Number 1059


"Keep yer yaps shut!" Lou Cameron's tough guys


Artist Lou Cameron has been featured in my blog, as well as Karswell's The Horrors Of It All several times. I've always thought of Cameron's Golden Age work as being primarily horror, but he did some crime stories, too. I have two of them, from Ace Comics' Crime Must Pay the Penalty.

Cameron's crooks are hardboiled, tough and murderous. They cause lots of mayhem. These are two violent tales, the sort of comics that got the industry in trouble. They were published in issues #40 and #41, which came out in '54, the year of greatest heat on comic books. The next year the Comics Code came out, and Crime Must Pay the Penalty lasted a few issues under the Code.

No matter in what genre he drew, Cameron was superb. He did comics for a few more years, then became a writer, an author of original paperback novels.