John Wayne Adventure Comics #8

When oil prospector Spade Marker enlists John Wayne and his partner to help him drill for black gold in hostile territory, they find themselves caught between Marker's dreams for his distant son and a ruthless Eastern syndicate willing to kill to stop the well. As the trio pushes deeper underground, a shocking act of violence forces a young man back home to face a promise he never expected to keep.

In "The Ugly Duckling Bandit," a young man named Nathaniel Hilton, scarred by a cruel accident and shunned for his looks, finds himself driven to a life of crime. After a desperate escape across the desert, he’s saved by a member of a Native American tribe, who offers him the one thing he’s never known—friendship. Now, decades later, the tale of his hidden fortune and the man behind the scars comes to light.

A young man rides into Gold City swearing vengeance for his father's murder, convinced that John Wayne's father shot him down in cold blood thirty years before—but when he confronts Wayne himself, an unexpected witness emerges with the truth about that fateful duel. As old grudges threaten to spark new violence, Gold Dust Pete must decide whether revealing what he saw that day will save a life or simply delay an inevitable reckoning.