“Mountain Dew Murder” in 1954’s Authentic Police Cases #33, at Auction

Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Matt Baker, Mountain Dew, St. John Publications

Authentic Police Cases #3 contains a stand-out cowl by Matt Baker, and a story of bootlegging gone flawed referred to as “Mountain Dew Murder.”

A slang time period for whiskey, “mountain dew” was a phrase of Scottish origin that may very well be discovered in London newspapers as early as 1818 and broadly discovered in U.S. newspapers by the 1820s.  Drinks referred to as “Mountain Dew Drop” have been broadly marketed as each an alcoholic beverage and mineral spring water by means of the 1870s-Eighteen Nineties.  Throughout the 18th and far of the nineteenth centuries in the U.S., the phrase got here to be slang for moonshine — illegally made and distributed whiskey.

According to writer Dick Bridgforth‘s excellent Mountain Dew: The History, Tri-City Beverage of Johnson City, Tennessee, launched the primary model of the Mountain Dew mushy drink model in December 1954, after having acquired the rights from Knoxville bottlers Barney and Ally Hartman, who had developed the drink as a mixer however not offered it publicly.  So when St. John’s Authentic Police Cases #33 got here out early that yr, the time period mountain dew was nonetheless universally related to bootleg moonshine. That subject’s Mountain Dew Murder facilities round precisely that.

The Mountain Dew Murder story in this subject was drawn by artist Antonio Canale.  Matt Baker‘s cowl this subject may be very loosely impressed by Murder, Inc.’s #1 Boy, a narrative drawn by Gene Colan.  A rarity for Authentic Police Cases in that it contains a well-known real-life gangster, Murder, Inc’s #1 Boy is the story of Harry Maione, a hitman for the notorious Murder, Inc. enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate.  Maione was convicted of Murder and executed in the electrical chair in 1942.

For Baker followers, his cowl for this subject is one other stand-out in a sequence of uniformly nice covers. The Mountain Dew Murder story provides a singular angle with an space that crime comics of the interval didn’t typically chronicle, apparently sufficient.  A St. John crime traditional from close to the tip of the pre-Code period, there is a copy of Authentic Police Cases #33 (St. John, 1954) Condition: GD/VG up for public sale in the 2023 August 17 The Matt Baker Comics & Comic Art Showcase Auction #40233.

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