Number 1037


The fine art comic book artist


Gerald McCann was a comic book veteran, another journeyman, who was also a painter, a fine artist. I don't have much information on him beyond his birth year of 1916. If McCann is still alive he's about 95-years-old by now, but nowhere online could I find a date of death. If you google Gerald McCann you can find examples of his fine art.

McCann did comic books across the genres, but specialized in crime and later in TV tie-ins. He had a fine artist's eye for panel composition. The two moody crime stories I've got here have a noir feel to them. McCann worked into the 1960s, at least, for Dell (Ghost Stories) and for ACG editor, Richard E. Hughes. Today I'm showing one of his later stories from a 1963 issue of Adventures Into the Unknown.

Here's a link to a Western story McCann did for Avon.

From Murderous Gangsters #3, 1952:








From Real Clue Crime Stories Vol. 6 #2, 1951:








From Adventures Into the Unknown #143, 1963:

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Number 898


Boss Tweed


The story--to me, anyway--isn't that with his drawings cartoonist Thomas Nast helped bring down the New York Tweed political ring in the 1870s, but that 140 years later the kind of corruption practiced by Tweed and his Tammany Hall gangsters is still going on in places around the country.

This story doesn't show Nast, but mentions him. Here are a couple of his Tweed cartoons, which helped people of the time recognize the “boss”. Do you think Tweed really had that remorse filled soliloquy in his cell as shown in that last panel? In a perfect world, maybe.


“Boss Tweed”, attributed to Dan Barry-with-a-question-mark by the Grand Comics Database, is from the 1948 Real Clue Crime Stories, Vol. 3 No. 2.

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