Well, sadly, it turns out that there was no "future issue of Climax!" #2 was the last issue!! Now we'll never know the truth!!
Well, we can't have that! There are no prizes, certainly no $25 war bonds, but feel free to submit your answers in the comments here. How did the detective know the nephew was lying? Why did he do it? Would the solution stand up in court? Did the detective's pipe contaminate the crime scene?
Or, if you're daring, you could send your response to the address they give...maybe there's some old dude there just waiting for the correct response, like in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Maybe there's a whole cache of unopened responses there, and you can lead a class action suit against the publishers of Climax for never giving out the promised rewards!
Have at it!
8 comments:
Why are there three opened pots of paint on the veranda? If he's painting the garage, then he'd have opened the paint tins out there.
More likely he was supposed to be painting the veranda, killed his aunt there and some paint was spilled. He then thought he’d take one tin to the garage and make up a story about painting out there.
I'm also wondering why so many tins are open. Could the window frames, shutters and sills all be painted different colours? If so, more evidence that the nephew is lying about painting the garage.
That's the best I can do. The artworks not great here. I can't tell what's muddy footprints and what's spilled paint.
Or spilled paint on the veranda but all the pots are still full?
Maybe that there's no paint on the dead aunt, even though the nephew supposedly was covered in wet paint when checking to see if she was alive? I dunno, the art really doesn't make it easy to tell precisely what's going on.
(Does the fact that the nephew doesn't appear to be covered in paint in his flashbacks count? Probably not, unless that was done intentionally to show that he got the paint on himself after the murder to "prove" his story.)
I mean, the "why" is pretty obvious. Dude was just complaining that the aunt was too stingy to pay someone to paint the garage, even though she was rich. Killing a relative to claim an inheritance is one of the oldest motivations in the mystery genre...
(Alternate theory: it was really Jean Loring who did it.) (Nah, that'd just be idiotic...)
I'm guessing that those streaked lines that appeared in the flashback are an indication that it was raining when the aunt was killed. Yet the detective failed to find any footprints in the wet ground. It also points to the fact that the nephew was sheltered from the rain during the murder, especially since the paint stains on his clothes weren't runny. Which suggests he was painting on the veranda, killed the aunt, and staged the accident with the ladder after the rain stopped.
Ow. That took too much thought for a poorly drawn comic. I'll try a less thoughtful explanation: The nephew claimed to have heard a shot, yet the aunt showed signs of being strangled with a ladder. The detective glance at the ground merely to cover the fact that he wet his pants.
Third panel from the last shows there is paint all over the porch. No way that guy was painting the porch and didn't step in it.
Second to last panel the detective says 'I found what I *wasn't* looking for!'
He found paint in the footsteps of the alleged masked man. The footsteps were created by the nephew, so his story is false.
It was the publisher. He learned the detective was on to him, and that's why he cancelled the comic!
The answer is obvious: the tracks on the lawn aren't paint, but clay! The killer is actually Clayface posing as the nephew. The detective is actually Batman in disguise and he's been onto him the whole time. Don't worry, the Flash ran backwards through time to save the wealthy aunt, who was secretly a mind-wiped Jean Loring.
George Chambers's theory makes the most sense.
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