Number 2265: Killing is a bad career choice

Si Reddy and Arnie Walsh are a couple of old-time gangsters who are in the business of murdering people for money. Their reputations would spread by word of mouth.  Murder for hire might be lucrative enough, but doesn’t include health or dental insurance. There's no pension plan; none that I know of, anyway. A killer could make out pretty well until it was time to cut and run. In this case Si and Arnie don’t get a chance to enjoy their retirement or old age. For a killer, premature death is an occupational hazard.

“Trigger-Men by Trade” appeared in Fox Comics’ March of Crime* #7 (actually #1, 1950). No writer is listed, but the artist is Wallace Wood. Grand Comics Database gives him total credit, and he may have done it himself, but I think the odds are that another artist or two helped him out. It seems most, if not all, of Wood’s jobs for Fox have something in common: the splash page is usually the best artwork in the story. Early Wood collaborator Harry Harrison explained the team’s dealing with the art director at Fox in an interview in Graphic Story Magazine in 1970: “We would slide in this ten-page pile of crap with a real good splash page for the first page on top. He would look at only the top page and count the other nine, flipping through them real fast. Nobody really cared about the quality. No one looked at these books; no one read the things very carefully.”

Also, Fox was a slow-payer, if he paid at all. He soon went bankrupt and Star Comics, run by L.B. Cole, picked up his inventory. Over the next couple of years Star reprinted many stories originally published by Fox, the self-proclaimed “King of the Comics.” This story does not have a GCD record of being reprinted.

*March of Crime was a play on words, in this case the newsreel series, The March of Time shown in movie theaters from 1935 to 1951, and heard on radio from 1935-1945. Time, Inc., publisher of both Time and Life magazines, might have taken a dim view of a garish crime comic book using a variation on their title, which may be why the comic book only lasted three issues

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