Hey bi.org, long time lurker but I've finally got a solid reason to post
After finishing The Dark Tower books I've been catching up on Steven King short stories, and like most of you I eventually stumbled onto The Blue Air Compressor. It's not a wholesome story and it's probably not even palatable for most of this community, but King's commentary written into the story mentions something very interesting:
Part of the inspiration for this story came from an old E. C. horror comic book, which I bought in a Lisbon Falls drugstore. In one particular story, a husband and wife murdered each other simultaneous in mutually ironic (and brilliant) fashion. He was very fat; she was very thin. He shoved the hose of an aircompressor down her throat and blew her up to dirigible size. On his way downstairs a booby-trap she had rigged fell on him and squashed him to a shadow. Any author who tells you he has never plagiarized is a liar.
The comic mentioned might end up being just as unappealing as the short story it inspired, but that didn't stop me from staying up way too late trying to narrow down which EC run the story might be from. Besides another forum post asking about the comic, the only other mention of the story is another Steven King piece, Danse Macabre:
In the old E.C. comics, adulterers inevitably came to bad ends and murderers suffered fates that would make the rack and the boot look like kiddy rides at the carnival. My all-time favorite (he said affectionately): A crazed husband stuffs the hose of an air compressor down his skinny wife's throat and blows her up like a balloon until she bursts. "Fat at last," he tells her happily just moments before the pop. But later on the husband, who is roughly the size of Jackie Gleason, trips a booby-trap she has set for him and is squashed to a shadow when a huge safe falls on him. This ingenious reworking of the old story of Jack Sprat and his wife is not only gruesomely funny; it offers us a delicious example of the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye theory.
Has anybody run across this?
A couple years back I tried finding it with no luck. Searched a lot in this vintage horror comics blog, but I think these are not E.C. comics: The Horrors Of It All