The Hermes Press is adding Mickey Sp illane’s powerful, but short-lived Mike Hammer comic strip to its roster of classic comic strip reprints. Mickey Spillane’s From the Files of Mike Hammer: The Complete Dailies & Sundays, a $49.95 hardcover collection of the entire Mike Hammer comic strip that appeared in select newspapers in 1953-1954 at a time that Spillane’s hardboiled detective was at the height of his popularity.

 

The short-lived Mike Hammer comic strip was the only licensed project based on his work that Mickey Spillane actually contributed to as he oversaw the strip that was drawn by Ed Rollins.  Spillane also ended the strip rather than subject it to censorship when the syndicate objected to a panel in which a thug was torturing a woman with a lighted cigarette.

 

The Hermes Mike Hammer volume contains all the tough guys, bimbos, hustlers, and crooks that made Spillane’s novels so riveting with the daily strips reproduced in black-and-white and the Sundays in color.