Last week after I reviewed Arnold Drake’s novel THE STEEL NOOSE, a friend reminded me that Drake also co-authored what is considered by some the first graphic novel, IT RHYMES WITH LUST, published in 1950 as a digest-sized paperback by the comic book publisher Archer St. John. Drake co-wrote the script with Leslie Waller under the pseudonym Drake Waller. The black-and-white art is by Matt Baker (pencils) and Ray Osrin (inks). This book has been reprinted in both paperback and e-book editions, so I picked up a copy of the e-book to check it out.
IT RHYMES WITH LUST is set in Copper City, somewhere in a Western state. If you
want to figure it’s loosely based on Butte, Montana, that works for me. Buck
Masson is the kingpin who runs everything in Copper City from the criminal
underworld to the mines. But when Buck dies, control of his empire falls to his
beautiful, cunning, and ruthless wife Rust (whose name rhymes with lust, get
it?) who brings in an old flame of hers, newspaperman Hal Weber, to edit the
local paper that supposedly is opposed to the Masson criminal empire. Weber is
supposed to be a crusading journalist who’s out to reform things, but he’s
really just a tool for Rust to use to undermine Marcus Jeffers, her late
husband’s second-in-command who now figures he’s going to take over. Weber
wants to play things straight, especially after he meets and falls for Audrey
Masson, old Buck’s beautiful blond daughter by his first wife. But can Weber
escape from Rust’s clutches?
This lurid, hardboiled crime/melodrama is very reminiscent of the type of yarn
Gold Medal published all through the Fifties, only IT RHYMES WITH LUST was
published just as the Gold Medal line was getting started. The main influence
on Drake and Waller’s script was probably the noir movies of the late Forties.
It works very well in graphic novel format. The script has the rat-a-tat-tat
pace you’d expect. The art is easy to follow and very effective.
I talked about Drake in the last post about him. Leslie Waller wasn’t nearly as
prolific, but he wrote some well-regarded thrillers under his own name as well
as some popular movie novelizations. Matt Baker was a well-known comic book
artist in the Forties and Fifties. Ray Osrin worked as an artist and inker in
comic books and later became an editorial cartoonist. All of them do excellent
work in IT RHYMES WITH LUST.
Archer St. John followed this publication with another mystery graphic novel,
THE CASE OF THE WINKING BUDDHA, written by Manning Lee Stokes with art by Charles
Raab. This one seems to be a lot harder to find than IT RHYMES WITH LUST.
Neither sold well, and that was the end of the experiment as far as St. John
was concerned. Since IT RHYMES WITH LUST is readily available, I don’t hesitate
to recommend it to fans of hardboiled crime fiction. I really enjoyed it.
