Number 2360: “How I made a killing in the murder-for-hire business.”

Something I read about DC Comics’ foray into crime comics in the late forties during a period of DC’s slumping sales (and the popularity of crime comics), is that they got the license for a comic book version of the popular radio program, Gang Busters. While the contents of early issues of Gang Busters probably weren’t much different than the more rowdy and disreputable crime titles, the hope was that the attachment to a popular radio entertainment would mitigate the usual criticism of crime comics. I have no idea whether it did or not. As it was, DC published Gang Busters for 67 issues until 1959. Having seen some of the later issues, all Code-approved, the stories were far tamer than the wilder days of the 1940s.

George Roussos drew “Murder Was My Business” for Gang Busters #1 (1948). If Fredric Wertham, M.D., critic of comic books in general and crime comics in particular, had seen the story I am sure he would have noticed that the joyful killer gets away with his lucrative career bumping off people, right up until he is led to the electric chair and turns into a coward. That is a way the publisher could point at a story and say the killer was not glorified during the story...after all, despite bragging about his career in killing (to a priest, of all people), inside he was just a gutless braggart.

Roussos was a journeyman who had done assisting on Batman, then worked for various companies over the years, including Marvel in the sixties where he was identified as George Bell. Roussos died at age 84 in 2000.

Posted in: Pappy Comics