War Against Crime

I’ve recently found a love for EC Comics, and my local comic shop has a bunch of the Gemstone reprints from the late 90s still at their cover price. $10-$13 for five issues of vintage anthology comics can’t be beat. EC is mainly known for their horror titles, particularly for giving us Tales From the Crypt, but they also published science fiction, war comics, romance comics, and as in the case of this series, police comics.

The stories are sensationalized cartoon mobsters that after a crime spree discover that justice will always come for them. Looking back at these stories in which the police are always heroes through a modern lens, you get a different sense for justice than what the book intends. The good guys in these stories always come in guns-a-blazing, and the crims are usually headed for the electric chair. That said, one of the heroes of one of the stories isnamed Choo-Choo Jones, so who is to say if it is good or bad.

As anthology books, the short stories were created by a variety of writers and artists, usually under heavy deadlines, and so the storytelling or visuals can be varied in quality, but there were definitely some real charmers in here that made it overall worth revisiting.

Daken: Dark Wolverine

My real introduction to Daken was in the Krakoa era, in Leah Williams’ excellent X-Factor run. By this point he is somewhat of a reformed character, mostly a charming dangerous bad boy. Revisiting the character in his older solo series is a fair bit different from the now; he was more a conflicted villain than even an antihero. The villains-masquerading-as-heroes stuff has never been that compelling to me, whether it’s the Freedom Force of the 80s or the Norman Osborne Dark Avengers stories that spawned a lot of Daken’s arc. In line with that the stories here would not have been as compelling to me, but both Williams’ writing and the artists’ work on these books made them a good read regardless.