TG crime title

When looking at mod covers at this site, I found myself really liking the "crime" stories, like femur's "Judgment Day" and "Triple Cross". I also found it easier to come up with crime stories than romance stories for mod covers.

Instead of mucking up AF with a lot of crime stories, though, I decided to group them under an independent title. "Body Crime" is kind of a vanilla name, but maybe if you squinch your brain a little you can pretend it has a Philip K. Dick vibe. Eight of the nearly 40 covers I've made:

I think Body Crime is a great idea! Is it an open universe?

These are all good covers, with a nice eye for period design. I especially like Double Trouble. I'm surprised though, that the CCA approved Some Assembly Required. ;)

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "open universe." If you mean "Can anyone play in it?" I say "Absolutely and please!" If you mean "Are there rules?" like there are rules on AF and the medallion, well ... um ... scratches ear ...

I did wind up making some guidelines for myself, on the principle that ideas bounce harder when there's a surface to bounce off of. But I also purposefully wrote them with a hole so big that in practice there ARE no rules. So, technically, there are rules; but in practice, anything goes.

Does that sound like a total contradiction? Well, I suppose if anyone were interested in what those guidelines are, I could supply them ...

Some Assembly Required: Well, judging by the issue number, that came out sometime in the late 80s. But perhaps the phrase "asleep at the wheel" (and maybe even "ravished in its sleep") would apply to the CCA in connection to that particular issue ... :p

Oh, as long as you're mentioning "Double Trouble": I hope no one minds if I try dislocating my shoulder by patting my own back on the touch-up job on that image. Lotta work, but FUN to do:

These are fantastic! Very original! I especially love the idea of crooks stealing bodies like they would any other kind of "swag", and also the idea of teenage body-swapping as a regular date event. What "base" would that be? (As in "getting to second base", etc.) Maybe it's like running the bases backwards! (and in high heels)

Keep up the great work!

Amanda

great idea and well done covers. Please post the others. My favorites were "Could have AF" & Neo Noir" & first issue

Okay, I'll post a few a day, so people will have a reason to come back. :)

A few notes:

"Sex Change": If someone can suggest a different name for a sex-changing chemical than "Gen-X," I'm all ears.

"Dressed to Kill": Interesting that in "Body Crime" the corpses bleed raspberry jelly ...

"Bride and Bridesmaid": And you thought the last wedding you attended degenerated into a catfight ...

Three more great covers! The quality of all these just blows me away. I am a fan! I like "Bride and Bridesmaid" and also the idea of a sex change bomb. The blonde is gorgeous. (One possible chemical name is simply "X-Gen". Another is "XX -> XY", or whichever way round it should be.)

One problem with "20 Seconds" is that the victim is already a woman, yet the bomb hasn't gone off yet. Or is she about to be turned into a man? (If so, yuck! What a step down!) It's a great cover, but a bit confusing...

Amanda

Bride And Bridesmaid is excellent! Is that a dagger the bride is tucking in her garter?

Thanks Seuzz for posting more of you excellent work

on drug name - how about the Venus Virus .
20 second sex change, LOL!

Dresed to kill, Great use of pic & story. I llove it thaat 'She' calls 'him
Scott' instinctively. Excellent Touch!

Bride & Bridesmaid, great story! & LOL! - so many things can go wrong. An agent swapping bodies with a woman for security reasons kind of reminds me of my Story Missing Congeniality on Fictionmania

XX -> XY

Excellent suggestion! Thanks! I had assumed it would be clear the bomb would change her into a man -- hence the panic on the lovely girl's face, since, as you point out it, would be a step down. "XX -> XY" would help clarify that, though. Thanks for noting the potential confusion, and for giving me a way to help fix it.

"Bride and Bridesmaid": I think that's a dagger, but I'm really not sure. So it's a relief to see someone else also interpret it that way. The original "Brenda Starr" cover doesn't make any sense to me; in it, the redhead in the foreground is saying "I thought champagne was for weddings ... not poison." I have no idea what she's supposed to mean by that. You're supposed to have champagne, not poison, at weddings? Champagne should be poured at weddings, but you're not supposed to mix it with poison? I guess both are true, but talk about a clunky way of expressing yourself. Also, where in the picture is this poison of which she speaks?

Three more covers:

"Guys in Dolls": Impossibly baroque plot? Check. Crazy-ass faux-Irish mobster dialect? Check. Incredibly dishy, red-headed TG female? Check and mate!

"Vinnie Vitti Vici": I love Charles Biro's artwork. There's always something deeply wrong in his pictures. In this one, for instance, he has "Vinnie" slapping the girl so hard her makeup flies off. Then Biro quietly gives the guy a glass to hold, so you can figure out the image's logic after you've gotten good and aroused by its sadism.

I thought about making the girl's name "Vicky" so that the title could be "Vinnie Vitti Vicky," but I worried that was too many V-names that themselves look too much alike. "Val" is bad enough, but at least it's nice and short.

"The Face That Launched 1000 Capers": "Gance" was originally "Simpson," but that seemed a joke too far.

"Bride and Bridesmaid": I think that's a dagger, but I'm really not sure. So it's a relief to see someone else also interpret it that way. The original "Brenda Starr" cover doesn't make any sense to me; in it, the redhead in the foreground is saying "I thought champagne was for weddings ... not poison." I have no idea what she's supposed to mean by that. You're supposed to have champagne, not poison, at weddings? Champagne should be poured at weddings, but you're not supposed to mix it with poison? I guess both are true, but talk about a clunky way of expressing yourself. Also, where in the picture is this poison of which she speaks?

I suppose then that it is supposed to be a long, slim vial* of poison in the bride's hand, rather than the handle of a dagger, but that would work just as well for the cross-dressed assassin. Frankly I think a floor-length gown would make it difficult to reach anything hidden in a garter without *ahem* attracting attention.

* Acme Vials; Wile E. Coyote's glass supplier of choice.

Thanks the last 3.
Guys in dolls, LOL
Vici, funny & weird
Face - good story& use of pic

eric

Another great set, Seuzz. My fav is "1000 Capers".

I toldja I had a lot of these. ;)

"Quick Change Artist": I am haunted by the feeling that I have seen this exact same cover given this exact same subversive treatment somewhere else. Is that because the joke is so obvious? Or because I have seen it elsewhere, forgotten it, and then unwittingly stolen it?

"Gay Gangster": Yes, I know that technically that should be "Ivana Denisovna" (or something like that), but pedantry is the enemy of humor. As for the main cover—well, let's just observe that it doubles down on the genre subversion.

"A Leg Up for Limpy": Ghastly misplaced word balloons; no matter how you arrange the dialogue, someone will probably read them in the wrong order. Biro's work here is redeemed only by the Buscemi face he's given to "Limpy."

Thanks, all 3 are clever & LOL!

LOVE the puns and the plays on words !!!

"Chicago's Newest Crime Family": The first "Body Crime" I made; in fact, it's the one that gave me the idea for the title. "Dog Day Afternoon" by way of Looney Tunes-type cross-dressing, I guess.

"Counterfeit Contessa": Biro again. Wertham has a lot to answer for, but I'm not sure the elimination of low-octane nightmare fuel like this shouldn't rebound to his credit. I mean, c'mon. That isn't a hunchback. That's a short guy with a pillow stuffed down the back of his shirt. He doesn't need a new body; he just needs to be reupholstered.

"Jailhouse Jill": I think the background is clear, but the implied story is kind of "blah." If I'd seen this on the shelf, I would have skipped it. I will say I kinda like the look the thug down in the right hand corner is giving the guy--that kind of slightly freaked skepticism makes more sense with my revision than it made in the original.

How about the "Jill Pill" for the drug?

Bad biro, funny & clever.
Jailhouse Jill, great story! I wonder if the new Jill has found a man to take care of her? LOL

More good stuff, as always.

One problem with "Crime Family": too much of the "mobster" accent and the reader loses focus on the story; it becomes a distraction. It's better to just slide in a few slurred words here and there to suggest the accent, rather than try to capture how it would really sound.

Amanda

Gosh! The original of Crime Family was seriously on drugs! Presumably the tommy-gun-toting "baby" is a double amputee, since there's no way his legs would fit in the pram... The Case Of The Counterfeit Countess is one of those cases where one is left wondering how many of the unfortunate implications were intended, and how much down to really, really bad drawing.

spacewoman88 raises an interesting point about the "mobster accent". I used something similar in my Jimmy Olsen cover The Messy Break-up. I did worry whether it would distract the reader, but I must confess that the main reason I had the mook in the foreground speaking "mob" was that using "da" instead of "the", "ya" for "you" and "ya gonna" for "you're going to" was simply to fit the dialogue into smaller speech-bubbles...

Good points about the dialect. "Crime Family" was my first, and I've dialed back the dialect considerably since then. Is it too obtrusive in other covers?

That said, I did intentionally go overboard with the dialect in that cover, since the image itself was so incredibly overdone. I've also noticed that some covers from the period are almost as bad with the dialect.

More stuff:

"Goon to Gun Moll": And just as the story gets started, it suddenly ends. Presumably, this scene did not occur in the story, but telescopes two quite different events together. At least, I hope so.

"The Price of Imposture": Another true-life "expose." "Body Crime" seems to have developed a weakness for this kind of thing in the 60s and 70s.

"Husband to a Godfather's Goon": Even in the original, the policeman's gaydar seemed to beeping wildly.

GOON< LOL
Husband weirdly funny!

Thaanks, keep them coming!

"Mobster Mom-to-Be": Another "brilliant" Biro cover. Fireworks over on the left hand side, while a guy calmly talks to the screaming dame on the right. Could it be any more hilarious?

Yes, it could. Because this is a mirror image of the original. Which means that in Biro's original the calm guy was on the left, which made it even more obviously a case of "calm guy" giving a weather report during a gun battle.

"She Had Her Man": It's 1959, and "Body Crime" gets very catty, like "Peyton Place." Probably would be better as a "Bodyshift."

"Dangerous Curves Ahead": Shrug.

Stay tuned. Major weirdness coming tomorrow.

MOM to be, LOL!
She had her man. clever 7 funny
dangerous Curses, LOL & very good story & use of cover. Where' the original Starlet?

Guys in red suits... green suits... YELLOW suits... Not to mention "Calm Guy" in brown pants, orange jacket and green hat... Mobsters sure had "great" fashion sense back then. Given the woman's pose, I might have tried to work in something about a wig...

I'd never heard of Judge Crater, but Google is my friend. In Australia we can see your judge and raise you a Prime Minister!

The questions pile up. Where did the guy in Dangerous Curves Ahead get a ray-gun? Is the blonde (or the mind in her body) a time-traveller or something, and he's being pursued by the time-cops? Why does the starlet have a star on the inside of the door to her dressing-room?

Earlier, I mentioned giving myself "guidelines" about "Body Crime." The first was: "Body Crime" itself is published in an alternate universe, one where body swaps and changes are common. Not all stories in BC are or could be true, but they do extrapolate from the AU's reality. (Thinks "Batman" in our universe.) Mission: Imagine stories that would appear in such a magazine.

Weirdly, this meant I wound up with covers that baffled even me—strange, suggestive images that hinted at phenomena and practices but didn't make anything really clear, even to their designer. If these things work (and that's a humongous "if") it'll only be because they convey something slightly creepy that imaginative readers can construct shadowy backstories around.

I have my own ideas for/about the six covers posted here, but I'm more curious what situations/backstories suggest themselves to others.

"Honeymoon Killers": This one you totally have to make up your own story.

"Tempest in a D Cup": I hope it's somewhat clear what's going on, but the exact circumstances are much less transparent. At the same time, this is another cover (like the "Quick Change Artist") that gives me the nagging feeling the original has gotten this exact same treatment elsewhere.

"Body Show Rooms": Well, the idea of a "show room" is clear enough, and it is apparently illegal (though winked at). But what exactly are they selling? A body suit? An actual body? I suppose I could have made it clearer, but I dislike "walls of words", which is one reason I've got all these covers that are so damned allusive. (And elusive, for that matter.) As for "Feydeau Follies": you have to know something about the theater, and do a little extrapolating, for that to make sense.

"The Bloods and the Bobbysoxers": I did come up with a short story to go with this cover, but I haven't written it yet.

"Beach Blanket Body Jumping": Totally obscure. I came up with this one and spent most of the day scratching my head over what it meant—the picture is clearly metaphorical, not illustrative. I finally came up with an idea, but again, I won't share it just yet.

"The Bellhop Bedhop": I think this is probably the only "tease" issue that really works. I hope it's sufficiently suggestive to inspire speculative fantasies in the reader without seeming like it's just empty or confusing.

Okay, now we're into the covers that have problems. Personally, I like 'em. But I'm not sure I can treat them as canonical.

"Treachery of the Heart": Er, that's a guy in the brunette and a gal in the quarterback. I mention that, because otherwise ... well, otherwise there's nothing to make it TG, is there?

"Chinese Takeout": Wow, I hope people forgive the sheer tastelessness of this one. The raunchiness, the bad draughstmanship, and the absence of both a price and an issue number ... I'm going to put this one down as being a mockup, something created as an internal prank or office party joke at the "Body Crime" offices.

"The Best Laid Plans of Viktor Kano": Another cover I'll have to pretend was never intended for publication. Would a "rough sex" joke have gone out even in pre-Code days?

Rough these may be, but I got a good laugh out of "Best Laid Plans". :-)

Amanda

The Victor Kano cover is good for a giggle. The Chinese Takeout one really needs the heroine to look oriental, but don't I know the frustration of trying to find cover images to fit the story rather than the other way round.