EXTRACTS: Illustrators Crime Comics Special © 2020 Book Palace Books (144 pages in full edition)

80 BELOW: Bob Wood’s troubled life was destined to become as lurid as the comics he edited. RIGHT & FACING PAGE: The covers to Crime Does Not Pay ventured into hitherto unexplored territory in terms of its graphic depictions of sex and violence. perhaps the lesser talent of the three, but a man whose decline and fall seemed to provide a perfect epitaph for the blood-soaked comics he had once edited. Bob Wood was born Robert Silva on June 14, 1917. His parents Dr Severo Silva, a physician of Portuguese heritage working for a local insurance company, and his wife Minnie had met some four years earlier at Tufts College, married and set up home together in a reasonably comfortable middle-class neighbourhood in Bedford, MA. Bob was followed by brothers Dick (born December 6, 1919) and David (born September 6, 1926), all three would achieve a degree of success in the comics industry, but all three would have lives prematurely curtailed by natural and, in the case of Bob, unnatural causes. However, the shadows that cast themselves over the fortune of the Silva family were already gathering as Bob was still in his crib. Severo had indulged in some risky speculations, and in the uncertain world of 1918, Illustration by Peter Richardson