New York: St. John Publishing Company, 1950

Small 8vo, unpaginated. Stapled text block in illustrated wrappers. Artwork by Matt Baker and Ray Osrin. Spine and edges just a little rubbed, light wear to spine ends, wrappers separating from text block at rear. A very well preserved copy with an unbroken spine and the front wrapper’s artwork bright and vivid.

First edition. THE FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL, PUBLISHED BEFORE THE TERM WAS COINED.

Arnold Drake [1924-2007] began working with DC Comics shortly after Lust’s publication, courtesy of an introduction from Bob Kane, the creator of Batman. Drake created the superhero team Doom Patrol as well as Deadman for DC, and went on to freelance for Marvel, where with Stan Lee he co-created Guardians of the Galaxy in 1969.

After his collaboration with Drake, Leslie Waller [1923-2007] went on to become a best-selling novelist, and under the pseudonym ‘Patrick Mann’, wrote the novelisations of the films Dog Day Afternoon and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Matt Baker [1921-1959] was the first African-American comic book artist, his earliest work (for the Jerry Iger Studio) appearing in 1944. He was gay, and thought to have been the partner of Archer St. John, whose company published this title.

Ray Osrin [1928-2001] was the book’s inker, providing Baker’s drawings with their fine detail. Osrin enjoyed a long career as a cartoonist, comic strip artist and television animator.

Drake and Waller pitched It Rhymes With Lust to Archer St. John by describing it as a ‘picture novel’, something between a comic book and a conventional novel. (The term is used in a banner on the book’s front wrapper.) A full-length, self-contained original story, and heavily influenced by the noir films of the time, It Rhymes With Lust was envisaged as a mass market paperback for the general reading public, not just the young comic book readership. But it failed to break through, and after the publication of just one more title, The Case of the Winking Buddha (1950), the ‘picture novel’ line was discontinued. The term ‘graphic novel’ was not coined until 1964, by Richard Kyle in an essay published in Capa-Alpha. The genre would finally achieve lift-off in the 1980s, notably with the publication of the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1986.