Talk about a disparity between title and visual! It would be difficult to come up with an image that less embodied the concept of SCARY TALES that this one, featuring a happy super hero whose body fragments into pieces comically battling a pair of thugs amidst a bright green forest. And that’s because, like the last issue of SCARY TALES that we looked at, the feature in this one hadn’t been created for this title at all. Rather, Mr. Jigsaw was another strip that had been submitted for consideration to CHARLTON BULLSEYE, Charlton’s short-lived title that would print material submitted by fans but which offered no payment for said material.
Mr. Jigsaw was the creation of writer Ron Fortier and artist Gary Kato. Fortier was interested in coming up with a strip that captured some of the whimsical fun style of such Golden Age characters as captain Marvel and Plastic Man. Their hero was Charlie Grant, who had been born with the ability to separate any part of himself from his body and to animate and control that separated appendage from a distance. In essence, he was akin to the Milton Fass CAPTAIN MARVEL of the 1960s, though he wasn’t an android. Rather, his mother Betty Jo Trent had been accidentally exposed to a “trans-molecular charger” when she was a student. While this seemed to have no effect on her, her son Charles was born with this distinct and unsettling ability.
Realizing in the manner of super heroes everywhere that he must turn his bizarre powers towards channels that would help humanity, Charlie adopted the guise of Mr. Jigsaw and set out to fight crime and help those in need of a helping hand with one of his. Fortier and Kato had prepared their submission for CHARLTON BULLSEYE, but after that title folded, it for some reason ran as the cover feature in SCARY TALES #38.
This SCARY TALES appearance was a one-off–it wasn’t even the opening story in the issue, rather it ran third behind a pair of other short weird/supernatural/suspense tales–but this wasn’t the end of Mr. Jigsaw. Fortier and Kato pursued the adventures of their character as a creator-owned concept after this, reprinting this first story in a MR. JIGSAW one-shot backed up by another new Mr. Jigsaw adventure. Since then, they’ve continued to produce new Mr. Jigsaw stories, many of which are available for purchase as print-on-demand items today.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
The art’s very obviously imitating Steve Ditko, but it comes off quite well in a cartoonish way.
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