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Author:
Title: SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES No. 4
Place Published:
Publisher:EC [Indicia: Tiny Tot Comics, Inc.]
Date Published: August-September, 1952
Description:

CGC certified: VG- (3.5). Green Label (Qualified). Piece out of 12th & 13th pages, slightly affects story. Off-white pages. Slab scuffed but not chipped or cracked on the left side, about 3.5" from the bottom corner. Cover: Wally Wood. Plots & scripts: Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines. Art: Jack Kamen, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Joe Orlando. Used in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT. GPAnalysis: A Green label 3.5 sold for $153 in December 2021.

"In another comic book the criminal is a police lieutenant. He kills his wife by deliberately running her over with his car. At the end he is undetected and completely unsuspected, and presumably lives happily ever after. Six pictures on one page show the policeman-murderer lighting and smoking a cigar, walking triumphantly, with the full knowledge that crime does pay. He goes free because at the police station an innocent man is tortured into making a confession. The child reader is spared no details. The man is punched in the stomach, hit in the face, his arm twisted behind his back.... The very last panel in this child's story shows the real murderer, the police lieutenant, smoking his cigar and 'cleaning his wife's blood from his car.' Stories like this are so typical that I could go on and on." — Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent. Rinehart & Co.: 1954, p. 387.

In addition to drawing Dr. Wertham's ire, Feldstein and Wood's anti-police brutality story "The Confession" generated a flurry of reader indignation, as expressed in the letter column of Shock SuspenStories #6. Gaines and Feldstein defended the verisimilitude of their tale with a list of police interrogation tactics gleaned by their "research staff" at the New York Public Library: "Kicking, rubber hoses, rolled-up telephone books, lead pipes, blackjacks, knocking out teeth, breaking wrists and legs, twisting arms out of sockets... with the following results: abrasions, burns, black-and-blue marks, broken bones, dislocations, ruptures, hemorrhages, and in some cases, death."

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.