At the Mental Floss blog, Mark Juddery considers “5 Memorable Moments in Comic Book Censorship,” including the altered ending of a Steve Ditko story from Marvel’s trange Tales #83 (April 1961):

Artist Steve Ditko’s story told of a vengeful socialite who meets a guy dressed as the Devil at a costume party, and falls for him. But at midnight, when it’s time to unmask… you can probably guess the rest. “Mask?” says the Devil. “What mask, my love?”

However, the editors were afraid of what the Code might think, so they removed the final panel (which presumably suggested a terrible fate for the socialite) and hurriedly replaced it with two small panels, drawn by another artist, in which she faints, recovers and resolves to change her malicious ways, while the “Devil” (who is obviously somewhere else) pulls of his mask, and is revealed to be one of her would-be victims in disguise. Yes, they included all of that. When you’re censoring a story, you can squeeze a lot into two small panels.

Related: Blake Bell, author of Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, has more on the story.

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