Action and adventure

The detective genre featured a vivid roster of private eyes, eager to discover 'whodunnit' with a combination of brain and brawn. Usually, they were based on newspaper strips: Dick Tracy became a comic in 1939 (Dell), and was joined by The Spirit (Quality) in 1944 and Charlie Chan (Crestwood) in 1948. Occasionally, sleuths would be created exclusively for the comics, such as Sam Hill Private Eye (Close-up, 1950) and Ken Shannon (Quality, 1951).
The crime comics were different to the detective titles in that they were more in tune with adult 'true crime' magazines, and the hard-nut heroes of the Jimmie Cagney gangster movies: they were more grown-up and infinitely more violent. Mixing fictional and non-fictional stories about hoods, murderers and other criminal types, they revelled in bloody tommy-gun shoot-outs and underworld sleaze - blowsy dolls were obligatory. None delivered the goods with more style than Crime Does Not Pay (Comic House/Lev Gleason, 1942), the market leader for many years, which featured the kinetic artwork of Charles Biro; in fact the comic's sensibility was not a million miles from the 1990s movies of Quentin Tarantino. The crime titles that followed through the 1940s and 1950s were often more extreme: for example, issues of True Crime Comics (Magazine Village, 1947) and Murder Incorporated (Fox, 1948) are sought after by modern collectors for their spectacular scenes of sadism and torture.