Number 2398: Short in the saddle

Luke Short’s name seems almost too good to be true. Short, an old West character who shot several men and killed many, if not most of them, was a short man. Maybe that is why men who were apt to pull their guns in a fight took him for an easy target. They were short-sighted.

Luke Short was something of an entrepreneur; he opened gambling dens, taverns, got into the boxing game as well as horse racing. But he also shot and killed people. Everyone has their flaws, I suppose. Short lived at the same time as well-known people like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson (who wrote a biographical tribute about Short after his death), but I had not heard much about him until I did a bit of research on this story from Crime Does Not Pay #29 (1943). The crime comics tried to justify showing crime and violence by having the criminal in the end get justice by being executed. They could not do much with Luke Short because he died of kidney disease, not a noose. A court found against him once for a shooting; he was fined $150 and released. You’d be selling Luke Short short if you assumed, as I did, that he was a typical Western bad man.

P.S. The Western novelist, Luke Short, used the name as a pseudonym. His real name was Frederick Dilley Glidden,

The Grand Comics Database has no idea who wrote or drew the story.

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