I'm hoping someone in this group can help me track down an old comic book story I remember vividly reading as a kid. I don't know the title it was published in, but I'm fairly certain it was a black & white short story in an anthology comic/mag. Likely from the 70s era, but I can't say for certain (it definitely wasn't the 80s or more recent).
Anyway, here's the story as I remember it:
Two convicts handcuffed to each other escape into a swamp, with the authorities in pursuit. They come across a decrepit shack and inside find an axe. One convict with a maniacal look in his eyes says the other is slowing him down and proceeds to chop off the other guy's hand, running back into the swamp with the severed hand dangling from the handcuff. But as he starts swimming through the murky swamp, he gets pulled under the surface. In the final panel we see him drowned, and see the severed hand of the other convict grasping an underwater root tightly.
In my mind's eye, it featured Bernie Wrightson art, but I could be 100% wrong about that. It could just be that my love of his artwork, and his affinity for this type of subject matter, just filled in the gaps in my memory with something that wasn't the case.
Anyway, hopefully this will jog someone's memory! I'd love to be able to find the issue this story appeared in.
PS. Don't know if this will help or muddy the waters more, but I also recall another story from either the same comic or a similar one about these middle school bullies who steal a kid's backpack and somehow attach it to a deer's antlers (!) The deer runs into the woods and the kid has to chase after it, missing his school bus. But this kid is supernaturally fast, and catches up with the deer, retrieves his pack, and runs to school, getting there before the school bus arrives and surprising the bullies.
