In a culture built on mounds of crap, we lionize those surface specimens appearing to contain particles of real art. Thus comic books become "graphic novels," and prole and professor get to read the funnies together, the prejudices of each equally flattered.

I'm of two minds about this. I admire some high-low art. But it's like Chinese food. It would be nice, I guess, to find a delicate Eight-Flavor Duck at a Fukinese take-out joint. But if I'm in the mood for Beef Chow Fun with lots of grease, then by god that's what I want to find in my cardboard bucket.

Likewise, when I go to the crap mounds, I don't want some dense Homeric epic or post-modern puzzlebox: I want crap--lurid, cheesy, workmanlike.

Compliments then to Atlas Comics, the long-forgotten pulp mill that produced this found object, the April, 1975 issue of Police Action: Featuring Lomax, NYPD, and Luke Malone, Manhunter, which delivers daydreams of violence and masculinity with minimal craft and maximum efficiency.

The heroes in this book resemble he-man actors of the day. Lomax looks like a crossbreeding of Darren McGavin and Mike Connors; Malone, of Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin. Joe Don Baker is the Mayor of New York, and all the other cops and bureaucrats would in real life be fighting Anthony Zerbe for sidekick roles. The villains are crazed white hippies who alternately bully ("Tough, ain't ya, fuzz! But not in the GUT!") and whine ("C'mon, I know my rights!") in fulsome, TV-beatnik slang.

Detective Lomax makes his own rules--and, apparently, coordinates his own wardrobe: blue slacks, loafers, black t-shirt and a jacket he apparently won at a golf tournament. Lomax is a loose cannon tolerated by the force because he gets things done. "Lomax!" Captain Stoddard greets our hero at a crime scene (cab, terrorist, hostages, plane demanded). "All these years I've gotten away without working with you! I guess my luck's just run out!" "There's three lives at stake out there!" roars Lomax, gun drawn. "And with your permission, I'll go save them while the big wheels have their tea!"

Though everyone growls and snarls, the only real men in the story are Lomax and the chick hostage, who helps foil the caper and joins Lomax for a drink ("You're on!") after the hippie is subdued.

The second story lacks this brio, but more than makes up for it in rugged, he-man grace-notes of guilt, remorse, and homoeroticism. It's an origins story. In the prologue, Luke Malone, a lieutenant in the San Francisco PD, is in a similar fix to Lomax's (bank, terrorists, hostages, plane demanded). Malone muses on his wife Mary ("What a broad!") during the siege, and this is his downfall: When Mrs. Malone is revealed to be a hostage, Malone goes cowboy, and she is wasted ("You stinkin' pigs! I warned ya!") in the struggle.

One month later, we see what a dame can do to a man: Malone, drummed off the force, is a rummy muscling a stock AIP waterfront bartender for some hooch to wash away his sorrow ("Just fix me up, Sam! I don't need a sermon!").

Here's where the real love story begins: Malone's old colleague, a bald Asian delightfully named Joe Wong, shows up. "That's it, Luke," he announces. "You've hit bottom! You're nothing but a bum--but that's all over now! Either you're gonna find the guts to live--or I'm gonna beat you to death and put you out of your misery!"

A donnybrook ensues. Wong cold-cocks Malone and carries him out on his shoulder. "I just hope you can save him!" says the barkeep. "Oh, I'll save the bum alright," winks Wong, Malone's actual bum next to his cheek. "Either that or you're have some exotic fish bait to sell in a week or two!" (I've puzzled over this panel for some time, and decided that the authors were having a bit of fun on company time.)

In the car ride home, Malone wakes and Wong lays out the course of his salvation: To help him catch the mastermind of the tragic bank job--who, to Malone's surprise, is still "walking the streets of San Francisco"--Malone must become a private eye. Before Malone can respond, a sniper blows Wong's brains out; the car crashes, but Malone uses Wong's heater to bag the sniper.

"Jeez!" muses Malone. "First Mary--now Wong! I'm poison to everybody I touch!" He finds a bottle in Wong's glove compartment and contemplates oblivion ("I gotta get out of this world before I kill someone else!"), but in the end he is redeemed by love of Wong ("Blast you, Wong! Now I owe you!") and hurls his "liquid buddy" away to hunt down the architect of Wong's and Mary's deaths. "Luke Malone, Private Investigator!" he muses. "Doesn't sound so bad at that!" A bright red tag at panel bottom right announces: THE BEGINNING!

And so, in grainy color drawings, pre-adolescent boys of the Carter era got to see gunplay, fistfights, expurgated cussing ("Private eye, my fanny!"), and faint intimations of the taxing, sorrow-streaked burdens of manhood. What havoc might this have wrought upon their tender psyches? Not much, I'm guessing. Police Action is impossible to take seriously--at the level at which we've examined it (call it the sub-anomic level), and even at the daydream level of childhood.

The children of Lomax and Malone are now grown, and few if any are telling the Commissioner to stow it or waiting for Joe Wong to rescue them from the hooch-haunts of coastal Frisco. It was all a dream, not even the kind of dream you write about in your journal, but the kind that harmlessly passes a little time in the uneventful stupor between dusk and dawn.

--Roy Edroso