Crime Can’t Win

    (Marvel, 1950-1952)
™ and ©1951 Marvel/Atlas

Crime Can’t Win was a “me-too” crime comic published by Marvel/Atlas, then a distinctly second-tier company, in the early 1950s when crime books like Crime Does Not Pay and Crime SuspenStories were in their heyday. Like those titles, Crime Can’t Win purported to tell “true stories” of crooks, with loving attention paid to the violence and mayhem of the criminal lifestyle, and with a just-desserts moral tacked on to the end for propriety’s sake. Crime Can’t Win dispensed with much of the sociology and melodrama of the genre’s more prestigious practitioners; the shooting began on page one and rarely let up until the inevitable electrocution scene or climactic gunfight with the cops. Many of these coarse and brutal stories were penned by the Atlas house-writer at the time, Stan Lee.
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