Heading:
Author:
Title: POLICE TRAP No. 1
Place Published:
Publisher:Mainline [Indicia: Mainline Publications, Inc.]
Date Published: August-September, 1954
Description:

VG (4.0). A few creases and rubs to spine, small nick to bottom spine, a few small edge chips to covers, 1/4" tear to open edge of covers with matching indent to covers and pages as from a paperclip or something similar, similar indent to bottom edge of pages, faint crease to top right corner of front cover and most pages, small crease to bottom right corner of front cover with tiny chip affecting covers and pages (mouse chew?), distributor's mark in blue ballpoint to back cover ("B6/5"). Cream to light tan pages. Cover: Jack Kirby. Art: Mort Meskin, Bill Draut, John Prentice, Bernard Baily, Joe Albistur. GPAnalysis: No reported sales in this grade. Only two results in any grade, none in a decade. Most recent result: a 7.5 sold for $200 in May 2012.

Simon-Kirby crime mag boasting intelligently-written and nicely-drawn tales of police work, but no gore, licentiousness, or gratuitous violence. Of special note is Bill Draut's "Masher!," about a pretty blonde forced to deal with the unwelcome attentions of creepy guys on a crowded subway train, decades before #MeToo. There's also a nice ad for Bullseye #1, a Mainline mag featuring one of Kirby's most iconic covers of the 1950s. Simon & Kirby's Mainline Publications was a worthy venture that succumbed to lousy timing, another sad casualty of the Comics Code.

"Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, faced with dwindling commissions by comics publishers, tried forming their own comic-book company, Mainline Publications, in 1954, only to find the business climate suffocating. Although the titles they created... were tame, the major comics distributors declined to take them on. 'We couldn't get a decent distributor, because all the laws about selling comics had all the news dealers scared out of their wits — they were afraid to put comics on the newsstands,' said Joe Simon." — David Hadju, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. FSG: 2008, p. 315.

Consignments welcome for PBA's Fall 2022 Comic Book sale. Pre-Code Horror, Golden Age and Silver Age comics, original art, vintage comic-related photos and ephemera sought. Send inquiries to ivan@pbagalleries.com.