Number 2040: “Who summons Satan?”

Nick Rico has a great lawyer. Nick keeps getting arrested for his gangland murders, and his lawyer gets him off, every time. Not only does that defy the odds, but Nick has a hot blonde girlfriend — appropriately named Dolly — who is lucky enough to find a bookstore selling a book on necromancy and black magic. She uses it to summon no less than Satan himself! That shop looks like a fun place to browse.

Stan Lee wrote it, and Russ Heath drew it. Heath did his usual excellent work. “Gentlemen of the Jury” was originally published in Adventures Into Weird Worlds #17 (1953), but I scanned it from a reprint in Vault of Evil #9 (1974).

The visual punchline

These three 4-page shorties all appeared originally in Atlas’ Spellbound #13 (1953). I scanned them from the reprint comic, Vault of Evil #10 (1974). While published in a horror comic, these are clearly not typical horror. They are more like vignettes, story fragments, setting up punchlines. I don’t call them shock or surprise endings, because with the exception of “The Death of a Puppet,” drawn by Jim Mooney, the stories seem jokey. Stan Lee’s contribution, “The Pitchman,” about a con man selling the Brooklyn Bridge, sounds like an urban legend (and makes me wonder if I have seen it before, in another form). It is drawn by Bob Brown. “Let’s Face It” has a punchline based on the story’s title. The GCD guesses the pencils are by Joe Orlando, and the inks by Jack Abel.

Here’s another story set up to have a visual punchline, from a Harvey pre-Code horror comic. We travel back to 2007 for this one.