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

The Case of the Disappearing Matt Baker Series, Authentic Police Cases

St. John Publications' Authentic Police Cases helped give Matt Baker his start at that publisher, but then it disappeared... for awhile.

If there's such a thing as an underappreciated Matt Baker-related series, St. John's Authentic Police Cases might just be it.  While many collectors focus on Baker's romance from the St. John era, and deservedly so, there are quite a few seemingly overlooked Baker covers in the Authentic Police Cases run.  This series lasted 1948-1955 for 38 issues, features 28 Baker covers, and 25 of those are available in this Matt Baker Showcase Auction.  Perhaps the most famous of these, Authentic Police Cases #6, is among Baker's earliest works for St. John (either his second or third-published St. John cover, depending on how you count it).  But right after Matt Baker hit this series with a signature Baker beauty being endangered by a scruffy thug on a speeding train, Authentic Police Cases promptly disappeared from America's newsstands for the next 18 months. How that happened helps explain why the entire Matt Baker cover run of Authentic Police Cases is so criminally underrated, and you can get most Baker-covered issues of the series up for auction in the 2024 July 18 The Matt Baker Comics Showcase Auction #40267 at Heritage Auctions.

So what happened with Authentic Police Cases?  As we noted with St. John horror series Weird Horrors / Nightmare / Amazing Ghost Stories, Archer St. John seems to have been vulnerable to bad publicity for his comic book line.  1948 was a peak moral panic year for the comic book industry, and many publishers responded by forming the Comics Code-organization pre-cursor, the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers.  While St. John didn't join the organization, he was feeling the heat that many other publishers felt in 1948.  Authentic Police Cases was showing up on local newsstand ban lists.  And just at the time that Authentic Police Cases #6 was hitting newsstands, a Washington state reporter singled out Authentic Police Cases #5 with cover of a "bare-kneed girl helping a convict shoot it out with an officer" in connection with a juvenile delinquent's reading material.

It appears that St. John simply decided that crime comic books were too hot to handle at that time.  Authentic Police Cases and Crime Reporter, Matt Baker's earliest St. John cover gigs, both ended in the same month.  The very next month, the company launched its first romance comic book, Teen-Age Romances, with a Matt Baker cover — altering the course of Baker's career and enabling St. John to find its footing in the process.

When Authentic Police Cases returned to the newsstands some 18 months later in early 1950, much had changed.  The crime comics moral panic furor had actually calmed down, for the moment.  Baker had put St. John romance on the map with Teen-Age Romances, Pictorial Confessions, and Teen-Age Diary Secrets.  His work on It Rhymes With Lust was likely in progress and perhaps not far from completion.

The title was restarted and added to Baker's regular cover assignment workload with Authentic Police Cases #7, cover dated April 1950.  Meant to be a bimonthly, there was actually still a four month gap between that issue and issue #8, which almost certainly put him clear of the It Rhymes With Lust workload.  Baker did the covers on 27 of the remaining 32 cover of the series from the 1950 restart through its end in 1955.  But Baker's work on these covers when he returned in 1950 is very different than that first Baker cover on this series in Authentic Police Cases #6.  Issue #6 is a great cover, but it's arguably nowhere near the most interesting cover of the series.  There's more drama, tension and storytelling in the 1950-1955 covers.  It's likely that working on It Rhymes With Lust had honed his skills on a number of fronts.  There are so many great covers here… issue #14 jumps out as a scene that has tension without action (and of course, a classic Baker beauty), the mayhem on that issue #10 cover, the classic jewel heist on issue #19, the shocking arson scene on issue #24, the drama of issue #32, we could go on and on.  There's plenty in this particular auction for a beginning Baker collector as well, such as this copy of issue #31, or this issue #38.

It should also be noted that a now-infamous interior panel showing a woman in lingerie by artist Walter Johnson from the interior story Human Cat Trapped by Death Gun Slugs of Authentic Police Stories #6 was used by Fredric Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent in 1954.  And overall, there's plenty to choose from for every Baker collector here and most Baker-covered issues of the series are available in the 2024 July 18 The Matt Baker Comics Showcase Auction #40267 at Heritage Auctions.

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