Thursday, February 14, 2019

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre

That agonizing pang you feel in your heart today isn't the result of love overload, or lack thereof. It's from the shot of hot lead from a smoking tommy gun fired repeatedly into your aching chest! Yep, today at AEET we ditch the usual kitschy cuteness of previous years and deliver the historic, true story of gangland Chicago's most notorious slaughterama-- The St. Valentine's Day Massacre! From the June 1948 issue of A-1 Comics #13: Guns of Fact and Fiction, --and FYI: this is a SOTI issue as well-- even the western story is full of bloody, bullet riddled bodies!













bang! bang!

4 comments:

JMR777 said...

No comments? I will leave a few then-
Crime comics could be as gory as the best horror comics.

The card is cute, though I don't think it would be looked on favorably today policeman valentine or not. Then again, a policeman pointing a pistol, or a policeman in general might start a debate about police brutality.

Its a different (but not better) world we live in nowadays.

As always, thanks for al the posts, Karswell.

Mr. Cavin said...

Happy Valentine's Day!

Sheesh, I can see why this might have attracted Wortham's attention. Not only is it markedly gorier than the industry norm, at least as far as I'm aware, but there's just something creepy about the kinda fascinated and leering way the most violent frames focus solely on that violence. Something lurid about the abbreviated way the story skips from atrocity to atrocity, without bothering to flesh-out the drama or characters in between. I mean, this thing just exists only to vector scenes of mob brutality, with little added value. It's really quite an example or precode excess. Thanks for posting it.

(And that holiday card at the end is brilliant, especially in the context you've created for it. "These ain't real cops, you sap. They're child psychopaths we shipped in from Florida." "Aargh, Frankie, he got me right through the valentine....")

Mr. Karswell said...

>No comments?

Yeah I'm always a little bewildered by the lack of action around here, especially when I post something completely relative to THOIA, and even give a heads up link from there directly to here, and still only a couple of you seem to realize that this 9 year old sister blog even exists. Oh well...

>"Aargh, Frankie, he got me right through the valentine...."

Haha... "Sweetheart, you take me to a hole new level..." (also works for adult Valentines)
Thanks for the comments, you two!

JBM said...

OK, You hadn't posted THOIA for a little bit. So I came and looked here. I enjoyed the bloody thing and was thinking it had a smidgeon of Simon/Kirby. Thank you Mr. K. Always a pleasure visiting your sites.