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

84 Illustration by Peter Richardson BELOW: The ever ebullient Charles Biro. Tall, good-looking and charismatic, he was the creative dynamo behind Gleason’s burgeoning comics empire. when the long-suffering Minnie revealed, under cross-examination, that she had handed over her wedding ring to one of the plaintiffs in the vain hope of forestalling any court action. Such was the audacity and grand scale of Severo’s fraudulent activities that the judge imposed a hefty custodial sentence on him, and in February 1926 he was incarcerated at Norfolk State Prison. He was eventually released some three years later, but the family’s financial difficulties and reduced circumstances were exacerbated when Severo was found unconscious in the fume-filled garage basement of their home in Brookline, MA. Despite efforts to revive him, he was pronounced dead on arrival at the Symmes Arlington hospital. Despite the less than propitious circumstances, all three brothers were bright and industrious, and with their mother’s successful filing of a petition to change the family name from Silva to Wood (Selva meaning wood in Portuguese) sufficient distance appeared to have been established between their troubled past and a more promising future. Bob’s talents for cartooning led him to apply for a post at Max Fleischer’s Animation Studios in New York. He secured a job as an ‘in-betweener', and it was there that he encountered other luminaries such as the teenage Robert Kahn, who would go on to achieve fame and fortune as Bob Kane the creator of Batman, as well as an animator and animation director named Charles Biro. Biro was some six years Bob’s senior, with buckets of drive and a physique more in keeping with a baseball star than a pencil pusher. Biro, whose surname was derived from his Hungarian ancestry (the name translates as