Number 2409: A Kirby Killer: the story of the Tri-State Terror

Wilbur Underhill was, as the story says, a real person. He was a crook, ex-convict who escaped prison twice, a gangster who was wanted for various criminal acts in the early '30s. That was a golden age of crooks in cars, going from town to town robbing banks, shooting people...you know, all the usual psychopathic behavior. Underhill was known, among other nicknames, as the Tri-State Terror. I was surprised reading this Jack Kirby version of Wilbur’s story because while it compressed his story, it actually ends with the real story of Underhill’s death-by-cop; he was shot many times but got away from police and died on a bed in a furniture store.

I have been reading The Jack Kirby Collector #16 (1997), with a look at Kirby and Simon’s crime stories. Kirby liked drawing stories about gangsters. As writer Tom Field quotes Mark Evanier, speaking of Kirby’s crime stories from In the Days of the Mob from 1971, for DC: “‘He was a fan of that stuff. He had met a lot of people who knew the gangsters.’ Although Evanier and Kirby’s other assistant, Steve Sherman, did a lot of research on gangsters and the Depression to help enrich Kirby’s historical fiction, Evanier concedes, ‘Jack probably could have done these stories from memory and they wouldn’t have been much different.’”

In the Days of the Mob wasn’t given a chance to succeed, unlike the comic books Simon and Kirby were creating in the forties for Hillman and Prize, when crime comics were being produced to much notoriety and big sales.

“The Trail of the Gun-Loving Killer” is from Real Clue Crime Stories Vol. 2 No. 4 (number 16, 1947), and is credited to Jack Kirby as penciler, and partially inked by Joe Simon. Kirby is credited by the Grand Comics Database as inking pages 1, 2, 5 and 7. No writer is credited.

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