Wanted Comics #24

Gregory Hamilton survives a hit-and-run accident only to discover that the world around him has transformed in mere hours—his office is gone, his home replaced by a tavern, and even his own reflection seems unfamiliar. As strangers call him by another man's name and press him for debts he never incurred, Hamilton desperately searches for anyone who can confirm his identity, leading him to a woman from his past who holds the shocking key to understanding what has really happened to him.

When gangster Angie receives three cigarettes and one match from Big Nick's enforcer Charlie—an underworld symbol of a death sentence—he knows his days are numbered. As detectives investigate Angie's murder, they learn the grim superstition's origins: during the Boer War, British soldiers discovered that lighting a third cigarette on a single match gave snipers time to draw a bead, and the unlucky third man always fell. In the criminal underworld, the omen proves just as deadly.

Johnny Larrone returns to his struggling neighborhood with big ambitions and a ruthless idea—to build a marijuana empire by coercing his poor neighbors into growing the crop for him. When the F.B.I. closes in, Larrone eliminates a would-be informant and sets his sights on stopping the federal agents investigating his operation, but the bureau's determination to unravel his scheme begins to tighten the net around him.

A maid's morning discovery of a dead man in a Tulsa rooming house sets off a manhunt for Bruce Cornett, the elderly dishwasher who roomed there and vanishes before police can question him. With a criminal record stretching back decades and a motive of robbery, Cornett becomes the prime suspect in a murder case that will test whether even a career criminal can outrun the law one final time.

In Depression-era 1930s, an ambitious young man named Mitch Ralston climbs the ranks of organized crime by working for gang boss Augie Berelli, only to be seduced by rival Johnny Gordon's promise of greater power and wealth. When Mitch betrays Berelli with a fatal ambush, he soon discovers the consequences of his greed—but by then, it's far too late to undo what he's set in motion. This seven-page crime tale traces one criminal's rise and fall in a world where loyalty is currency and betrayal carries a bullet's price.

Tommy Davis learns early that the real money in crime flows from above, but when a desperate fugitive stumbles into the hotel where he works, the young bell hop sees his opening—and launches a profitable scheme as a hideout operator for the underworld's castoffs. Like the jackal that preys only on the wounded, Tommy prospers by taking what others leave behind, until the weight of his own scheme threatens to catch up with him.