CGC certified: VG- (3.5). Jack Cole cover and three stories.
Classic crime comic full of sex, drugs, violence, and the degradation of the human spirit as filtered through Jack Cole's manic imagination. This grand-slam mag hits the pre-Code trifecta: used in Seduction of the Innocent, Parade of Pleasure, and the New York Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comics.
"In 1947 Cole hired Alex Kotzky to help him package True Crime Comics, a new publisher's short-lived attempt to cash in on the crime comics then dominating the field; a story in the second issue, 'Murder, Morphine and Me,' has become notorious as one of the most intense and delirious examples that the lurid genre had to offer. One small panel - so charged that it has tremor lines around it and tilts, almost tumbling off the page - was enshrined as Exhibit A in Dr. Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, the book that triggered the Senate hearings and thereby toppled the industry: it shows a close-up of Mary Kennedy, the dope-dealing protagonist, being stabbed in the eye by a junky with a hypodermic needle... I find the panel (part of a dream sequence, incidentally) emblematic of the comic book's visceral power to pass the reader's analytical defenses and pierce the brain." -Art Spiegelman, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits [Chronicle Books: 2001].
CGC census: Only copy in this grade. Comparable CGC sales: None. A 3.0 sold for $405 (April 2015).
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