Customer Reviews

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
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This is the third Mammoth comics volumes--the first two focusing on war & horror. Both of those earlier volumes were hampered, although not crippled, by the refusals of EC, DC, Marvel/Atlas & Warren to allow reprints of their stories (although Warren tales did appear in the War volume). However this volume focuses on crime, a genre neither DC or Marvel/Atlas did much of importance with, Warren only produced a few stories in (although they tended to be of quite high quality) and, in fact, an EC story does appear here.

With almost the entire field to choose from the quality of this volume is very high with an excellent 1934 Dashiell Hammett/Alex Raymond tale from Secret Agent X-9; two stories from Bernie Krigstein (including the very strange 'Blind Man's Bluff' which was his swansong to comics); obscure but high quality Alan Moore & Neil Gaiman tales (including Moore's epilogue to his graphic novel 'From Hell'); a great Max Collins/Terry Beatty Ms. Tree tale, a fine Johnny Craig story from EC, Jack Cole's classic 'Murder, Morphine And Me!', a fine Joe Simon/Jack Kirby bunko tale, some decent Euro crime tales making their North American debuts, Will Eisner's Spirit (although one might quibble why 'The Portier Fortune'--a good but not great Spirit tale appears, when such genuine noir greats like 'Black Alley', 'Ten Minutes' or 'Fox At Bay' were passed by), Jordi Bernet with a Torpedo tale, an Alex Toth classic, Charles Burns' El Boro and much, much more. In fact, the quality of this book is so high while the price is so low that it may well be the best comic anthology of the year for your dollar.

Since reading Mike Benton's fascinating Illustrated History of Crime Comics, I've been interested in the genre. It predates horror comics by more than a decade, and crime comics were a huge hit with adults in the 40s. In terms of era, form and content, they fit neatly between the hardboiled pulp magazines and novels, and film noir.

This Mammoth Book collection has plenty of pre-50s stuff, including the amazingly hard hitting Secret Agent X-9 newspaper strip from the 30s. There's also a cool Johnny Craig story from Crime Suspenstories-- my favorite EC title! Frank Miller talks about Craig's work a good deal in the Sin City commentary.

It's also wonderful to finally have high quality reproductions of the original inks of Jack Cole's "Murder, Morphine and Me," and Alex Toth's "The Crushed Gardenia," and Bernie Krigstein's "Lilly-White Joe"-- all real classics. I also loved Krigstein's solid adaptation of the bizarro 87th Precinct story "Blind Man's Bluff".

Even the newer stuff I've never heard of is worth reading. And it's all great reference material. I wish this was a huge coffee table hardback, but then it would've probably cost seventy-five bucks! I hope there's a part two, because I know the source material's hardly been exhausted. One example that comes to mind is the terrific Joe Lansdale/Bruce Timm team-up "Red Romance".

An Eisner Spirit classic, A Torpedo classic, a huge chunk of Hammett and Raymond's Secret Agent X-9 comic strip, El Boro short, Miss Tree story, This book is a classic "mixtape" of someone's most favorite crime comics ever! I was SO enthralled by this collection that I ordered all of the other Mammoth Comic collections, but sincerely, this Crime Comics volume is a great collection and a high example of some of the best quality and entertainment that comics have to give. Easily a bargain at TWICE the listed price!

This obviously does not collect any of today's big crime titles such as "criminal" "Filthy Rich" or "100 bullets", but it has some great indy stuff and a lot of older crime comics. You get what you pay for and with this being a book over 500 pages and is pretty cheap, you are bound to get some bad comics thrown in. like i said they can't pay or get the rights to reprint those big name titles but for the price it is a good deal. All comics are in B/W. The good thing about this book is that if you do not like a story you can move on to the next.

I thought the title said Best Crime comics. I seriously doubt that unless all the best comics are printed on the second half of the book. I couldn't read more than half the volume. It was boring really.