Marvel Tales #110
In "The Empty Bus!" from Marvel Tales #110 (1952), a desperate prisoner agrees to a bizarre deal: a pill that makes him appear dead, so he can escape execution and dig himself out later. Written by Don Perlin and inked by Abe Simon, the story unfolds with chilling precision as the man’s brother, in a shocking twist, sells his body to medical students for five hundred dollars—only to learn the price of his own brother’s survival is far higher than he imagined. The cover, by Russ Heath, captures the eerie tension of a moment that feels both inevitable and horrifying.
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A man visits a convicted killer in jail and offers to sell him a pill for five hundred dollars that will make him appear dead in order to cheat the electric chair. Once he has been buried, he will dig him up. The killer agrees, but has no money, so he extorts it out of his brother. He takes the pill and it works, but instead of taking him to the morgue, the police wheel him into a group of medical students with scalpels. It turns out his brother sold his body to dissection study for five hundred dollars.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).