Mystery Tales #9
In "The Specimen!", a desperate butcher’s scheme to ruin his ex-partner’s business backfires when he’s accidentally locked inside a meat locker he’d poisoned—left to starve while the very meat he tainted remains untouched. Written with chilling restraint, this eerie 1953 tale from Ben Brown and David Gantz unfolds in tense silence, exploring isolation and desperation in a single, suffocating space. The stark, atmospheric cover by Bill Everett captures the story’s dread with a single, haunting image.
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A butcher poisons his ex-partner's meat locker in order to drive him out of business but then comes back later to make sure he did not leave any evidence behind and gets himself locked in. Over the course of several days he waits for someone to come and let him out, but no one comes. He resists the temptation to eat the meat and eventually starves. When his body is found the owner wonders why he did not eat the meat since the inspector had declared it unfit and made him replace the entire locker with fresh stock.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).