The wait is over. After years of speculating about the content of one of, if not the rarest of monster comics (much less coming across a copy), I finally tracked one down. The most recent sale of this esoteric title that I could find was a slabbed copy, CGC-graded at $2,226, that sold at auction on March 7 of this year.
The first and only issue of the elusive MONSTER CRIME was a one-shot concocted by Hillman Periodicals that has a cover date of October 1952 with a cover price of 15 cents. The editor was Edward Cronin.
Now, as I said, for one who has not actually seen the interior of this comic there is a lot of mystery behind it. Do you remember that over-hyped 1986 Geraldo Rivera TV special when he was going to find a lost horde of valuables in a vault owned by gangster Al Capone? Remember the payoff? A big, fat zero -- nothing -- nada. A waste of 2 hours. Well, finally getting a look inside MONSTER CRIME is kinda like that. In fact, it was a crime as I felt robbed!
What we have here is actually a crime comic book, not a horror comic book. The only monsters are on the cover and the human kind called criminals on the inside. To say that I was disappointed is an understatement. It looks to me that Hillman had a surplus of crime comic stories and decided to do the old bait and switch and try to sell it as a horror book since these were gaining popularity at the time. Whatever the motivation, it's one of the greatest comic book ripoffs that I can remember.
On another note, comic databases are at a loss for who wrote the scripts and drew the art for these stories. One of these, however, I'm laying money on that Gerald McCann did the illustrating for "Another Halloween" (no, this isn't a horror story, either!).
Well, there you have it, and here it is: MONSTER CRIME #1 in all its glory!
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