October 20th is the premiere of the newest Martin Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Described in its wikipedia entry as an "epic Western crime drama film," it is an adaptation of the bestselling 2017 nonfiction book by David Grann. The story centers around the murders of at least 20 (perhaps many more) members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the early 1920s, by unscrupulous white men after their oil money. It also happened to be the first major case investigated by the newly-formed FBI. The series of events has faded into obscurity for most Americans (except the Osage people), with most having no idea such a thing ever happened. Grann and Scorcese are not the first to tell the story, though... it was the topic of Chickasaw author Linda Hogan's debut novel, Mean Spirit, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. Long before that, in 1959, it was one of the plot threads of the movie The FBI Story, starring James Stewart.
And before that... it was the subject of a 1948 story in a crime comic book, Headline Comics, by the legendary team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, who at the beginning of that decade had co-created Captain America. The story was actually an ideal comic book subject, as by 1948 superheroes had mostly fallen by the wayside and two of the biggest genres replacing them in the racks that year were crime stories and westerns. This tale was both rolled into one.
And then it was in the comics again... when Dell did a movie adaptation of The FBI Story in 1959, by another comics legend, Alex Toth, in Four Color #1069.
Here are the pages relating to the Osage murders from that Dell comic by Toth:
And here's the 1948 version by Simon and Kirby:
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