Foyer, Guns, and Honeys

I'll take this in reverse:

The honeys are Rust Masson and her stepdaughter, Audrey, vying for the affections — or perhaps just the obedience — of our protagonist, Hal Weber, in the days of dames and dolls.

The guns come out in the climax of the book, when all the principal players converge upon the Masson Mining Company.

The foyer is barely glimpsed in the home that Rust shared with the late Arthur "Buck" Masson — but crucial, as it's where Hal first glimpses Audrey on his way to visit his newly widowed old flame.

The cover to St. John's original It Rhymes with Lust,

identical to the Dark Horse edition save for the price

It Rhymes with Lust was the first in a proposed line of so-called Picture Novels from St. John Publications, crossbreeding the comic book with the somewhat more respectable, certainly more adult entertainment of the prose paperback potboiler. Digest-sized, with black-&-white interiors under a color cover, Lust hit newsstands in 1950 and was largely forgotten until Dark Horse Comics released a replica edition in 2007 [ISBN 978-1-59307-728-0].

Arnold Drake wrote Lust with Leslie Waller under the pseudonym Drake Waller. If Julius Schwartz was kinda-sorta the '60s DC equivalent of Marvel editor Stan Lee, as I put forth last week, Drake was definitely the '60s DC equivalent of Marvel writer Stan Lee. He wrote imaginative sci-fi stories and co-created the angsty Deadman and misfit Doom Patrol, whose debut in My Greatest Adventure hit the racks nearly simultaneously with the first issue of the very similar X-Men. That, however, came well after Rust Masson.

In his afterword to the Dark Horse reissue of Lust, titled "The Graphic Novel — And How It Grew", Drake traces the history of stand-alone, grown-up comics in an impressively brief, accessible fashion, arguing not too strongly that he was ahead of his time. Waller & Drake were attending school via the GI Bill in 1949, writing for comic books on the side, says Drake, when it hit him: With all the other returned veterans in his position, accustomed to picking up panel-to-panel fiction at the PX, there might be a market for "stories illustrated as comics but with more mature plots, characters, and dialogue". He pitched the idea to St. John, a small but historically significant comic-book and magazine publisher, with his own rudimentary drawings.

Crossing the popular crime and romance genres, which along with Westerns and other non-costumed adventuring were supplanting superheroes in comics come the 1950s, It Rhymes with Lust strikes me as a curious choice for an opening bid to attract the attention of ex-soldiers. I confess to the obvious, which is that I'm a habitual comics reader fifty years in the future of "Drake Waller's" potential audience, and also that this might sound sexist (in both directions). But the book strikes me as more what you'd see on the Lifetime channel if it existed back then and less Double Indemnity.

As the story opens, Buck Masson has just died, leaving his second wife, Rust, and his lieutenant, Marcus Jeffers, in conflict over the operation of not just Masson's business affairs but the "state political machine". Hal Weber arrives in Copper City to meet with Rust, who reveals that she summoned him there to take over the city's opposition newspaper. Everyone knows that the Massons own The News-Times, but they own the anti-Masson Express, too, which Rust wants Hal to use to undermine Jeffers. Once a crusading idealist, Hal is now cynical yet still naive, his qualms about reporting to Rust instead of reporting the truth dissolving whenever he's within twenty feet of her womanly wiles — at least until the escalating violence and the lure of young Audrey Masson, daughter of Buck's first wife, begin to change his mind.

The Matt Baker cover to Aug. 1948's Phantom Lady #19 from Fox

Penciled by Matt Baker and inked by Ray Osrin, It Rhymes with Lust is generally handsome. Whatever debits it may incur in stiffness, by today's standards, are more than compensated by the period charm that very stiffness brings. Baker was renowned for drawing lovely ladies in action features, particularly Phantom Lady and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and while occasionally uneven the illustrations in Lust are on the whole crisp and detailed, printed in the Dark Horse edition on sturdy paper with just a hint of grayness in the vein of old-fashioned newsprint.

Duoshade or a similar mechanism is used throughout the book in a largely counterproductive way, my one real artistic complaint. This technique is usually employed in lieu of crosshatching or stippling to fill in an area that should be darkened but not fully black; it's also used, as it is in part here, to lighten the linework of the background and so provide contrast. The problem is that Lust uses it to echo a photographer or filmmaker's manipulation of focus in a disconcerting way that often gives us a sharp plane unnaturally sandwiched between two blurred ones or, as in the large panel above, the other way around.

One thing that the narrative does very intelligently — and which reinforces my feeling that this is as much a book to introduce prose readers to comics as to bring comics readers more adult material — is ease itself into the panel-to-panel continuity. The first story page has one small, boxed illustration surrounded by narration rendered in some of the tightest hand lettering you'll ever see. We then get a full-page illustration, but with a printed newspaper clipping pasted atop it. Only then, on the facing page, does a wordy caption begin the first multi-panel page. Whether or not this was intentional on the part of the authors or publisher, it acts as a sort of prose-to-comics decompression chamber.

The first three story pages of It Rhymes with Lust, each clickable to read at larger size

It Rhymes with Lust is ultimately a historical curiosity, but a welcome one that can certainly be enjoyed as period melodrama. The hero dithers until it's almost too late, undying love is professed at the end of the first chapter after one night of dancing, and you almost root for the villainess because even though she's a witch she's the most determined character in the story. You'll find soap-opera poetry in such full-page, silent shots as Rust in an amorous embrace with Hal the day her husband was buried, surrounded by his portraits. And even though this Picture Novel often opts to tell when it could show, sometimes the overwrought prose is the only deliciously florid way to convey the characters' emotions, all the more fun when it clunks now and then, like so: "Her heavy perfume was heady and seductive, the touch of her fingers arousing. There had always been something irresistible about Rust. He had never been able to put her out of his mind, even after she had walked out on him many years ago... without saying good-bye. He had drifted in those years from one job to another, drenching his memories with hefty drinking. But now she was real, alive, enticing! It was hard to rationalize. With a sweep he caught her in his arms."

St. John Publications gave up on the Picture Novels line after just one more book in 1950 from another creative team; The Case of the Winking Buddha was billed as an "Original, All-Picture Mystery" and has yet to be reprinted. While that and the original Lust would have cost you a quarter apiece on the newsstands, Dark Horse's replica edition retails for $14.95, and it's tough to recommend at that price. The good news is that my copy came to me as a gift from a friend who went bargain-hunting in the Nick & Dent section of the Things from Another World website, where everything is 50% off — and based on the box of fun I received, the light damage on the merchandise ranges from imperceptible to at worst totally acceptable for the price. [The updated bad news is that It Rhymes with Lust is no longer available there in the Nick & Dent department, but smaller discounts can be had at other online retailers for new copies.]

The cover to St. John's Lust follow-up The Case of

the Winking Buddha, illustrated by Charles Raab

You'll find a lengthy, informative history of St. John's Publications at Ken Quattro's Comicartville website, with personal commentary from Arnold Drake on It Rhymes with Lust on the first page. The online American Art Archives has remarkably vivid examples of Matt Baker's comic-book covers. And Mark Evanier wrote a remembrance of Drake upon his passing in 2007; having attended the 1999 San Diego convention where Drake was given the Inkpot and agitated for recognition of Bill Finger with what he called the Fickle Finger award, I'll attest to the fact that he would have been a worthier foil for Rust Masson than Hal Weber.