Confession, some say, is good for the soul. I'm about to test that by admitting to something I did a long, long time ago and which I've felt guilty about for that long, long time. Call it an act of fraud. Call it a deception. Call it false advertising…whatever. Please though remember that at the time, I was young and naïve. Now that I am old and naïve, I know better.
When Jack Kirby left Marvel and joined DC Comics in 1970, he urged the company to experiment with new formats for comics. Comics these days come in different sizes and shapes, including many that Jack proposed…but at the time, DC was resistant to those ideas — or at least to gambling money on them. They kept saying they would try them but saying that and actually publishing were two separate things. Many of his ideas went unattempted and the few that they did try were watered down, dumbed down and produced with the smallest possible investment. One of these was a line of magazines (not comic books) the first and almost last of which was called In the Days of the Mob.
Jack wanted it to be slick and in color and thicker and filled with the work of many different writers and artists. What resulted was in black-and-white with cheap printing, a low page count and no one writing or drawing it but Jack. DC had so little confidence in it that they didn't even put the famous DC name on it. Instead, they hid behind the moniker of Hampshire House Ltd., which (someone told me) was a dormant sub-company once used by some sister outfit that put out puzzle books.
Almost no one bought it. That was because almost no one saw it. DC, through its Independent News division, had perhaps the best distribution company in the business but they were unable to get this magazine — and the second one Jack did called Spirit World — on very many newsstands. A basic rule of any business is that you can't expect people to purchase your product if they don't know it exists and couldn't find it if they did. Jack also did a never-published-then magazine of stories about people in the throes of divorce.
My then-partner Steve Sherman and I helped Jack put these magazines together. We were all pessimistic about them selling at all, given what DC turned his proposal into…and when Jack saw finished, printed copies of In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World, he knew for sure. We finished up second issues of these but DC never published them. Some of the material for Spirit World went into other DC books. Most of what we did for the magazine projects has been printed in hardcover collections in recent years.
So now you're probably wondering just what I'm confessing to. Here is a chunk of one of the very few ads that DC arranged for the first issue of In the Days of the Mob…
I call your attention to the promise of a free (!) Giant Authentic John Dillinger Wanted Poster. The magazine did indeed contain a pull-out poster that at one might call a "John Dillinger Wanted Poster" but it was not particularly giant and it was about as authentic as a George Santos résumé. Here — take a look at that poster. The photos of Mr. Dillinger are his actual mug shots but does the rest of this thing look real to you?
Of course not. It looks like something that a 19-year-old kid would whip up on the drawing board in his bedroom in his parents' house. And seeing how it was done in 1971 before we all had computers with infinite fonts, he probably created the text by using rub-on lettering from some company like Letraset or Transfer Type without ever even seeing a genuine John Dillinger wanted poster. You can probably guess who that 19-year-old kid was.
This poster was not my idea. As I recall, DC head honcho Carmine Infantino phoned Jack and said he wanted the black-and-white magazines to have pull-out posters because that would make them thicker on the newsracks and it was way cheaper than adding more pages to the magazine. (Warren's Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella magazines were 50¢ and each had 64 pages. Ours were 48 pages for the same price — yet another reason ours didn't sell.)
Jack told Carmine the poster in In the Days of the Mob #1 would be a wanted poster of John Dillinger. I'm not sure if he said "authentic" or not but the ad they designed in New York said it would be and we were unable to find a real one…just the mug shots in some book we located. So Jack told me to make one and I made one. In more than half a century since this magazine came out, no one has ever mentioned to me what a shoddy fake it was but I still felt some guilt about it.
There's one other thing in that ad excerpt that I might mention. When DC tried to launch this line of comics in magazine format, it brought some intra-company complaints from Bill Gaines, publisher of MAD. He didn't like that another division of the same firm was publishing magazines that were the same size and shape as his…and he really didn't like that they'd be carrying work by MAD mainstay Sergio Aragonés and that MAD was mentioned in the ad. I don't know if this contributed to the distributors' lack of enthusiasm for the line or to their swift termination. But it sure didn't help.
Making my confession here though did. I feel a lot better about it now. Thank you for listening.