Before EC, before His Name is… Savage!, before underground comix, this volume collects a pioneering attempt - from the creators of the first true crime comic - to publish stories aimed at adults in the comic book format.
From their inception in 1935, comic books - starring Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel - had been primarily written for and aimed at adolescents. There were always the occasional outlier artists who pushed back against the commercial constraints of comic books and envisioned the next evolutionary artistic leap in the artform: Charles Biro was one of those artists.
In 1949, the ambitious Biro - who had previously co-created the realistically brutal comic Crime Does Not Pay - edited and wrote an oversized comic aimed at adults, called Tops. Like several other radical adult comics projects that would follow, it proved to be a commercial failure and lasted only two Life magazine-sized issues. The original comics have since become a legendary holy grail among comics fans and historians, fetching as much as $6,000 on the collector's market: written about but rarely seen and never reprinted. Until now.
Hardcover
