Down With Crime - No. 1 Nov. 1952

    The level of detail here is exquisite.  First, let's start where we're intended, the foreground.  Presumably this is Desarro falling here from the fire escape.  Look at the way he is captured in the light.  Not is it enough that he is square center on the page, but his importance is literally highlighted by the police searchlights.  And not only is he framed by those lights but so is his destination below, creating an obvious visual flow downwards.  Suspense is heightened by capturing the moment just after he's lost his footing.
    The visual theme, therefore, is quite apparent.  Crime must be done away with, torn from our neighbourhoods, from the sides of our buildings; from the illicit height Desarro has attained, where people sleep and hang out their laundry.  But, our focus is him, not the police.  The usual trope of crime comics holds, that the criminal is more exciting.  It is exciting and would be less so seen from the ground up; the badge-eye view, if you will.
    Only Desarro shows emotion.  The police are too far away to read.  They are faceless and therefore heartless and implacable.  The thrill comes from Desarro's face and the detail of his body.  What hair he has is whipped about.  Nothing is forgotten in stasis, not his tie nor the wrinkles in the clothes, even the left collar of his shirt.
    The nuanced contrasting of light levels, from bright yellow at his back to the tans of his suit and the thick shadows on top give him a depth the rest lack.  The line work on the police is very fine.  A genius hand inked this cover, going so far as to add vents in the hoods of the police cars.  But the only subjects with life here are Desarro because of his depth of colour, and the light, because of its lack of contrast.  It is pure, a projection of the life residing within the police, who here are merely mechanical representations of order, as set in stone as the buildings and the street.
    They are, though, the reality, for despite our focus on Desarro it is they who have the ultimate authority here over life and death.  They have taken from Desarro his power, seen in the gun leaving his hand.  He is left without a foothold in the world, seen especially in the angle of his left foot, and can only surrender to the might of those who crave, if it's not going too far to say, purity.
      Notice that two of the police seem to be firing.  Notice too, that we cannot see what guns they carry. Their true weapon is the light crossing in the sky and covering the bottom half of the foreground.  At other times, light in comics is illustrated as partly transparent.  Here it is blinding out the pavement.  It overtakes the ordinary with extraordinary measures to return this neighbourhood to normalcy.  The all-encompassing fire of justice.  Above all, a moral judgment.
    However, we learn nothing from it about the horror of crime or the reason of law.  No moral lesson is even indicated by the title, an implied denial of what has captured our thought and focus.  While the circumstances around Desarro form a moral core, they - the police - are distant and iconically hostile.  We only look at him.  His heart, figuratively, beats with fear, and ours with excitement.
    While full of tension, the piece's emotional base is on a man who will soon feel nothing at all, let alone fear.  The life of that fear is quick, and the emotional through-line that we can imagine following from its death, is short.  No innocent bystander clutches a window, looking out.  There are no crowds, no focus on gunplay, no bullets or "Bang"s.  Ultimately, it's a quiet piece but the impact is deep.  So much so, that the title itself is upset, telling us that normal pace will be disrupted.  The gun, note that it's Desarro's gun, is dead center of the X from those spotlights, separated yet still potent.
    But all for the greater good.  The surrounding stillness, as again the action is held entirely by Desarro, says the pace will return, life will be alright.  And soon.  The light that blots the street will blot Desarro, his gun and all others to come.  Desarro, in all his contrast, is Crime, and light destroys shadow.  Desarro himself creates the shadows on him.  They do not come by the light.  For despite the brightness of those beams, no other shadow is cast as strongly.  The innocent can hang out their laundry and go to bed.   They can turn away from the corruption that has already consumed Desarro.
    It's valid to ask if that light blinds innocence to knowledge, for we know much about Desarro from his contrasting shadows, but little about the police and nothing of what their searchlights block out.  Such is the nature of this use of light.  As for us, we want that knowledge, enough to pay for it and are allowed to enjoy what thrills we can in the seconds it takes to discern Desarro's fate.  This piece, at heart, is at war with crime, forever enticing us with thrills it forever seeks to erase.