Number 1239: The inside joke

There’s an inside joke in this Steel Sterling story. Charles Biro wrote his buddy, Bob Wood, into the story as “Pig-Pan Wood.” His face, we are told on the wanted poster, “resembles that of a pig.” I wonder if Wood had any foreknowledge of this alleged joke, or what he thought of it.

About 15 years later Wood killed a woman in a hotel during an alcoholic binge. That tale is told in Blackjacked and Pistol-Whipped, Crime Does Not Pay. It’s an excellent anthology of lurid stories from the Biro-Wood edited Crime Does Not Pay comic book, which had its own nefarious history. These pictures of Bob Wood and Charlie Biro are from the book:

If anyone had a pig-pan it wasn’t Wood.

I found a real Pig-Pan — the resemblance is striking, you must admit — while surfing through some local mugshots. Yes, I entertain myself, not only by reading comics, but gawking at ID photos of people who end up in jail with their pictures posted on the Internet. The man whose photo this is was charged with “failing to register as a sex offender.”

From Zip Comics #11 (1941), by Joe Blair and Charles Biro: