so much

And I think it's maybe not the first one That like captured the Imagination Because it opened with a true story Of a real criminal Like Al Capone or some famous gangster Anyone with notoriety And did a more or less faithful

Adaptation of their life In five pages And the whole time they get followed Around by like the spirit Of crime Brockwood can you guess what the spirit Of crime looks like I'm going to guess

It is a ghost in one of those Stripey prison jumpsuits With like maybe a ghostly ball and chain That's a great guess Thor you might know this cold Do you have a guess Wait no what year is this 1942

It's a black guy That's actually A really bad guess So basically he follows around A famous criminal and sort of He's sort of like the devil on their shoulder Like he can make suggestions Of things that we're probably already

Going to do but has no effect on anything And then after they die or end up Alone in prison he taunts them Saying like aha you shouldn't have listened to me Crime is bad It's not just this one guy haunted By the spirit of crime it's every guy Every criminal ever

I guess has been haunted by this guy That's a real criminal Yes every real and fake criminals You know they're governed by Different spiritual forces I think But that's sort of The theme of the comic is We watch a criminal be very very bad

And then just kind of die Like real stories don't Have quite the narrative arc We're used to as you know Nerds so like A guy will just like kill a couple of people Things are going great and then one of his Own guys will kill him or the cops will find him

Or you know whatever he'll trip And fall or shoot himself They're always very sad and weird endings That have no twist And there's no beginning middle and end to these stories Nobody ever finds Jesus and Crime ghost is just like alright You get a pass

He has to hang out with the ghost of Jesus The whole time god I hate this This whole comic is lame there's like 40 more issues Of them like you know helping the Community so That's One part of the comic is real stories Narrated by the spirit of crime

Guided by the spirit of crime And then every other story in these comics There'd be five or six others Would be the same format but also Not real so it'd be An uninteresting story about a guy Where a bunch of shit happens and then it's over But they're not but they made it up

And I when you allow A writer to do that to just say like Oh yeah just pretend like it's a real dude And get me five pages Back tomorrow like That was their business model But they always had one real one Did you have to guess the real one

So that sounds like fun As far as I can tell they didn't want us to know That they were fake A lot of them they say a true crime Story or based on a true story But we changed everybody's name so you'll never Figure it out I love how ghosts in the darkness

Did that once one of my favorite things Where they before the movie Based on a story dot dot dot That's true Nice Based on a story that's true It's based on a story The story part is true

A guy killed a lion with his hands In that movie I love that movie so much That they really try to be and this part's true When the lion's like high five And then they try to link up And do like a double clothesline Was it bell kill me

It's bell kill me Lion tag team on him It's gonna take two lions for bell kill me Yeah it's a two lion man I'd agree any movie I think Willow you might need three lions Enough about bell kill me

We got a crime Sorry I gotta keep the shit on the rails All the comments with Brockway All the comments I think Sean maybe might have lost his fucking mind So anyway So here we have this comic where

All of it's pretending to be real But only one of them is real And the real part has a ghost Running things Tell which part's real The crime ghost And I did share with you a four page Feature

From crime does not pay Thor do you wanna run us through the plot of that That story is called the killer the law couldn't kill Right Because obviously If the law can't kill him what can So Bill does a truths crime story It stars a

Sort of Chubby Angry young Cattle wrestler or just sort of Kind of hobo but not entirely hobo I don't think he has a house But he loves to murder He checks in

He finds some people Like not even camping out Just like hanging out and cooking woods In the wilderness That's how you used to do it back in the day You used to pull over by the side of the road and be like Here we are for the day Yeah and it's a couple and they show him kindness

And feed him and he repays the favor By just Merking the man in the face with his rifle At close range I love his logic The guy, the husband Says Sure is great having a wife

And the crime vagrant Yeah it must be and so he kills the husband And takes the wife Right now I have a wife Maybe you shouldn't have said that about your wife And in Texas He kidnaps the women They go on like a crime spree

They bring the body along And it's caught And so Then we get the sort of Since this is only four pages They gotta just slam the fuck through this They get the sort of Twist of the story

He's like sure I killed him But we're in Texas and Texas Doesn't allow capital punishment In this world Liberal paradise And we literally we get a full on Jack chick ask In the courtroom just gloating

And so Can't do nothing I love jail But then The sort of Townsfolk I think it's important to notice that Aside from the woman and her husband

Everybody in this story is Brutally deformed They're all incredibly strange looking people They're caricatures That could be an artistic choice Or an artistic incompetence Or it could just be Texas back in the day True this was drawn by Dick Briefer

Who went on to draw a comic called Frankenstein that was basically just Frankenstein hanging out In the suburbs and getting into misadventures So I think that this is very on Part it's very like right in the Pocket for him so the twist is The townsfolk well if he was trying

To break out something might Happen to him so they loosen the bars In the jail cell he jumps out Over a bullseye That's been painted on the side of the jail Where The townspeople were Practicing shooting at that exact moment

So he was executed By a blameless accident No harm no fault And then that's it and then oh yeah he died And that's the story And that's the story that's true And yes I did not find any of those names when I

Googled I don't think that's a true story But why I brought it up Is because I think The real bad guy in this story Is just the idea Of there ever being a time or place In human history where you couldn't kill a criminal That concept

Is the villain of the story That's true And so that's caught And it's like not even halfway Over when they catch him And he confesses I think It's kind of a shame that this story only had Four pages because I'm imagining

This like spun out to like 80 Or 90 pages where the townspeople keep Hatching schemes To get this guy killed That don't work out I would read a whole series about that It's incredible that that's Incredibly fattening food and hope he strokes out

Like no no He's just too deformed To die that way Just a whole town of wily coyotes The roadrunner's the bad guy That's a brilliant idea for a comic It is extremely wily coyote How they actually do kill him

They had to paint the bullseye there We were shooting at our target Shooting at the local jail like you do Perfectly legal Anyway that's the story of the great criminal A brief dicker The criminal's name is Star Daily

I don't believe that That's somebody looking at a newspaper Think of a name That's a good point That's a fucking newspaper title For sure Criminals the daily view goal So the

The point I'm trying to make is the tone of these comics Is very much not like Let's rehabilitate these men Or teach them the other ways It's that crime is like Just a thing they do And they need to get killed for it And anything getting into the way of that

Problem And it's important to note that crime is also Just fun as fuck Up until the moment they die Like this guy, our star daily is totally unrepentant He is having a time He gets a free meal and a wife And he gets a laugh in the face of a judge

Temporary wife Disposable wife All the rage back in the day She went along with it too You didn't mention that in the comic In order to trap him You killed my husband I guess you're pretty handsome

That's how wives work in Texas That's true And some guy drives by on his bike and she goes Don't react to me and the things I am saying But I am being kidnapped So she like hatches a lot of clever plots He said something Jumping jinkers

Jumping jinkers Love it You can't say that shit anymore Nobody lets you get away with that She's like don't react to this And he's like jumping jinkers That is the opposite of what I am saying What did you just tell that guy

Since it's only four pages We don't get to see any of that We got a whole panel of the old man riding off On his bicycle and saying jumping jinkers But something exciting like a police chase Or a showdown or something I burned that space on the jump and jinkers guy I'm not going back

The cops are not the heroes The idea of killing criminals Is the heroes And so this was The tone of this entire genre of comic For six years And The rules changed slightly based on the setting

Like this one was a wild west one They would do some like set in old Timing medieval times or whatever You get a pirate story every so often too Yeah, yeah But the tone was generally the same Crime was so easy And so fun

It just ends badly for you But you shouldn't do it And though it's the best So Six years later The trend shifted towards Criminals being more cowardly Like they tried to

Maybe they decided that they were responsible For inspiring way too much crime Every month crime just skyrocketed After these comics Kids would buy the comics and tear out the last page Yeah And then it's just instructions on how to be awesome Yeah, it's just a great life

Ending with like how to make Your own tank at home You could buy those, those were like $7.95 Just send it in You get a summary that you can really drown in Absolutely Put this cardboard box in your bathtub, you fucking idiot

So The comic I want to talk about is called Crime Must Pay the Penalty Not a sketch It's cool And I love this comic because On the top of every single page it says Crime Must Pay the Penalty And it wasn't unusual

For each story to end With someone saying that or with the narrator saying that So Like I said in these comics The Criminals were generally total Pussies and they would sort of beg for their life And then they would lose

Because you must pay the penalty Right, you Could not pay the penalty but Here we are And so They'd also set up the bad guys Like they'd be like oh please Don't put me in the electric chair, I'll go straight

And then the guy with the switch would be like Sure you'll go straight, straight to hell And boom that would be the ending It's a good ending, it's a good ass, I'm taking that Yeah, so the writing was better Because now there would be like little twists Because the guys Didn't just do crime and it was awesome and they died

They did crime and then they Had time to repent And like realize the consequences Of what they did, they didn't just get hit by a stray bullet They like They had to look death in the eye And see justice coming And still, still did not perform

Repent to know, it's like the opposite of a Chick-Tract where you can repent At the last minute we'll give a shit Yeah So, so did you just put something in discord here? I was just because we were talking about the things Advertising, there's this really incredible ad for I guess what is a proto slinky

Which Is Pretty astounding Piece of Piece of art. It doesn't go down Yeah, it's for, I guess they Called it The Mr.

Walker toy and it combined The fun of a yo-yo, the elusiveness Of a bouncing rubber ball And the entertainment of yogi tricks So I think we're We're talking a lot about the Violence and Moral nihilism of these comics

But it's important to recognize that They were sold to like Stupid, gullible, seven-year-old children Right And this was almost certainly A crime in and of itself These are children who were baffled By the elusiveness of a bouncing rubber ball

So naturally Understanding crime is going to be completely beyond them I do love how this ad is Sort of like the chumbox of 1948 Where, like, I recognize that Kid's face, like they just keep putting Different products into that drawing of a child Because it's such a good drawing

Such a high quality Human child He isn't jazzed About Mr. Walker That child's definitely been dead for like At least three weeks I know Erectus, I've seen Erectus That's Erectus

Mr. Erectus Now There was another trend I want to talk about At around the same time That was a real curveball And Thor, you actually posted A cover of this in the discord It's called crimes by women

And this is another comic We've gotten to the official In the last comic you talked about A woman was just kind of Well, she had some agency But she was property to be exchanged About in the street condemning them I love crimes by women

That's one of my favorite golden age crime books Because it starts out pretty Stayed, like the first issue Of crimes by women is Bonnie Parker Bonnie and Clyde, like these So it's pretty It's pretty basic But by like the third or fourth issue

Crimes by women Gets insanely horny It is so horny It is so horny And like it is not even attempting To be like Level headed Or sort of

Truthful about the physical appearance Of people, it's like look at these hot babes They're going to kill people And then they're going to die Bangable criminals That's my favorite series And of course this is the 40s It's like just leg basically

That's what you're going to see You're going to see legs ahoy Legs, did you mean Gams? I meant stems You mean this The stems of these dizzy dames Okay so This kept the same tone

As crime must pay the penalty And that the criminals were cowards Like all of these women after they do their crime They beg for their life That's a real trope of this comic Is that they will beg for their life right up until they're Electrocuted It's getting into fetish territory

Is that when I see A comic so obviously horny And then a woman is begging for her life While she's being electrocuted I'm like They need to arrest whoever did this Someone has a sex fetish You started the fetish here I started collecting the final panel of these comics

Because so many of them ended With a woman literally sparking to death While she screamed please don't kill me I don't want to die like this It's rim as Fuck It This is a powerful comic

Yeah besides the Sex thing Thor mentioned The three tropes I found were The first I mentioned begging for life Usually from an electric chair The second one is suicide And now when Women commit suicide it's always by

Bloodlessly shooting themselves in the heart And this happened a lot Like they get to the end of the comic and they just can't deal with The law on their tail To kill themselves by shooting themselves in the heart And the third way The story's end is just through sheer Dumbassery like women will

Just fall off of shit or their own Like schemes will backfire One woman took up archery To like murder people On the range and just like Fell off her horse while screaming In like Chris Claremont style like oh no I am falling from my horse no no

Arrow pointed up I will fall on it I'm falling on the arrow oh I'm dying And that's That's true that happened True that all J. So that was Now the trend in 1948 is

Criminals are cowards And comic book writers are horny And both And also both of those things mixed Yeah and it's fair to say that We're still like in the mid 40's Most of these books are just being Packed out the work is bad

It's not Good looking or entertaining You know in any Real way Yeah it's really unsophisticated Like in it's Panel to panel work and it's like rendering Like it feels like they got guys

Who maybe did like medical Drawings and they said okay can you Can you draw a comic like oh I don't fucking know My legs too bad for the war I guess I have to What if there's half a pie in it For you Half a pie sign me up You get the crest

On signing and the filling on completion One more question Do you hate women And are you constantly horny for them Alright If it's a yes you're hired Another one I like from 1948 Was called gangsters can't win

And that one was Exactly the same as crime must pay the penalty It was gangsters that Were just kicking all kinds of ass And then they just turned into cowards at the end And every single Story ended with the words gangster can't win So

Sometimes it was screamed by the grim reaper Sometimes it was screamed by the cops shooting them Do you think at some point they wished They had made it grammatically correct just so it wasn't Weird when they screamed this thing That might have been my fuck up I didn't sleep Last night so I'm a little punchy but yeah Gangsters can't win I should have said

So Two years later They sort of Shifted back towards the real And a comic called crime can't win And These were All over the place but generally

Wanted us to believe again that these were Faithfully based on true stories So They regressed back to just this Structuralist narrative of just Stuff happening And That sort of

I think the last comic where the criminals Were the stars Because in 1951 They had a new comic come out called Fight Against Crime These are getting much weaker Well you know I don't like crime

Tepid on crime Strongly against crime Not So the trend now In these comics is not The bumbling stupidity of criminals Or their cowardly nature But how genius the cops are

So it'll start with like a bait and switch Like oh this is going to be about like some Al Capone dude Who's so smart And then it's like nope it's actually about Just some random beat cop who You know knew exactly Whatever the type of Clay and this ravine

I don't know you know what I'm saying Those tropes but this is when The shift went to like how awesome cops Are versus how shitty criminals are There was one I really loved Well I guess I'll get to that later But The point is we're now shifting towards

This and in 1954 we get to A comic called police action Where they just embraced it Now the Heroic cops kick all the ass And They still want us to believe it's real

Like they'll give it like you know Sergeant Jack Dempsey of the Chicago PD And of course that's not a real dude There was one I found Again this is supposed to be a real story It was set in 1894 where a London cop Learned that a man was using his trained dog To kill people so he had a special whistle

And he was just running around the night Being like hey kill that guy dog tweet tweet And so London cop shot the dog Like he went out like with Dog bait and shot the dog and then just Followed him back to the guy's apartment And then shot him and then told his dead body

Haha I knew a wounded dog would have turned to His master haha So I wound every dog I see Yeah he just went out shooting Dogs until one of them led him To a killer maybe That was considered heroism back in the day And

That's police action Now that is police action Yeah so I think that It's interesting because The sort of root source of All of these crime comics rewinding back To the very beginning is Dick Tracy The Chester Gould newspaper strip which has

All of these hallmarks It has gruesome villains Who are Unrepentant and die Hideously you know Or are jailed only to die hideously later And so it's interesting that That pendulum

Eventually swung back to like our super Detective who always gets his man and the Detective is like sort of the The ostensible protagonist now As opposed to having the criminal be the Protagonist of the story Right and I guess Scattered throughout this whole 12 years

I'm talking about There are a ton of like noir style stories Of like hard punching detectives Who like go out and fight crime I was just trying to focus on Comics that are just about the general Idea of crime with no real main characters And

How strange they got from The Angles they took until they finally ended Here with this like Cop propaganda and how like Super awesome and smart they are And how criminals can't win not because They're foolish but because

We're the best and I do think it would be Outrageous if one of these Comics came out today like if you saw police Action today on the shelf I mean you Someone with your education would probably Think oh this is like a throwback to golden age comics

But if you were just like some random fan Who saw police action you're like dude did Fox News just fund a fucking comic This is going to be bad Yeah you might be giving them ideas right now You know would be truly incredible Hmm Revive police action

But they're investigating the crime of the century The terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 We're back to Frank Miller again Holy I guess that's true it's already been Taken but I mean I love I would love the idea of like A modern comic in this

Format you know about O.J. Simpson you know Right yeah Casey Anthony And the genius cops that brought him down It's just it's it would be I mean I honestly sincerely Want to do this I want to tell A story in that format

Give me four pages To tell the O.J. Simpson story With him at the end you know That has to end with the glove not fitting And then he jumps in front of a bullseye Whoops Now So this was

1954 was basically the last Crime comic now do you I bet you have a strong guess on why that happened What caused That That would be the Founding of the great comics code Authority where basically

All of you sick perverts You know who've been Producing these comics are now out of A job unless you can clean your ass up And make Archie To be fair you did start Like an electrocution fetish when you were Uncovered

Someone needed to put some oversight Maybe there was sure they Overstepped but I would argue It came from a necessary place Yeah It was poorly executed But yeah the comics code was based on The

Those cowardly women begging For their lives in the electric chair that Oh that made me so hot So the comics code was based on The wildly fraudulent work of Frederick Wortham who wrote Seduction of the Innocent which later Was proven to be

All nonsense like he just Made up his sources and His conclusions are insane And for 1954 That was pretty good science Yeah you could just do that He picked up the ball and he ran with it Yeah

I would honestly like to Know more about him just because How In the right place was his heart I grew up in a world where Is just sort of objectively And obviously evil and All the moralizing is very much like

Fuck you this is like Our method of control not really like I just I really care about Kids and that's why I want These right wing things to happen So like maybe in 1954 Like this Just

Floundering moralism was It came from a good spot Do you think that's possible Well so in the context of sort Of how Wortham Gained the power to do with this It's important to think back to the mid-fifties Is when people were starting to get

Really freaked out about teenagers Right As a cultural invention teenagers were Fairly new and As opposed to being forced to go Work in a shoe factory kids Were instead deciding to smoke a cigarette So as opposed to

Smoking a cigarette during their shift at the shoe factory So these kids with free time started Freaking out adults and In 1953 The senate established The senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency Which was A government body

Designed essentially to get The kids to stop being So You know teen Terrifying It was a big enough deal That the senate had to get involved What were we going to do about this

I have an idea, electric chair Right, every teen Only for the dames Husties, electrocuted Bigly So one of the Scapegoats they found was comic books And so

Senator Estes Cavoffer Who was a democrat from Tennessee Brought in both Wortham and William Gaines EC Comics Publisher They were far and away the best Of these The most graphically

Intense And beautifully drawn And actually Relatively high quality And so there's a lot of And also because they were the best They were also the hardest To defend

So they brought publisher William Gaines In front of this body And honestly I just blew it like crazy There's a great sort of Actually we should do a dramatic Reading of this Okay, Thor you be a

Beaser And Rockwell you're Cavoffer Then you think a child Cannot in any way shape or manner Be hurt by anything That the child reads or sees I do not believe so There would be no limit

Actually to what you'd put in the magazines Only within the bounds of good taste Now here is your May issue This seems to be a man with a bloody axe Holding a woman's head up Which has been severed from her body Do you think that's a good taste sir? Yes sir I do

For the cover of a horror book A cover in bad taste for example Might be to find his holding her head A little higher so that the blood Could be seen tripping from it And moving the body a little further Over so that the neck from To be seen to be bloody

You got blood coming right out of her mouth A little It's just so great Not have blown it Harder if you tried You could not fuck that up I love that so pedantic So pedantic

Actually if I had moved her head A little to the left the blood Would be very very gross And it's such a It's such a child like I could Have made it much fucking worse It could have been so much worse You don't know how good you got it

So naturally you know this did not Work out the comics code authority Was passed all of the major publishers Voluntarily agreed to not Show things like werewolves Which is a big deal Right that was the problem There's so much if you read through

The comics code it's really These fucking teens are getting all their ideas From werewolves Right here Now the first thing in the comics code That sort of helped kill this entire genre Was crimes Werewolves

Crimes shall never be presented in such a way As to create sympathy for the criminal To promote distrust of the forces of law and justice Or to inspire others with a desire To imitate criminals All fun criminals are gone now But yeah To promote distrust of the forces

Of law and justice is like Such like blatant propaganda Brief dicker just blast in his way Through Texas wives That's over And it's wild to me that That's not what these comics were doing These comics weren't like ACAB

You know fuck the pigs They were doing exactly what they wanted Criminals were suffering But they were having too much fun Along the way But like there's no Mistaking the message Of crime must pay the penalty

Crime must pay One of them should have said that at the end That's what the last word Of the comics code should be Crime must pay the penalty The next one is If crime is depicted It shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity

Which already That one definitely Is good advice that they were not following They were Selling us pretty hard on the awesomeness Of crime for 80% of every single story I'm still sold on it They got me

Policemen, judges, government officials And respected institutions Shall never be presented In such a way as to create disrespect Or establish authority Aw man, no goofy cops That's such like a You can't add one goofy cop

I might have mentioned this In the podcast before but when I was a child I was not allowed to watch Night Court Dukes of Hazard because They presented Authority in a disrespectful way Incredible Of all of the

I don't know what to do with that This podcast is over Take that And run with it But yes, my mother's still very right Wing And I had to grow up with that So

Night Court is just a slow Creeping up on me The ridiculousness of not allowed to watch Night Court, you'll get ideas about Frivolent judges Doing magic tricks Impossible So you know how some people

Argue politically At 11 years old I knew that There's no getting through to these people When I'm like, oh actually I'm good, I think I can watch Night Court Anyway, unchanged from that And It's a brick wall

It was so disrespectful to The judicial system And then I'd be like, right but so is This and this and this and this And the fact that we live in such a chaotic world And you know whatever I'd cite Whatever fucking things I knew at 11 And so that's how I grew up

It's knowing that like There's just this I don't know how to put it There's just this awful stupidity That isn't worth throwing your energy against But here I am doing it Crime does not pay Crime does not pay

Dukes of Hazard I think was Fair, those cops were full on Accepted Dukes of Hazard and then Night Court just slow crept up on me Just ninja style Let people have fun at work mom But they're the good guys still It's still like against

Still against crime By procedure But yeah Dukes of Hazard were like Criminal bootleggers with a full On racist flag on their car Fair enough Not a great example Let's see

Next one was criminals shall not Be presented as to be rendered glamorous Or to occupy a position which creates A desire for emulation Which feels like just a flowery Rewarding of the last couple They really had like one point Stop making crime look fun

Yeah but like Let's put that in a real cute way Let's try it again But let's keep every draft That we do in there as a separate route Well they saw how these comics were named So like these guys like to say the same thing In a bunch of different ways let's speak their language

Smart Speaking of the next one is In every instance good shall triumph over evil And the criminal punished for his misdeeds In every instance Again I don't think that's something Anyone ever considered doing I feel like every now and then

You'd get like a superhero comic Or a sci-fi comic where like The wizard of space would be the The protagonist and they would be clearly a bad guy But that's it was so Unusual By not saying ultimately or at the end To like you've made it so that they can never win

There can never be stakes So I would think that even just To be continued story would violate this rule Yeah like you couldn't leave it On a cliffhanger or anything Right And then of course there's stuff like Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited

Scenes of brutal torture Excessive and unnecessary knife and gun play So stuff like this where you're like Okay But like what a subjective Bunch of words that like I think society handles on its own Define necessary

What's a necessary knife play I would argue all knife play is Necessary Senator this is knife work I think one of my other favorite ones On the list is a very famous one It says no comic magazine shall use the words Horror or terror in its title

Which feels Very dark in it That's like no that's pure ec Like they're two biggest titles Or you know vault of terror or vault of horror It's like basically saying you you're fucked And talk shit to us in congress We don't like your specific comic

No vaults no dripping Neck blood Would you like to keep a crypt Fuck off What what an easy thing To like circumvent to like you could just Be like vault of scariness You're like I can't do shit about this Uncle Sam

Vault of unease We got the vaults The crypt of discomfort Next one was all Lurid unsavory gruesome illustrations Shall be eliminated That's a big one That's everything right

Like a lot of these guys could only do Gruesome illustrations these were not Your high-end illustrators here this was the best Lurid is such a A thing to define I think Fuckin everything I do is Lurid Yeah anything above the knee

I think is Lurid Anyway we don't need to go through the entire comic Investigatively killed this genre And the horror genre Because the word describing it Was made illegal And the other thing is this wasn't exactly Like

You don't have to follow this this wasn't mandatory Is just simply because That slap my tantrum So advertisers will Be feeling their safety knowing they could just Advertize with you It will feel like an X rating How they used the X rating

Well, you could do whatever you want. You'll just get, you know, you won't get this award or you will get this letter. And that's how it's still free. You know, we're not restricting you. The big companies also were reached out to newsstands when this was happening where they were selling these comics. We're like, you know, this is the comics good authority.

This means your comic is safe to sell to kids who come to your store. If it doesn't have this, it's not safe to sell to kids. So like, who's gonna, nobody's gonna, as a retailer, you're not gonna take that risk. Right. And of course, I can't imagine parent groups were probably really obnoxious back then.

Like when I was a child, parent groups made it so the local bookstore couldn't have a Dungeons and Dragons. And I imagine, you know, 20, 30 years before that, they were like. Radicalized a generation of nerds. Right. Yeah, I,

Thor, do you have any hot comic tips like from the, from the golden age that are good? Like I sort of picked out some that were obviously absurd, but. Yeah, I think all of the EC books, everything EC published, which was crimes, the crime was especially crime suspense stories and shock suspense stories are brilliant.

They're so tight and like beautifully put together. The artists are great, Johnny Craig, Wally Wood, one of the greatest of all time. Just, they're definitely away from the true crime sort of format. It's basically just people doing shitty things to each other and getting, having it boomerang on them. And they're, they're really good and interesting.

EC was, you know, they didn't miss. They put out so much good shit. And one thing that's interesting is they were the ones hit the hardest by the comics code. They were the strongest, you know, crime and horror publisher at the time. And their pivot after the code was passed is super, super interesting

because they tried comic genres that I don't think anybody's ever done before. Like one of the titles in the direction in 55 was called Psychoanalysis. And it was literally a therapist, an analyst, like working with people and like sort of having talk therapy sessions, like figure out what was wrong with them,

which is such a deeply weird concept for 1955. Yeah. Is this it? Do you kids like this? Is this the next thing? And they also, at the same time they had MD too, which was like a sort of medical surgical comic. It was the same thing.

It's like, how do we, how do we leverage like these incredible artists we have were really good at telling these stories into something that we can actually fucking sell? Dr. Lurid MD. Oh, fuck. Absolutely illegal. I always liked the guys that had a really mundane job

but also punched their way through danger. Like Mr. District Attorney is one of my favorite comics. Cause he's just a district attorney and he just punches the shit out of everybody. And he kind of ends up in these weird James Bond circumstances. This is not a good example of a good comic, but of a fun comic based on a bad idea.

Did he say objection and then just punch them? All the time. Objection, client is unpunched. He'd whoop your ass with lawyer words. And then I think the other like really interesting stuff from the early phase of these crime comics is the work done in crime just not paid by Jack Cole, who was the creator of Plastic Man.

And so this was really early in his career, but he fricking went balls out on these. Like even his primitive work on this is, it's a full of like crazy Dutch angles and wild shit. It's so much more inventive and interesting than a lot of stuff. And you can see how he grew into the cartoonist that he became. But it's really, it's like fun.

It's still primitive and kind of goofy, but the craft is just like so far beyond what all these other hacks we're doing. Yeah, if you look at his Plastic Man, it's like the depth of the insanity is so immense that like sometimes I'll get lost in a Plastic Man panel, thinking about like the existential horror of the people there must be going through

with this person in their world, like that will just- Just never safe and never alone. Yeah, it's just like walking past like a vase and the vase will turn into a snake and just devour you while joking about like how it's happening. And it's the terror that they must be feeling versus just the fucking not giving a fuck of Plastic Man. Like nothing can hurt this guy.

He can like make a rocket and fly on a rocket. He's fully living like Looney Tunes cartoon logic in a world of more or less real rules. And I actually have a file on my computer called That's Fucked Up Plastic Man, where I just saved panels of Plastic Man, where he's doing something that's just like- Found our next podcast.

Yeah, the whole Jack Cole story is incredible. He is a truly tragic figure in comics. I didn't know he's a tragic figure. Yeah, I'm trying to remember what year. So he actually killed himself in 1958. He committed suicide. Oh, I see. Sort of, he basically,

it's hard to say why he killed himself. He was like super depressed. He basically got into his car, went to the store, bought a rifle and shot himself in the head. 43 years old, nobody knows why. He was working. He was working for Playboy. He was getting like tons of work.

He was happily married, you know? Like nobody knows why. He just, yeah, but he was just an unbelievable, like super talent, could dry anything. Mm-hmm. Now that's very sad. 1900, Frankfurt! 1900, Frankfurt!

To the podcast, come out! And with Maximal in the job! Talk Frankfurt podcast! Correct! The craft is not trapped, it's not under! Shit, they're in the 100s now! They are in a stunde! Come on, John!

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Yeah, 9000! Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the 1900 Hot Dog Dancers. These are your Supremes! Refinger Louie, Adam Ruth, Adrian H. Ooh, doin' the robot, it's Aidan Muat! Alpha Sciences Javo, Armando Nava, Benjamin Sirenin, Brandon Garlock, Breanne Whitney,

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Haraka, J. Burr, Al Aidan, Jamie Gordon, Jeremy Neal, next up, it's the J-Squad, that's right, dance troupe within a dance troupe. Here's John, John McCammon, John Minkoff, Josh Pavian, Josh S, that's your J-Squad! K&M, Lyman, Mark, Matt Riley, hey, Mike Styles, Mojoo, ND, stop!

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