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Release Date: 18 July 2008

Paul Gravett edits and Peter Stanbury designs The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics. This is a 480-page collection of 24 mean, moody masterpieces, many painstakingly restored by Stanbury. They range from classic newspaper strips and notorious uncensored pre-Code comic books to the finest in American, British and European graphic novels.

The line-up includes:  Dashiell Hammett & Alex Raymond, Will Eisner, Johnny Craig, Mickey Spillane, Bernie Krigstein, Alan Moore, Joe Simon & Jack Kirby, Neil Gaiman, Alex Toth, Jacques Tardi, Jordi Bernet, Paul Grist, Jack Cole, Charles Burns, Max Allan Collins, and José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo. Highlights include the first comic book appearance by Mike Hammer's prototype written by Spillane and shot from the original comic book artwork, and the never-before-reprinted last ever comic book by EC genius Bernie Krigstein, a bizarre 87th Precinct tie-in to Ed McBain's famous characters.

Paul Gravett discusses The Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics:
"My new book, once again sharply designed, by Peter Stanbury is The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, officially out July 18. You may have seen their previous fine comics anthologies, clocking in at around 500 pages, like Best New Manga 1 & 2 (the all-colour third volume is coming this autumn), or Best War Comics and Best Horror Comics.

When Constable approached me to do a Crime collection, they were still looking at doing this book, as well as War and Horror, in the same smaller manga format, which would have seriously shrunk the comics pages down way too small. Thanks to our insistence, they enlarged the format of this series, and in fact for Crime Comics, expanded it a little further still, letting the pages breathe and fill the page area far better.

Stories by Alan Moore top and tail the book perfectly and other contributors include Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, Will Eisner, Jack Cole, Jack Kirby, Jacques Tardi, Muñoz & Sampayo, Neil Gaiman and more. Another distinction is in Peter's exemplary graphic design, which lends the whole 480-page compendium class and atmosphere. Peter also put in amazing effort to restore and refurbish the comics pages, which appear mainly in crisp black and white with no murky greys, to suit the strong, black-and-white noir style. And the contents really are some of the very best, no padding, no also-rans, but two dozen of the cream of crime comics, first-class throughout."

If your only real exposure so far to crime comics has been the Sin City graphic novels by Frank Miller or maybe their faithful big-screen adaptations, you'd better fasten your seat belt, you're in for a foot-to-the-floor ride through this compendium of the cream of crime comics. Along the way, you'll see how several of Miller's acknowledged masters and peers enthrall with their pacing, atmosphere and verbal and visual panache. You'll also see how Miller's battered, bandaged Marvin belongs in a long line-up of lean, mean machismo going back to the Thirties and before, when gangsters fought the cops for control of America's cities. More...

Interview: Forbidden Planet Blog
Paul Gravett discusses graphic criminality and leather nuns with Joe Gordon at the Forbidden Planet Blog. More...

Audio: Alan Moore
Alan Moore and The Sinister Ducks perform Old Gangsters Never Die. More...

Interview: Panel Borders:
Alex Fitch talks to Paul Gravett about his new anthology The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics. More...

2008 Comics In The Rear View:
Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics edited by Paul Gravett; written and drawn by Many People including Eisner, Moore, Gaiman, Spillane, Chandler, Krigstein and pre-21st Century Frank Miller (before he went insane)! Twenty-five of the best crime comics ever published. Mammoth has also issued collections (by different editors) of Best Horror, War, Zombie and New Manga Comics, but this is the one I personally had to buy.

Britain's best-known comic expert and editor Paul Gravett's... latest book [is] The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, a collection featuring 24 of the best stories around. Give it five minutes and you'll be hooked. The opener, Alan Moore's sng-a-long classic, Old Gangsters Never Die, is swiftly followed by the brilliant The Switch from Sanchez Abuli [and Jordi Bernet]'s Torpedo series. What more could you want? Well, how aobut another 500-odd pages worth... Buy it, and buy it now.

Two panels from 87th Precinct: Blind Man's Bluff, Four Color #1309 (Dell, 1962) drawn by Bernie Krigstein, reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics edited by Paul Gravett (Running Press, 2008). As usual Krigstein's work outshines the mediocre stories he has to work with.

I love the kinetic energy in this panel. Krigstein doesn't even bother to draw wheels on the car. The background is just an abstraction of repeated shapes that hint at some kind of structure (and possibly little circles representing people?). He also gets all the lines heading towards a single point, which is one of the protagonists running out of the car in the next panel. This is one of the simpler examples of Krigstein showing movement with a streaky, repetitions, stroboscope like effect. In being less ostentatious is integrates better with a lot of the panels which have a traditional rendering to them.

This panel follows two after the above. I love the jagged explosion of energy emanating from the police breaking down the door. Another kinetic image, though using a comics convention. The way Krigstein just draws the line around the door seems unusual to me, though perhaps it is not so much. (Also the "crash" sound effect has a Toth-like appearance to it.) I really need to read Sadowski's B. Krigstein Vol. 1 which has been sitting on my shelf for a few months.

Once one of the medium's most popular genres, crime comics all but vanished after implementation of the censorious Comics Code in 1954. But as comics expert Gravett shows in this massive black-and-white compendium, many foremost comics talents continued turning out tales of miscreants and murderers. The generous page count allows Gravett to include not only the expected choices, such as Dashiell Hammett's 1930s newspaper strip Secret Agent X-9 and Will Eisner's masked crime fighter the Spirit, but also any number of gratifying surprises. The genre's heyday is represented by such leading figures as Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Plastic Man creator Jack Cole, and masterful innovator Alex Toth, as well as two stories written by Mickey Spillane, whose career started in comics. The most unexpected entries are two written by superstar scripter Alan Moore, one by Sandman writer Neil Gaiman, and one starring underground artist Charles Burns' masked wrestler–private dick El Borbah. In-the-know aficionados will prize a true rarity, Bernie Krigstein's last hurrah before leaving comics for the fine arts, an adaptation of TV's 87th Precinct.

When it comes to descriptive book titles you might think that publishers are prone to injecting a little hyperbole, especially when they're describing something as ‘mammoth'. If you've had the pleasure of handling this weighty tome, however, you'll be well aware that in this case it's no embellishment – this book is authentically enormous.

Presuming you can lift it, ploughing through the pages is a joy. There's a wide range of stories on offer, from superstar comic creators across the generations. While the oldest story in here dates back as far as 1934 and others are nearly as old, there's few that feel old-fashioned – it's the hard-boiled, gritty, noir nature of war-time and post-war hardship that's influenced crime comics ever since. And while the book is crammed with some of the big names of modern comics (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Jack Kirby to name but three), it's the stars of the past, working in the crime genre for much of their careers, who really nail it.

Which brings us round to Paul Gravett, a superstar comics scholar whose research brings this crucible of crime comics out of dusty, forgotten archives and into our unsuspecting hands. A true connoisseur of comics, Gravett's breadth of knowledge and discerning taste is a treasure in itself.

As he mentions in his introduction, this book is well pitched at readers who love noir crime comics like Sin City and Criminal, and have an interest in the kind of comics that inspired them, some of which you'll find in this glorious retrospective cross-section of the genre from the last 70 years or so.

"It's words times pictures," Clive James once said of some arty movie. Despite that sage's frequent delving into popular culture he has never, so far as I know, had much to say about graphic storytelling or comics as they were once crudely known. Even so, they, too, are words times pictures and talented creators can make of them good art. There are many talented people featured in this big, thick tome.

The book opens and closes with work by Alan Moore, a testament to the box office power of that interesting British eccentric. In the first pages his big name is appended to a little piece of work, basically a comic version of a song lyric the hairy one did for Bahaus. It's more clever than most song lyrics, of course Alan has a way with words and the pictures are nice. It's not really a story but it's good. The closing piece is a story but I did not much care for it. 'I Keep Coming Back' has an 'adult' sex theme with art by Oscar Zarate, whose scribbles I did not love. At least Alan has done other adult themes such as politics, love and philosophy and is aware, unlike some, that sex is not the only one.

These Moore-ish little items bracket a stupendous compendium of stories old and new. Mature now, 'Moss creeping slowly up once heroic limbs' (Gore Vidal) I incline more towards the old. However, there's definitely something here for everyone.

Possibly the biggest name in crime fiction is Dashiell Hammett, inventor of the hard-boiled detective genre. One of the biggest names in graphic illustration is Alec Raymond, cited by almost all artists in the field as an influence. The two are united here on a newspaper strip about 'Secret Agent X-9' which reads like a comic version of some old Bogart movie. Inevitably dated, it's still a classic but the piecemeal four panels daily format limited the writers scope and the art seems to get more sloppy as it proceeds. Interesting, though, and not unpleasant.

There's a Simon and Kirby 'classic', too, about a machine that prints money. The intro tells us that Kirby's artistic talent got him out of the ghetto. Well, I love Jack's stuff, always have, but is it art? Some argue that he can't actually draw and a few of the pictures here are a bit wonky. Since the production demands of the day mean he probably knocked it off in three hours I think we'll forgive him. The story was okay.

Comic art can be either realistic illustration or cartoon. By cartoon, I don't mean like Daffy Duck, it's clearly meant to represent reality, but the artist can take a few liberties. The distinction between the two styles is not clear-cut. Two of the best stories here, 'Lily White Joe' and 'Blind Man's Bluff', feature art by Bernie Krigstein which is cartoonish, reminiscent of Steve Ditko at his best, but shows real people. There are also short works from old masters Will Eisner, Alex Toth and Bill Everett which are pleasing to the eye. Eisner's 'Spirit' features some characters with faces as distorted as those in the Dick Tracy film. It works. Given that exact rendering of reality takes a long time and doesn't really suit the purpose of comics I prefer the cartoon approach. All the aforementioned old masters used it but the objects and people delineated were clear and recognisable. They did not simply knock off stylised scribble, which is what you get in some of the modern stories.

The modern stories also have more modern themes and are possibly a bit more interesting thereby, though not all the old ones are hackneyed or dated by any means. Even so, Agent X-9 was a man of his time, a clean cut all-American hero in a suit. El Borbah is a fat costumed wrestler hooked on cigarettes, junk food and porn. Charles Burns did script and art for this unusual detective. I liked the former but the latter didn't do much for me. Meanwhile, Ms. Tree (geddit?) is thoroughly modern, being a tough, widowed, pregnant private-eye who's killed many a villain since she took over the firm from her late husband. 'Maternity Leave' has a script by Max Allan Collins and art by Terry Beatty. Both were excellent.

Mickey Spillane, one of the pioneers of contemporary rough and bloody detectives has two stories, one from 'Green Hornet' comics featuring Mike Lancer and one newspaper strip with his big star Mike Hammer. The two Mikes are not entirely dissimilar.

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics is edited by Paul Gravett, acknowledged by the Times of London as 'the greatest historian of the comics and graphic novel form in this country'. I enjoyed his knowledgeable introduction to the book and his knowledgeable introductions to the individual stories, too. I hate to point out a mistake which is probably the proof-readers and not his but must for the readers' sake. Pages 150 and 151 are in the wrong place. They should be between pages 142 and 143. Notwithstanding this trivial error the book is a bargain at £12.99 and will provide hours of good fun, some of it clean.

Secret Agent X-9, the Interpol agent Commissario Spada, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Ed McBain: they're all represented in the impeccably dark and hardcore line-up for The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, an enthralling stalk through the mean streets of comics from the pulps to the present. Indecently entertaining, and lethally good value for the price, too, like all the Mammoth collections.

The Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics is a thick new anthology edited by Paul Gravett, part of a large series of Mammoth Book Of... collections which seem to be mostly prose but have also included ...Best War Comics, ...Best Horror Comics, ...Best New Manga and the upcoming ...Zombie Comics (oddly not the "Best" zombie comics...). The books I've seen of the series are far from perfect, and obviously rights issues keeps them from being really comprehensive, but they're a good value for the money (generally $12-$14 purchased on-line for about 500 pages) and good samplers of the genres, not restricted to just American comics.

The Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics has been the best of the collections I've seen so far, because it includes some Simon&Kirby, namely the 14-page story "The Money-Making Machine Swindlers" from Justice Traps The Guilty #6 (1948).

The reproduction is in black and white from a printed copy, and looks pretty good for that. There are some remnants of the colouring, but light enough that they provide some shading without distracting from the linework.

The story is a confessional type, told by Prisoner 235079, Stella Brady, about how she came to be a guest of the state, your typical story of a young girl looking to escape from the drudgery of working life, witnessing a scam gone wrong involving selling gullible fools a share in a phony counterfeiting machine. Sensing that she can work the scam better, she gets in on the action and helps to set up a hotel owner with a gambling problem as the next mark. Little does she know, crime does not... oh wait, wrong company. Little does she know, justice traps the guilty.

Great little story, some prime S&K from the period when the romance comics were just taking off, with a lot in common with those stories, from the confessional narration to the attention to detail in the various characters and settings, some great storytelling punctuated by moments of sudden violence that S&K excelled at.

The superheroes killed the gangsters.

Maybe that's not entirely accurate. Perhaps Superman and his leotard-wearing ilk weren't the true killers. Maybe they were more like birds when the earth-shaking asteroid of the Comics Code Authority made its impact in 1954, killing off the pulpy and titillating crime-comics dinosaurs that thrived from the 1930s through the mid-1950s.

Relatively unaffected by the changes to the comic book landscape, superheroes continued to thrive and evolve. The wiseguys, two-bit crooks, hardboiled private eyes, and femme fatales went to sleep with the fishes.

Edited by Paul Gravett, The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics is a loving homage to the old newspaper serials and gumshoe tales of a bygone era, and a look at the modern comics and graphic novels those old black-and-white crime stories inspired.

In an informative, but disappointingly brief, introduction, Gravett explains how the popularity of crime comics exploded in the 1930s with the debut of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy in the Chicago Tribune. Tracy's exploits were merely an outgrowth of the time as real-life gangsters were waging wars on the streets of Chicago.

Maverick publisher William Randolph Hearst set out to replicate the phenomenon and commissioned Dashiell's Hammett's Secret Agent X-9, whose cliffhanger serials began appearing in all of Hearst's newspapers.

It wasn't long before these popular crime-and-punishment comic strips were compiled as 10-cent standalone comic books. Detective Comics, the company now known as DC Comics and famous for bringing the world Batman and Superman, incorporated soon thereafter and featured — what else, but detective comics.

The genre took a darker turn in the 1940s, using splashier titles, melodrama, and featuring exploitive parables with titles like “Murder, Morphine, and Me!” These comic books were by no means kids' stuff, as the panels were packed with murderers, harlots, drug addicts, and a host of shady people doing some very shady things. Coupled with the rising popularity of horror and romance comics, comic books were growing more and more risque and salacious, eventually coming under fire from moralist crusaders.

Branded by the so-called moral majority as a corrupting influence on children, the comic book industry moved to clean up its act and regulated itself under the Comics Code Authority, a regulatory committee that toned down violence and banned controversial themes like kidnapping and "disrespect for authority."

"Constraints like these meant that crime definitely did not pay for America's comic book publishers and the genre all but vanished by 1959 as comic book superheroes took over once more," Gravett writes.

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics contains a group of 24 diverse stories, including early pioneers of the genre like Hammett and Mickey Spillane as well as contemporary graphic novelists like Neil Gaiman. Even the venerable Jack Kirby is represented with his cautionary tale of "The Money Making Machine Swindlers."

These crime comics are a lost part of Americana, where archetypal mercenaries kill the bad guys and get the girls. They play by their own rules, drink too much for their own good, and can get away with calling a guy "Mac" and still look cool.

Surprisingly, many of the comics from the 1940s and 1950s hold up well today, while the superhero comics from the same era are almost always excruciatingly hokey.

But the book is hurt by two key omissions. There is no representation of Dick Tracy, which omits one of the cornerstones of the genre. And it would have been nice to see Batman included — either one of his early comics or something from the Dark Knight era — as Batman, at his core, is really just a detective who has undergone a superhero makeover. No other character quite bridges the gap between pre-and post-Comic Code Authority action characters like Batman.

The superheroes — or the Comics Code Authority — may have killed the gangsters, but Gravett has given them a fitting and loving eulogy.

The Cream Of Crime: The Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics, edited by Paul Gravett, is a good-value collection of 24 comic strips in 479 pages.

It features work from Britain, the US and Europe, dating from the 1930s to the present decade, by some of the greatest writers in the medium's history. Will Eisner, Ed McBain, Dashiell Hammett and the incomparable dark poet Alan Moore all make an appearance.

The only slight disappointment is that the definition of 'crime' is perhaps a little too narrow - the stories are, without exception, noir or hardboiled, so there's no room for, for instance, Spot The Clue With Zip Nolan or Grimly Feendish, The Rottenest Crook In The World.

In The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, the editor, Paul Gravett, has done more magic digging, this time in the lost world of crime comics, and excavated 24 short pieces spanning nearly 75 years. The usual practitioners of crime are all here: Ed McBain, Will Eisner, Dashiel Hammett, Mickey Spillane, even Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, but there are genuine finds, such as the first English outing for the Milanesi Commissario Spada, by Gianluigi Gonano and Gianni De Luca, or the female detective, Ms Tree (geddit?), by Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty. A box of unmitigated delights.

This is a pretty solid anthology of its kind, a massively-stuffed anthology from a person with good taste, well-selected, at a terrific price. The only hall of fame works here are an Alack Sinner story and a Spirit strip from the immediate post-War era, but Gravett comes through with an eclectic group of top-rank cartoonists and comics creators working in a minor key, folks like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Jack Kirby and Charles Burns. In fact, the Charles Burns inclusion is the kind of thing that really distinguishes a book like this one amid so many older works that may work better as attractive, sturdy filler than a source for re-discovery. Additionally, it's always nice to see selections from Torpedo and Kane. One wonders if the editors couldn't get their hands on certain works, or if the designation "crime comics" leaves off the table radical departures on detective books like the Karasik/Mazzucchelli City of Glass adaptation. It would have been nice to see something by Ed Brubaker in here as well, perhaps at the expense of Ms. Tree, which pains me to say as nice as its creators were to my father once upon a time. I just don't get that appeal of that one, and certainly believe that Brubaker's work with Jason Lutes, Eric Shanower, Sean Phillips and Michael Lark were much, much stronger. Still, a pleasant surprise and great beach reading. Seriously.

If there's one thing Mammoth Books can't be criticised for it's value for money.  This thing is huge.  The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics has got about 25 stories in it, the shortest one about 6 pages, the longest one over 80.

Of course, quantity is no indication of quality – if anything, I tend to be suspicious of large anthologies like this as it's not easy to keep the standard high when you've got a lot of pages to fill.  I must confess I haven't read any of the other Mammoth anthologies, so can't speak for them regarding quality control, but what I can say for this one is that it's edited by Paul Gravett – and frankly, if you know his name, that's probably all you need to know.

Paul Gravett, along with his longtime design partner Peter Stanbury, used to produce Escape, a groundbreaking and highly influencial anthology comic from the 80s.  They discovered talents like Neil Gaiman and Eddie Campbell, and recently produced a series of widely acclaimed coffee-table books about different aspects of comics (including Manga! and Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life). Gravett has a reputation in the industry for knowing a good thing when he sees it (earning himself the nickname "The Man at the Crossroads", because he's pointed so many talented people in the right direction).  In other words, Gravett and Stanbury's names are a sure sign of quality.

Letting Gravett loose on a book like this is like asking John Peel to compile a genre anthology album.  You will have no idea what you're going to get, but you know it's going to be eclectic, surprising, and very good indeed.  Gravett has an encyclopaedic knowledge of comics, and it shows.  The book has contributions from Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett, two of the godfathers of the crime genre.  Did you know they ever did comics?  I certainly didn't but here they are.  Industry favourites are present and correct including rarities from Alan Moore (who has two tales in here, bookending the anthology), Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Max Allan Collins and Charles Burns, as well as European masters such as Jaques Tardi and Gianni De Luca.

The stories themselves vary wildly in style.  Part of this is due to when they were created, many of them as long ago as the 1930s.  (Any historian will be fascinated by how the book demonstrates how much the language of comics has changed over the years.)  However this is also due to the fact that many of these stories have been picked for the distinctive style in which the creators work.  Kirby, famous for drawing Marvel Comics, has a distinctive style that will be recognisable to many readers, but many – particularly the work of the European artists such as Tardi – will be introduced to new audiences through this book.

Story-wise, we have what you would expect – Kirby's The Money Making Machine Swindlers is a classic Crime Doesn't Pay! storyline, complete with a not-so-innocent heroine, whereas Dashiel Hammett's Secret Agent X-9 covers the adventures of agent Dexter as he hunts for a mysterious criminal mastermind in a world where nobody is as they seem.  Yet there are also big surprises in here too.  Giobe and De Lucca's Strada  is a story about perception, and how people's descriptions colour a chase to catch a thief.  Charles Burns' El Borbah is about a masked wrestler acting as a private detective.  Alan Moore's second story, I Keep Coming Back, is about ending up back at the Ten Bells Pub once frequented by the victims of Jack the Ripper, and finding himself having to confront his emotions about it.  As Moore states, "You have to be so careful what you write about."

There's very little to criticise here at all.  There really isn't a dud story in the whole package, each and every story is wildly different from the last, yet all fall very neatly into the crime genre.  If you have any interest in comics as a medium and want to see how it can work in different ways and what it's capable of, buy this book.  If you like crime stories, buy this book.  If you want to discover something new, buy this book.  If you like comics to give value for money, buy this book.

In short, buy this book.

Dave 'Babytoxie', August 21, 2008:
Much Better!: Running Press finally hit a home run. The Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics is the latest entry in their series of genre collections. I was highly put off by the quality of the previous War and Horror volumes - they certainly didn't seem deserving of the label "best", but the Crime volume gets it right. It features work from many top-notch creators, both classic and modern. Much to my surprise, popular recurring characters such as Kane, X-9, Ms. Tree, El Borbah, and Torpedo are included. The quality of the book is very nice, with bright paper and crisp, clear printing. Yes, it's black and white, but with 450 pages and such an affordable price, it doesn't matter to me. This is a superb collection, and it gives me hope for future releases. Maybe Running Press could even give us second volumes of War and Horror with this kind of quality in mind.

Richard J Arndt, August 14, 2008:
Great!: This is the third Mammoth comics volumes - the first two focusing on war & horror. Both of those earlier volumes were hampered, although not crippled, by the refusals of EC, DC, Marvel/Atlas & Warren to allow reprints of their stories (although Warren tales did appear in the War volume). However this volume focuses on crime, a genre neither DC or Marvel/Atlas did much with, Warren only produced a few stories in (although they tended to be of quite high quality) and, in fact, an EC story does appear here.  

With almost the entire field to choose from the quality of this volume is very high with an excellent 1934 Dashiell Hammett/Alex Raymond tale from Secret Agent X-9; two stories from Bernie Krigstein (including the very strange Blind Man's Bluff which was his swansong to comics); obscure Alan Moore & Neil Gaiman tales (including Moore's epilogue to his graphic novel From Hell); a great Max Collins/Terry Beatty Ms. Tree tale, a fine Johnny Craig story from EC, Jack Cole's classic Murder, Morphine And Me!, a fine Joe Simon/Jack Kirby bunko tale, some decent Euro crime tales making their North American debuts, Will Eisner's Spirit (although one might quibble why The Portier Fortune - a good but not great Spirit tale appears, when such genuine noir greats like Black Alley, Ten Minutes & Fox At Bay were passed by), Jordi Bernet with a Torpedo tale, an Alex Toth classic, Charles Burns and much, much more. In fact, the quality of this book is so high while the price is so low that it may well be the best comic anthology of the year for your dollar.

Ian W, August 27, 2008:
This time it really is the best. I've reviewed the other 'Mammoth Book of Best (fill in the blank) Comics' and had varying degrees of reservations about them all, usually to do with the word 'Best' in title, and that usually because the selections weren't genuinely inclusive, often, I surmise, because the compiler couldn't afford the reprint rights. I should also acknowledge that no two people would ever compile exactly the same Best list anyway.

This collection, however, combines breadth, depth and quality. The omissions of DC and Marvel stories isn't important this time because they weren't as important in this genre (except latterly for some Vertigo titles). A simple list of the contributors alone should have anyone with the slightest interest reaching for the add to basket button. Take a look at this-

An opening elegy for the gangster by Alan Moore; a short by Kirby & Simon, Jack 'Plastic Man' Cole including one image that freaked out Frederick Wertham; a surreal piece by modernist Charles Burns; a short sharp and sexy Spirit story (a mandatory inclusion); a 70-page complete daily strip written by Dashiel Hammett prior to leaving for the lucre of Hollywood and illustrated by then-newcomer Alex Raymond; legend Alex Toth; a 50page story featuring a 9-month pregnant private eye Ms Tree by Collins & Beatty; a Kane story by the talented and British writer/artist Paul Grist; Mickey Spillane writing Mike Hammer for a Sunday strip; and much much more.

The time span ranges from the 30's to the 90's, the contributors from America, Britain, and Europe.

Not all of it's perfect. Crime stories often look better in black and white so the removal of colour usually isn't a problem here. Usually. The two Bernie Krigstein stories look very thin compared to the other contributions. But that is the worst I can say and it's a minor quibble; Krigstein is historically important so I can understand why compiler Paul Gravett included him.

This is an excellent collection and certainly hands down the best of The Mammoth Book of the Best (fill in the blank) Comics.

Time to have a look at the books I brought home with me from my travels. The first event out of San Diego was that I had to take them all out of my case, as it was overweight, and make them my hand luggage. All twenty lbs of them.

First up, The Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics, edited by my dear old pal Paul Gravett, so you'll get no unprejudiced view from me. In fact I just found, and am stealing, this handsome photo of the wee chap.

Best Crime Comics: I don't enjoy having comics broken up into genres like this, though if I was in Paul's shoes I certainly wouldn't hesitate to get a gig contributing to the 'mammoth book series.' I would say that comic books as a subject in itself is the genre, and anything else is a subdivision of that. In the world of popular fiction it makes more sense to categorise things by genre, where you have writers devoting entire careers to one idiom, whether it's fantasy or crime or science fiction etc. and you can trace clear lines through time. There isn't as much mixing it up in that domain as there is in our comic book world.

The most notable things: the book is in black and white and Paul had access to some crisp black and white British reprints of a lot of American stuff, for instance the 30 page cockeyed 87th Precinct story that Krigstein illustrated in 1962.

There's a 120 day run of Secret Agent X-9 from near the beginning in 1934 when Hammett was still writing it. One appeal of this selection is to show what action strip cartoons looked like before cinematic style was introduced. Everything is staged at medium distance. It's good tough stuff, though lacking the invention of Hammett's best short stories.

While the book overall is of the type that I usually feel tempted to cut up and rearrange according to my own principles, one other thing I found exciting. A sixteen week run of Mike Hammer Sunday pages from 1953/54. The page for Jan 31 has piqued my curiosity. In his introductory note Paul tells us that the bound and gagged girl in the negligee, being tortured with cigarettes to the feet, attracted moral indignation that led to the title's cancellation. The page he reproduces is different from the version of the same page that appeared in The Comic Century (KSP 1995). I show the upper halves of both (The lower parts are identical). In Paul's version, the black and white, the panel seen in the colour version has been replaced by an enlargement of the final panel of the previous week's instalment and the torture is hidden behind the title box. I would tend to think that an individual newspaper had taken the liberty of making the change except that panel 4 in the altered version (the b&W) doesn't appear at all in the other. Could the syndicate have asked the artist to supply two different versions of the page? Can anybody shed light on the matter?

Paul tells us that a diappointed artist, Ed Robbins, quit the comic strip business. His Hammer boldly anticipates the graphic style and permissiveness of the hard-edged British strips of the sixties, of Holdaway on Modesy Blaise and Horak on James Bond.

Best Crime Comics is killer:
Earlier this year, there was quite a stir of attention (and appropriately so) for author David Hajdu's latest book, The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare & How it Changed America, which delved into the quirky and alarming crusades against comics in this country that reached their shrill peaks in the 1940s and 1950s. In a piece I wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, I admired the research but had some problems with the focus in the final analysis. That said, the book and its tale really stuck with me, and I think it should be on the bookshelf of anyone who loves comics history. And you know what should go right next to it? The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics and not just because both have oddly long and stilted titles.

If Hajdu gives us the motivation for the pop-culture offenses, this book, edited by Paul Gravett, gives us the crime-scene photos, so to speak. The book arrived in the mail the other day and the first thing I noticed was the heft; you get your money's worth with 480 pages of two-timing molls, square-jawed cops, doomed losers and booze-soaked ciphers. There's an impressive array of talent surveyed here, too, with classic names such as Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Bill Everett, Joe Simon, Jack Cole, Bernie Krigstein and Johnny Craig. More than that, Best Crime brings its lurid mission well into the contemporary decades, with comics work by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Charles Burns and mystery novelist Max Allan Collins (whose Road To Perdition comics spawned the film of the same name).

There's also the comics work of Mickey Spillane, who is no stranger to killers in trenchcoats, and best of all, some of Dashiell Hammett's Secret Agent X-9 comic strip from 1934, which was drawn by Alex Raymond, the graceful illustrator who that same year would launch a little strip called Flash Gordon that would end up doing quite well.

The book is all in black-and-white, which is a shame for some of the older comics that banked much of their appeal in blood-reds, muzzle-flash yellows and lots and lots of flesh-colored curves. There's also no Frank Miller (Sin City would have been a perfect last chapter, or his unforgettable Hard Boiled with Geof Darrow) or Steve Ditko (If there's room for Eisner's chipper masked-man, The Spirit, why not the ruthless Mr. A?) and the counterculture years of the the late 1960s and early 1970s feel completely forgotten, but why quibble?

It was a treat, too, to dive into the 1979 adventure of "Commissario Spada, the gritty Interpol adventure strip by Gianluigi Gonano and Gianni De Luca, even though the hero cop looks eerily like Ralph Fiennes' Valdemort with a toupee.

There are some jolting juxtapositions in the book (it's not arranged chronologically) that are to the good, reminding us that comics shelves are just like that, offering you the unsettling and surreal bio-crimes of Burns right next to the gentle noir of Eisner's Spirit. Back to back, it's like listening to Nirvana's "In Utero" and Ellington's "Take the A Train," but somehow it works because, everywhere you look, there's chalk outlines on the floor. This collection is felony-level fun.

Unlike the previous comics collections in the Mammoth line, The Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics features a ton of big names instead of unknowns and never-weres. That's no slam against the others, but it's amazing to see rare graphic work from the likes of Ed McBain, Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett under one roof, not to mention alongside Will Eisner, Max Allan Collins, Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore.

At nearly 500 pages and less than 20 bucks, this is one of your better book values of the year. Edited by comics historian Paul Gravett, the heavy tome of heavies is a colorful tour of black-and-white stories from the gutter, dating as far back as the 1930s.

It's bookended by two brief bits from Moore, both adult in nature. Set in the worlds of gangster and strippers, they're like little tone poems, serving as the perfect appetizer and dessert. Sanchez Abuli and Jordi Bernet's Torpedo 1936: The Switch is the first find - a hard-boiled revenge tale from 1982 with curvy waitresses, shots to the head and viable threats.

Marvel vets Joe Simon and Jack Kirby are represented with 1948's The Money-Making Machine Swindlers, a true-confessions-style account of a woman who pays the price by getting involved in a con-artist's scheme. She tells her story from the confines of prison, of course.

McBain wrote a ton of procedural novels set in the 87th Precinct, but who knew there was a short-lived Dell comic based on his characters? From 1962, the first issue, Blind Man's Bluff, from the first issue is here, and it's a semi-surreal gem. It has nothing in the wacko department, however, compared to Plastic Man creator's histrionic Murder, Morphine and Me!, featuring the infamous needle-toward-the-eyeball panel and more overwrought melodrama packed into 14 pages than you thought possible.

The great Charles Burns — whose recently re-released Black Hole is a masterpiece — spotlights his masked-wrestler detective El Borbah in the delightfully insane Love in Vein, while none other than The Spirit inhabits the pages in Eisner's The Portier Fortune. No crime comics anthology would be complete with him.

Hammett collaborated with Flash Gordon artist Alex Raymond for the Secret Agent X-9 daily comic strip, and here we get a complete story arc from 1934 - nearly five months' worth - running 80 pages. It's everything you'd expect from Hammett, who seemed not confined by telling a story in four-panel chunks.

After hearing about Collins' and Terry Beatty's Ms. Tree character, it was nice to finally actually read one, and 1992's Maternity Leave from DC is a riot. The female detective is nine months pregnant, yet that doesn't stop her from getting into trouble, as someone's trying to off her. It ends with a slam-bang finale and her genius line of “I just killed two morons... and my water broke.”

From 1948, Who Dunnit? is a curosity and a novelty - a mystery in which the reader is given all the clues, and must flip the last page over for the solution. The only problem is that the panels are crammed with so much dialogue, the characters threaten to drown under their own word balloons.

Spillane's first comics sale is reprinted, with 1942's Mike Lancer and the Syndicate of Death, a Mike Hammer prototype that's unpolished. It's followed by Hammer himself in his Sunday strip from 1954 - a stark improvement. Another crime icon - that of EC Comics - gets its due with Johnny Craig's The Sewer, from the pages of Crime Suspenstories.

With such name talents, true grit and real bang for your buck, this collection is an absolute winner that future Mammoth graphic volumes will be hard-pressed to top. Book it!

I added Best Crime Comics to my Comics History class text list sight unseen, then picked up a copy yesterday at my local shop and have been enjoying it immensely. Yesterday was a big day at the comic store, including new issues of some of my favorite titles and the long-awaited reprint of Journey, but in the midst of my score, Best Crime Comics is the book I'm going back to again and again.

As a Krigstein fan, I'm especially keen on that odd Dell story. And pre-trend Johnny Craig EC, and the odd one-off Gaiman story - I thought I knew most of Gaiman's oeuvre, but this one took me by surprise. Nice to see some of Jack Cole's crime stuff in here, too. Seeing Kane and Torpedo is a breath of fresh air in the somewhat barren current comics scene. And Ms. Tree and P'Gell... nice to see the ladies represented as more than the worn tropes of noir Black Widow cliché. This is a delightful and well-chosen collection.

I do have a couple minor quibbles. I'd prefer some later X-9 stuff. It would be nice to have an excerpt from Volcanic Revolver. In the best of all worlds, where we didn't need to wrestle with copyright and trademark, the book would include some early Dick Tracy and some trend-era EC stuff. The printing is a bit off in some of the older work, most noticeably the Mike Hammer strips. A color section, like the bit in Best War Comics, might have been nice. Also, unless I missed something, there's no work by women in this collection. Granted, there's not much in this genre by women, but a Lily Renee story or Collen Doran's Fortune's Friends (excerpted) would have been tasty.

But these relatively insignificant plaints don't negate the pleasure in this anthology. It epitomizes crime comics, and recognizes work from all eras and most corners of the world. I love it. I think my students will as well.

Paul Gravett replies:
Thanks Diana, really appreciate your inclusion of Best Crime Comics in your course and your praise and helpful suggestions. Frankly, re the reproduction on the Mike Hammer pages, Peter Stanbury put in overtime to improve them - all we had to go from were loans of colour-separation films and this remains a huge improvement on the previous reprinting by Ken Pierce in 1985 where the blotchiness and filling-in are considerably worse. And yes, I would have liked to have included some women contributors - maybe if there's a chance to do a second volume.

Hard-boiled movies on every page:

If people think of crime comics at all these days, they will tend, thanks to its startlingly faithful cinematic adaptation, to think of Frank Miller's stark and brutal Sin City. Gravett acknowledges Miller in the opening sentence of his introduction; and here are 480 pages of work that inspired, and was inspired by, Miller, as well as plenty of work that has nothing in common with him except the interest in crime.

Then again, a certain constant, unmistakable atmosphere will always cling to the genre, whether it is something as rudimentary as 1949's Mary Spratchet ("writer and artist unknown"), which appeared in the enticingly named Crimes by Women series, or Alan Moore's Old Gangsters Never Die, which started out in 1983 as a song written by him and performed by David J from the group Bauhaus.

Moore's lyrics ("Hey! Ma! They shot your boys out there... and as I live and breathe I never saw a pair who fell so sweet to hear the final poetry of cordite in the air") celebrate the cliches of the genre, and the stern critic might be expected to express mild wonder that I am recommending what is often formulaic trash to the discerning readers of these pages.

But the transformations worked by time and distance are surprising: what might once have been hysterical, almost worthless, is now delightfully kitsch, expressive and revealing. You never unearth so much about the human mind as when you think that that is the last thing you're doing. There is, as the psychiatrist said of Basil Fawlty, enough for a whole conference there.

By 1954 the industry had become so alarmed by itself that, unwisely as it turned out, it drew up a rigid code of content which precluded the depiction of, among other things, kidnapping and "disrespect for authority". At the same time, a panic about a woman gagged and bound in Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer strip Dark City forced its cancellation, and the end of an era. (The strip is reproduced here.) And what was once inordinately popular - a million copies of the magazine Crime Does Not Pay alone were sold every month - became scarce as copies were thrown away, burned by anti-comics campaigners, recycled for wartime paper drives, used as ships' ballast, or simply degraded due to the poor quality of paper they were initially printed on. Junk has become valuable.

There is also this consideration: the stories are, for the most part, a hoot. You could make reading them an academic exercise if you wanted to, but these were created to entertain, and that they most certainly do. Jack Cole's Murder, Morphine and Me (1948) is almost dementedly determined to grab us by the lapels. The title alone of Secret Agent X-9 promises camp fun for the modern sophisticate, but at the time of its appearance - 1934 - its combination of script by Dashiell Hammett and art by Alex Raymond delivered something as close to the cinematic experience as the page could reproduce.

An additional charm resides in the obviously unselfconscious depiction of contemporary clothing - dinner jackets for the men, skin-tight satin sheaths for the wicked temptress. (It is interesting how often later artists and writers return to earlier eras, in recognition that this was a time when crime looked better, and was, in a manner of speaking, more at home in the world.)

From what we see here, Gravett has obviously been careful to spread his net wide. This surprisingly wieldy book contains not only the pulpy classics, or old chestnuts, of the genre, but more modern twists on it. A heavily pregnant, ruthlessly murderous detective, anyone? (Max Allen Collins and Terry Beatty's Ms Tree: Maternity Leave, 1992.) A 400lb porn- and fast-food junkie detective who goes around in a wrestling suit and mask? (Charles Burns's El Borbah, 1987.) It is pleasing that the stories have not been arranged chronologically. I'm not sure if they've been arranged at all. It doesn't matter. These are hard-boiled movies for people who prefer to see them on the page. Almost every panel is a joy. Kiss kiss bang bang.

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, edited by Paul Gravett, is a lively compendium of mostly hard-boiled fare, including some terrific scripts by Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane and Ed McBain. What strikes you most is the onomatopoeia - the SKUEEELLL! of car tyres and the TAT TAT TAT! of machine guns (not to mention the IFFFFTT! of a cigarette being stubbed on someone's cheek). It seems that crime comics are in vogue at the moment in the wake of The Wire (both Marvel and DC have launched crime series), and this anthology is a great introduction to some of the genre's roots.

I think we can now safely say that the Mammoth Book Of Crime Comics has been the hit of the series so far, and by a very wide margin. Anthologies are a difficult sell unless you're McSweeneys - or, it now transpires, edited by Paul Gravett.  After just two weeks it's already sold five times as many copies here as the last three Mammoth Books combined.

Considering crime comics as featured in this collection span some 80 years of the medium's history, I can't begin to imagine how hard it must have been for Paul Gravett, editor of The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, to whittle his choices down to the excellent selection featured in this book.

Sandwiched between two great crime-inspired stories by Alan Moore (Old Gangsters Never Die, drawn by the much-missed-from-comicdom Lloyd Thatcher - where is he now? - and I Keep Coming Back Oscar Zarate) are 22 more top tales. These feature the work of creators such as Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner, Max Allan Collins, and Mickey Spillaine, the latter at his nastiest with the truly hard boiled Mike Hammer, just one of a host of characters many will recognise such as The Spirit, Ms. Tree and Agent X-9.

Superbly restored, albeit for one unfortunate page transposition in the X-9 story, the choice of stories is a delight, from straight mystery with Bernie Kriegstein adapting an 87th Precinct Mystery, Blind Man's Bluff, originally penned by Ed McBain, to the creeping horror of crime-does-not pay tales from Johnny Craig (The Sewer) and Jack Cole (Murder, Morphine and Me). These veteran tales are neatly balance with modern stories from the likes of Paul Grist (Kane: Rat in the House) and Gianluigi Gonano and Gianni De Luca (Comissario Spada: The Street).

This is the kind of well put together, lovingly designed collection that not only delivers a great read but leaves you wanting to track more from the creators featured. If crime comics are new to you but you fancy more than superhero fare, you'd be well advised to give this a try and find out what you've missed. If you are a crime comics fan, then The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics may well send you hunting for creators you'll discover here for the first time. Recommended.

I don't do 'bedside books' because I'm always far too busy having sex, but let's pretend for a moment that I was like you poor fellows who lead a life of solitary vice and, most likely, wear pyjamas and comfy tartan slippers; then I'd have no hesitation in snuggling up in bed with a steaming hot cup of cocoa and a copy of The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics because it's epic!

Only intended to flick through it for the time being but I wasn't reckoning with the irresistible pull of Jack Cole's drug soaked Murder, Morphine And Me (True Crimes, 1948), masked wrestler El Bordah (reluctantly dragging himself away from his copy of Bongo Butt magazine to investigate a bad show at the Sperm Bank in Charles Burns' Love In Vein, 1987) and the squelchy horrors of Johnny Craig's suitably malodorous The Sewer (William M. Gaines' Crime Suspense Stories, 1951).

Ruthless Mr. Big's, ultra-violent hoods, double-dealing dames, unscrupulous PI's, cops of all stripe, stacked broads, the occasional juvenile delinquent - they're all present and up to no good. I've not spotted any blackmailer's or fat guys called 'Mo' yet, but chances are they're in here. When I get time, I'll try and give you the full table of contents for this and the companion volume of sorts - Mammoth Horror Comics - but hopefully this taster will at least give you some idea of the sickly treats in store.

Crimes & Crooks on the Comic Page:
Gathering bullets all over the international comics world, Paul Gravett has compiled a who's who of crime comics.

Oh, how I envy Paul Gravett... and how I pity him at the same time. To dive into the world's cellars of crime comics, reading, dissecting and selecting a worthy crop of steel hard tales that have been produced over the ages to show the general public all those international hidden gems. To spend years on that selection, ever cropping, ever choosing the finest weeds over the gmo's. Oh, how I envy him.

And how I pity him. Those dank cellars full of moldy tales with their never ending descriptive captions, explaining what we see in the art in excruciatingly flowery detail. Oh, how horrible those captions must have seen to him before the assassination of captions and thought balloons in more later years. The never ending barrage of true crime stories in the fifties, formulaic written and abysmally drawn. The horrendous downpour of the worst humanity has to offer and having to read it all.

But Paul Gravett seems to be a proud man. Proud enough to never give up and rise from that dank cellar, covered in dust, face and hands smudged in printing ink; holding just one magnificent monstrous tomb off 480 pages!  The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics. Truly an explorer's treasure.

Let me run off a list of names here: Alan Moore, Bernie Krigstein, Neil Gaiman, Jack Kirby, Jordi Bernet, Johnny Craig, Bill Everett, Alex Toth, Dashiell Hammett, Alex Raymond, Jose Munoz and I'm not even half yet. From the thirties to nineties, from crime to cop drama, from the mystery twist to the detective. This is a pretty thorough sampling of the crime genre.

Paul Gravett is one of the great comic historians of not only American but also European comics (and other continents too no doubt, wait until you see him perform next to Stan Lee in "Who wants to be a comic historian?"). And he has a good eye for a good moody crime story.

The tales are presented in... well not chronologically or alphabetically... I have to guess that they are presented in an order which makes them a joy to read, therefore making the book a nightmare for an anal retentive list person. But the system works. It was a smart move to alternate modern and old tales, I found myself reading through it in almost one go, not an easy feat for someone who reads four books intermingled during different hours of the day. There's a hypnotic rhythm involved in reading Jordin Bernet followed by Simon and Kirby followed by Krigstein or Jose Munoz followed by Bill Everett followed by Paul Grist and so on.

I can't even begin to pick a few of them out to be honest, they're all that good. Jack Cole's infamous  Fredric Wertham's fetish 'needle to the eye'-tale is in there, Krigstein's last comic story ever, Alex Raymond's Agent X-9 tales impossible to find in reprint, Alan Moore's The Sinister Ducks' record sleeve comic and so on. Going from hyper realistic to cartoon, all drawing genres are present but all filtered through either the noir twist or the criminal reflection in a sharp knife.

If I have to hold one thing against this book, it is that some of the art reproduction is either of a low quality or the paper just isn't intended to reproduce fine lines on. I get it, grainy paper reminds us of the pulp tales of yesteryear we all so love but that's trash paper if you're going to celebrate the artistic achievements made in the crime genre. Alex Raymond's lines seem to have suffered the most due to his fine rendering but looking at it from the other end of the spectrum, thicker line work like Johnny Craig also suffers a bit because of the tendency of the paper to bleed a bit when dealing with large gobs of ink.

Paul Gravett is a career criminal comics historian. He is known for picking the difficult jobs and getting it done. He expertly dissects a comic story in 6.6 seconds, judging it's worth based on dialogue, plot and drawing skills. Though he is known for his dusty cellars holding hostage immens volumes of obscure comics, his one flaw is that he also likes to showcase his 'loot' in affordable books, presenting only the best and brightest of whatever genre he has focused on in his genius mind, his latest being The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Stories. Highly recommended.

Anthology collections of comics have been appearing from Mammoth for the past couple of years, amongst them the very successful, Ilya-edited Mammoth Book of Best New Manga series which has seen two titles in print and a third due in November 2008. David Kendall has edited The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics and the upcoming Mammoth Books of Zombie Comics and, to hand, we've perhaps the best of the bunch, Paul Gravett's Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics.

The best anthologies are in equal parts wonderful and frustrating: wonderful to be able to dip into a wide variety of comic strips that you might not otherwise see; frustrating that you only get a taste of something when you want to read more.

Paul's anthology is full of goodies: I'm a crime noir fan so I've dipped into quite a few of the strips on offer but I've still come away from the book with an overwhelming desire to see more. More of Dashiell Hammett's Secret Agent X9, beautifully drawn by Alex Raymond, because the 240 daily strips reprinted here have whetted my appetite. More of Will Eisner's The Spirit because one 7-page story is never enough. More of Torpedo 1936 by Sanchez Abuli & Jordi Bernet because their little 8-page yarn makes me want to find the 17 albums that have appeared in Europe (the first two drawn by Alex Toth, also present), not one of which is available in the UK (although the first seven were reprinted by Catalan in the 1980s).

Even with 479 pages to play in, Paul has had to be mightily selective. So while you won't find, say, a Frank Miller Sin City story - which I would have thought an obvious choice and probably precisely the reason Paul avoided it - you will find a couple of short examples of work by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, good names to have on any cover. Both stories appeared in the It's Dark In London anthology, although Moore is also represented with a very scarce (and here remastered) strip that has only previously appeared as a fold-out cover for The Sinister Ducks' single, Sinister Ducks/Old Gangsters Never Die (1983). From crime fiction there's Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer and Mike Lancer, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct (drawn by Bernie Krigstein) and Hammett's aforementioned Secret Agent X. Max Allan Collins - champion of Spillane - is present with a 'Ms. Tree' yarn. From the much-maligned crime comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s there are a handful of tales (including the classic Murder, Morphine and Me by Jack Cole) and, from the UK, a Denis McLoughlin Roy Carson tale that imports American gangsters to Blackpool plus an episode of Paul Grist's Kane. There are stories by Simon & Kirby, Sanchez and Munoz, Charles Burns, Grange & Tardi... it's an amazing line-up of talent and the quality of the stories justifies every inclusion.

Like all good compilations, you're definitely left wanting more by this selection. Let's hope it takes off in the same way that the New Manga series has and, next year, we can look forward to a second volume... and then a third...

One of the finest books on sale at the moment, and one of the best bargains in the shop, is the Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, edited by comics historian Paul Gravett, and showing the extent of his knowledge and research. It's 24 of the best thrillers in comics history, containing an extended Spirit story from Will Eisner, Jordi Bernet's Torpedo, a story written by Dashiell Hammett and drawn by Alex Raymond (I know, right?), and a couple of out-of-print yarns from comics grandmaster Alan Moore. There's even more than that, but if I went through them you'd never believe it's only £12.99! Which it is. Pick one up and while you're there, check out the rest of our Crime Comics Spotlight display, showcasing what we reckon is the best in police procedurals, heist thrillers and car chases.

What a rich and loamy mix is here! Comics authority Paul Gravett is the perfect guide for the reader through one of the richest and most subversive genres of comics, taking us from the hyper-violent American crime comics of the 1950s (the very tales that brought the wrath of the moral guardians of the day down on the industry) right up to modern-day masters such as Brits Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Despite an interesting selection of material, the last book in this series (devoted to horror comics) was compromised by the reduced format and artwork that suffered when shrunk to the smaller page size: no such problems here: the wonderful black-and-white artwork is given room to breathe. And the list of artists is matchless: from the legendary Jack Kirby to EC giant Johnny Craig, from Alex Raymond (working from a Dasheill Hammett script, no less) to the bizarre and surrealistic Charles Burns. An unmissable collection.

Murder, Morphine & Me:
Murder, Morphine and Me first appeared in True Crime No. 2, May 1947, not No. 3, July-August 1948.