Crack Comics #3

When someone impersonates the Spider to orchestrate a kidnapping scheme and shake down the Mercury Realty Corporation, the real Spider—Tom Hallaway—has to prove his identity while unraveling a stock manipulation plot that goes far deeper than a simple ransom demand. With his chauffeur Harry's help, the Spider tracks the conspiracy back to its source and corners the mastermind before justice can be served.

Slap Happy Pappy finds himself in a peculiar predicament when his false teeth accidentally end up in a piece of discarded gum, leading his family to believe he's met an untimely end. When the only solution seems to be a rocket ship journey to heaven, Pappy gets packed off into space—only to discover upon arrival that things are far more complicated than anyone back home realized. It's a wild two-page romp that proves even a simple mistake can send your whole day spiraling into chaos.

In "Gang Czar's Right Hand Man Arrested," Pug takes desperate action when his ally O'Brien is falsely accused by the ruthless gangster Scar Sizza. Disguised as the Clock, Pug moves through the shadows to strike at two key enforcers—Sparks and Mack—before the truth can be buried.

A husband devises an elaborate contraption to speed up his wife's dressing routine—complete with a canary, a toupee, and a burning pipe—in this tongue-in-cheek domestic comedy from Rube Goldberg's "Side Show" in Crack Comics #3 (1940). It's the kind of beautifully convoluted solution only a cartoonist's brain could dream up to solve an age-old marital problem.

Wizard Wells refuses to build a genuine death-ray for the government, but when a War Department official named Smythe convinces him that merely *appearing* to possess one could deter enemy aggression, the brilliant inventor accepts the challenge. Wells constructs an elaborate decoy using everyday components and stages a dramatic public demonstration designed to fool foreign spies into believing the weapon is real—with dangerous consequences that force him to improvise.