If it's mystery you're looking for, then you've come to the right house! Namely a house of being mystified at how some of these stories ever saw print. Well, of course we know how these stories saw print, they saw print as filler between ads for Tootsie Rolls, roller skates, and bicycles. As long as there weren't too many typos and nobody got injured in the eye or turned into a zombie, what happened in the stories was incidental. Like this one.


Let's see, what kind of "doom game" can we play with a couple of guys, a couple of pistols, and six bullets? Leave it to these two "fortune hunters" to find out! Here's a hint: it involves firing pistols like crazy!


Somewhere in Thailand, two white guys are rummaging through some ruins. When they do this in New Jersey it's considered trespassing, but here in the Mysterious Orient, where everything is ours for the taking, it's just good old fashioned adventuring with a side of profit motive. And when they find a couple of "magic pistols", that appear to be one-shot flintlocks but are loaded with three bullets, I don't know what's more unbelievable, that one bullet in each gun is the "bullet of doom", or that gunpowder left in the chamber of a pistol for a few hundred years is still going to ignite, or that goatee man's comb-over is fooling anybody at all.


Well, I guess black powder is good for three or four hundred years, even when lying around the humid jungles of Southeast Asia. Good to know.


And true to the legend, the bullet uncovered one of those treasure chests you buy for your fish tank, the kind where the lid opens and closes next to the little diver. Get the treasure chest, the diver, maybe a little underwater castle, some plastic greenery... who needs fish?


IMPORTANT GUN SAFETY NOTE: keep your finger on the trigger of your Doom Pistol at all times. You never know when you might want a shot to accidentally go blasting away into whatever you happened to be pointing at! Giant statues, grandmas, priceless Renoir paintings, school buses, they're all potential accidental targets!

And I bet you didn't know the Buddha had two sets of arms! That just shows how much you know about Buddhism, you uncultured Westerner. The extra arms mean he's extra holy.


I know we all know to rub the Buddha's belly for luck whenever we visit our local super-authentic neighborhood Chinese restaurant - you know, the one where the dishes have that fluorescent orange sugar glaze, the place mats feature the Chinese Zodiac, and you can get giant tiki drinks - but did you know the Buddha's belly contains a fortune in gold coins?! That's what four-armed Buddhism is all about - cash money, baby!


Haney (no doubt named after DC writer Bob "Teen Titans" Haney) still has one bullet in his inexplicable, possibly magical flintlock pistol, and obviously it's the 1-in-3 "Bullet Of Doom". Drake (no doubt named after DC writer Arnold "Doom Patrol" Drake), however, still has three shots in HIS inexplicable, possibly magical flintlock pistol! Will his two-shot advantage and his sinister goatee turn him over to the dark side? Don't do it Drake! You still have to create "Guardians Of The Galaxy" for Marvel!


Drake does the heel turn, proof that if you give a guy a Satan beard, sooner or later he's gonna turn evil. It's a law of nature.


Since greed as a physical force is generated by wealth and diminishes with the square of distance, all Haney needs to do is drag Drake far enough away from the treasure, and soon he won't be greedy any more. But since Haney sucks at wrestling that ain't gonna happen.


And even though Haney has his pistol back he can't dare fire it because the last bullet is the Bullet Of Doom. Which is also the name of my speed metal band.


Finally Mort Meskin gets a chance to throw in some actual Thailand reference imagery - apparently from the movie program book of "The King And I." Well, it beats a four-armed Buddha.


Man, I gotta say, this story is goofy but I love Meskin's artwork, it makes absolutely no sense for a giant Thai mask to be suspended on a tiny cable in an abandoned temple, but darned if he doesn't sell it. This is how you spot blacks, kids.


Oh no, Drake's cornered Haney in front of Trader Vic's! Maybe Drake will grant Haney a last Mai Tai.


Look Haney, these are centuries-old matchlock pistols, firing god knows what kind of hand-cast lead balls with old, moldy, damp black powder. He could easily miss, or the pistol could blow up in his hand, or misfire entirely, or, who knows, crack that totem right in half! Oh, no!


I bet when Drake got up that morning he didn't expect to be crushed under a giant totem in a Thai temple. But that's what happens when a couple of guys find a couple of Doom Pistols and fail to mark which one is which! Remember kids, mark your Doom Pistols. And if you're drawing a comic book where you have to show someone checking the loads on a pistol, you wanna go with the top break style revolver because the kind where the cylinder swings out is a pain in the ass to draw! Even if the pistol isn't a revolver to begin with!

Also important: check with local authorities before "treasure hunting." Turns out all that stuff already belongs to somebody, and they take looting seriously in Thailand! All the Doom Pistols in Asia didn't help Haney when they threw his ass into Klong Prem Maximum Security Prison, where he now entertains his cell mates with stories of how Buddha has four arms.

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