Tales from the Crypt #4
In "Four-Way Split," a heartbreaking tale from 1992, a father’s desperate love leads him to make a sacrifice that may have been for nothing. Written by Al Feldstein and brought to life with sharp, expressive art by Bill Elder, the story follows Pop and his son Richie after a violent confrontation leaves one man dead and the other dying. As Pop records a false confession to protect his son, a quiet twist of fate—hidden in the silence of a power outage—casts doubt on everything he believed. The haunting mood and emotional weight of the story are perfectly captured in Jack Davis’s chilling cover.
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Pop loves his son, Richie. But, Richie ends up in a shootout with another criminal and kills the other man. Richie is badly wounded, however, and Pop rushes him to the hospital where Pop is the resident repairman. While Richie is undergoing emergency surgery, Pop decides to take the blame for the other man's death by recording a confession onto a dictaphone. Richie ends up dying on the operating table and Pop is distraught that his false confession was all for nothing. What Pop doesn't realise until later, though, is that there was a power outage earlier and the dictaphone was inactive.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).