Climax! #1 (July 1955) is a crime-and-mystery anthology comic published by Stanley Morse under his Gillmor Magazines imprint. Unlike the typical lurid crime books of the era, Climax! leaned into elaborate whodunits and reader participation: each issue built around intricate mysteries and a recurring contest inviting readers to solve a two-page puzzle for a $25 War Bond prize. The debut issue collects the stories Fate!, Practice Makes Perfect!, The Phony!, Evil Eye!, and The Artist!, with tales of counterfeiters, impostors, and criminals who inevitably meet justice — with art by Sal Trapani and Eugene E. Hughes, and lettering by Jon D'Agostino.

The book arrived in a transformed marketplace. By 1955 the Comics Code Authority had gutted the horror and crime genres that had dominated the early decade, and Climax! bears the Code's seal of approval — its stories reframed as sanitized morality-driven mysteries rather than the gruesome suspense of the pre-Code years. It came from the stable of Stanley P. Morse, a prolific low-budget publisher who operated behind a rotating set of shell imprints (Gillmor, Key, Stanmor, Aragon). The series was short-lived, running only two issues.

Today Climax! is of interest chiefly to collectors of post-Code crime comics and to fans tracing the early career of journeyman artist Sal Trapani (later co-creator of Nukla and a Metamorpho mainstay). Its material has been revisited in modern reprints — including PS Artbooks Presents: Classic Horror Comics (2022) — and its reader-contest gimmick makes it a curious artifact of how publishers fought to keep crime-mystery comics alive under Code-era constraints. Note that despite the shared name, the comic is unrelated to the contemporaneous CBS television anthology Climax!.