Number 731


The hot dog from Coney


I'll bet you haven't ever seen a crime comics story that ends up looking like an educational comic book pitching the virtues of frontal lobotomies. I hadn't either, but this is that story. It's a thinly disguised account of gangster Frankie Yale drawn by Bob Powell for Street and Smith's Top Secrets #5, 1948. You can read about Yale in this Wikipedia entry, and figure out the real names behind the phony names in the story.

In the last two pages the story is turned over to the psychiatrist character, who tells us briefly of the theories of why Frankie Yale was a criminal sociopath, and then extols the virtures of chopping out portions of crook brains to end their crook ways.

The doc has a combover, a little detail which is something I love about Bob Powell's artwork.