The Marvel/Atlas
Horror Comics
August 1956 Part II
by Peter Enfantino
and Jack Seabrook
Mystery Tales #44
Cover by Bill Everett
"Lost in the Labyrinth" (a: George Roussos) ★★1/2
"Menace from the Stars!" (a: Al Williamson & Ralph Mayo (?) Roy Krenkel (?)) ★★
"Danger in the Desert!" (a: Bob McCarthy) ★★1/2
"The Unsuspected!" (a: Herb Familton) ★
"Foolproof!" (a: Mike Sekowsky & Carl Burgos (?)) ★
"Don't Let Them Catch Me!" (a: Paul Hodge) ★
Explorer Dirk Kenyard will not stop until he finds the Temple of Rahshina where, deep within its dusty bowels, lies a fortune in jewels! Kenyard enters a small village close to where the Temple is supposed to be located and starts swinging his pistol, threatening the locals with death if they don't spill the beans.
Not wanting any trouble, the village's ruler agrees to provide a guide to Kenyard, a "glowing mass of luminous, pulsating light" that lures Kenyard right to the stairs of the temple. Elated, Kenyard enters and beholds the fabled treasure. Then the light goes out and the pushy explorer is left to find his way out all by himself. After all, the villager agreed to lead him in... but not out! Simple, quick, and enjoyable, "Lost in the Labyrinth" feels like a riff we've heard several times before but the Roussos graphics are a definite plus.
Ever since he was a child, Commander Kit Boyd has had one motto: "If it ain't human, kill it!" Now, with bombs falling on Earth, launched by Mars, Boyd grabs a few good men and scientists and heads to the angry red planet to bomb some stuff but finds out someone else got there first. Mars is dead. And now Boyd and his men are trapped, far from Earth, with lots of time to think about how peace and love are the only solutions. Take my word for it, the only reason to read "Menace from the Stars!" is to gaze upon the awesomeness that is Al Williamson. There's a page of soul-searching by Cmdr. Boyd that could easily have been excised but then we wouldn't have Al's visuals to salivate over.
Henri has given forty years (and his right hand) to the Foreign Legion but now regulations state that the old man must retire back to France. But Henri's sleep is disturbed by a feeling of foreboding and, despite the fact that he is a thousand miles away, he comes to the aid of his former colleagues back at the fort. The climax to "Danger in the Desert!" makes absolutely no sense; I'm not sure, but another page of exposition might have helped. Despite the botched climax, I still enjoyed the tale, which reminded me of the kind of story John Severin used to illustrate for EC.
In "The Unsuspected," Mace feels neglected by the professors in the archaeological dig and sets out to create tension between the eggheads. Literally no tension is trapped in these four pages.
Two dolts plan a bank robbery based on info given them by a machine that predicts odds, unaware they're in front of a live audience when they ask the gizmo their question. "Foolproof!" is three pages of dopiness.
Pay attention... there will be a test later. Tom wants to marry beautiful Andrea Gilbey but his overbearing brother, Lester, won't allow it. Lester has inherited their dead dad's money and hidden it away and now sits in fear of the locals who are surely plotting to get their grubby mitts on his moola. Andrea's brother, Jim, has made a servant of her and won't allow her to get her own job. It becomes way too much for Tom and Andrea and they decide to elope. Tom picks up Andrea at her place but Jim (who's having a poker party) grabs his buddies and they give chase to the couple.
Tom and Andrea arrive at Tom's place but Lester won't let them in as he's convinced it's all a plot to steal his money. That is, until he sees the three goons at his door and he exits the back door with the crazy kids, money-filled briefcase in hand. While in the woods, Tom picks some "herbs for a meal"(!) and the trio chow down. Next thing they know, they've faded away for a moment and reappear a full day ahead of their attackers. Musta been the herbs!
Lester spazzes out when he realizes he doesn't have the briefcase, eats an herb, and disappears back into the past. Why he goes backwards instead of forwards is anyone's guess. Tom doesn't have time to tell his brother that Andrea has the case of dough and the couple decide to live in the future, always one step ahead of everyone else. "Don't Let Them Catch Me!" is one of the most nonsensical tales we've run across in some time, pinballing from one inanity to another. I wonder if pulpmeister Carl Wessler was enjoying some herbs in the Atlas breakroom one afternoon when he typed this one out.-Peter
Mystical Tales #2Cover by Bill Everett
"What Lurks Out There" (a: Joe Orlando) ★★1/2
"The Black Blob!" (a: Kurt Schaffenberger) ★★
"The Lizard!" (a: Dave Berg) ★
"Footprints in the Snow!" (a: Bob Forgione & Jack Abel) ★
"No Way Out!" (a: John Forte) ★
"Behind the Veil" (a: Herb Familton) ★
With nothing and no one to hold him on Earth, Lt. Perry Lane volunteers for the first manned flight into space. Once he gets "beyond the wave length," Lane is on his own and that's just how he likes it. Reaching the point where he's supposed to return to Earth, Lane begins doubting the U-turn and yearns for further exploration.
At that moment, Lane receives a startling message over his radio: "Do not return to Earth or you will die! Land here!" The message's origin is planet Rigel-II and Lane does what he's ordered. Expecting the worst, the lt. lands and exits his ship, only to be welcomed by smiling faces. The leader of Rigel-II explains that cosmic rays have altered Lane's DNA and now he can only breathe ammonia, the compound that makes up Rigel's oxygen. Eyeing up the leader's curvy daughter, Lane sighs and decides to make the best of never seeing Earth again.
The script for "What Lurks Out There" is not mind-blowing but I thought Lane's attitude toward spending life in space was refreshing. He was all set to drift through space until his oxygen ran out instead of returning to a world he had no interest in. The Orlando art is sketchier than his usual stuff but still easy on the eyes.
Miner Dennis Metcalf digs miles under the Earth's surface and stumbles upon "The Black Blob!" Stymied by the organism, Dennis slaps it in a crate and brings it to super-brain Prof. Oliver Parnell but the substance somehow escapes its prison and cannot be found. At the same time, around the world, an hour seems to go missing, playing havoc with executions and government coups. Metcalf finally locates the blob, sitting on a pub stool enjoying a lager, and trucks it back to the egghead's lab.
Parnell, suspecting that the lost time has something to do with the blob, orders Dennis to show him the spot where it was found. After a lengthy trip down on a mine elevator, Parnell suddenly realizes that the blob is the Earth's "center of gravity" and... well, removing it wasn't a good idea. Center back in place, Earth regains its spin. You have to give writer Carl Wessler at least a little credit for trying here, even if his science makes little sense (Metcalf informs Parnell that the hole they've dug is over 3.7 million feet deep!). It's dopey but fanciful.
New grandpa Harry Lansfield sits on his son's porch, depressed he can't afford to buy little Frank a "welcome to the world" present when a telepathic plea for help slams into his brain. A man is running from a mutated lizard in Florida of 1983 and his elephant gun seems to be having no effect. Neither are his pleas for help.
Harry does what any good citizen would do; he grabs up the family shotgun and starts blasting lizards in the front yard. The effect is the one desired and 27 years in the future the giant lizard vanishes. Supremely grateful, the voice in Harry's head introduces himself as... yep, you guessed it... Frank Lansfield! What are the odds? "The Lizard!" has some oddball Dave Berg graphics but not much else.
Equally dull is "Footprints in the Snow!" Poor Danny Wyatt is so poor (how poor is he?) that he can't even afford to pay for a night out with his best girl, Hazel. He promises Hazel that if he ever strikes it rich he'll marry her. That night, while walking home, Danny runs into a Plutonian named Zig and his fortunes change. Zig asks Danny to hide him from the suspicious government authorities and in exchange Danny will be rewarded with riches beyond his imagination.
Danny agrees and suddenly has enough dough to hit the town with a different dame every night. When Hazel comes calling, reminding Danny of his promise, the dolt tells her that now that he's rich he's going to play the field. Zig smiles and tells Hazel he knew Earthmen were no good. "You're right, dad...," she sighs, "take me home!" Indeed.
In "No Way Out," a man fights for freedom from a valley that won't allow him to escape. No explanation is given and none is needed. A truly wretched issue of Mystical Tales comes to a much-anticipated finish with the dreadful sci-fi soap opera schmaltz of "Behind the Veil." Throat-cutting tycoon Theodore Moss has stepped on a human ladder all the way to the top, stealing inventions and leaving poor and destitute scientists in his wake. Now, blasted with isotopes, Moss gets his just desserts from his victims. Well, no, actually he doesn't. In the final panels, Moss sees the error of his ways and swears to make good on all his past bad deeds. Sheesh. Bring back the scumbag lechers who populated the Atlas business world pre-CCA. Please!-Peter
Cover by Carl Burgos
"Man of Mystery!" (a: Vic Carrabotta) ★★★
"The Thing Called... X!" (a: Ross Andru & Mike Esposito) ★1/2
"Creature in Hiding!" (a: Manny Stallman) ★★
"The Master!" (a: Ed Moore) ★
"When the Door Opens" (a: Paul Hodge) ★★
"In the Darkness" (a: Hy Fleishman) ★★
Thomas Beeres is a nebbish who is gazing in a shop window at a poster advertising the quiz show, Hit the Top, where the top prize is $50K. A "Man of Mystery!" stands next to Thomas and encourages him to fill out an entry blank, promising a fortune if Thomas listens to the man. Thomas enters and soon receives the news that he'll be on the show. Outside the studio, the man of mystery tells him to choose the "mythology" category and provides the answers to the first round of questions.
Thomas gets all the answers right and immediately his personality changes; he thinks his family members are only after his money and he is certain that the only person he needs is the mysterious stranger. Thomas goes on the show again and wins again. When he appears for the third week, the mystery man tells Thomas that he will give him the answer to the $50K question for half the money, but Thomas declines, certain that he knows it all. Of course, he fails to answer the question, which asks the name of the Norse God of Evil; outside, the man of mystery begins to look for another victim and reveals that he is Loki.
I enjoyed this look at the mid-'50s mania for TV quiz shows, well-illustrated by Vince Carrabotta. I'll overlook the fact that we've seen similar personality changes before (see "Footprints in the Snow," above, for example) and that the end is typically mild; most of the story's four pages are entertaining and I was intrigued to learn how Thomas would fail in the conclusion.
Professor Dodd has invented a powerful insecticide--"The Thing Called...X!"--and wants to test it in the Louisiana bayou. Jeff Martin takes the prof and another man up in a plane and sprays X over a large swatch of bayou below. The trio land and check out the area they just sprayed (with no masks or protective equipment), finding that all of the vegetation and insects have grown to giant size! They manage to avoid being eaten by a beetle and, the next morning, they find that everything has returned to normal. Prof. Dodd decides X is too dangerous to market, never realizing that it was the three men who shrank!
Prof. Dodd is a moron, as are his cohorts. I knew they had shrunk to tiny size right away. Don't these people read Atlas comics?
A man climbs Mt. Everest and finds the Abominable Snowman, only to discover that he is a man as well. The Abominable tells a story of how he was born over 500 years ago and was the handsomest guy in the land. Fearing the ravages of old age, he created and drank an elixir of immortality; he subjected himself to many tests but could not die. Eventually, he went to Mt. Everest to live out his endless days alone, a "Creature in Hiding," because all of the tests he put himself through ravaged his handsome face.
Stallman does a decent job with a thin plot, but the lack of a final shot of the Snowman's ravaged face kills any momentum the story had built. Instead, we get a close up of the mountain climber's wide eyes as he looks at the Abominable's face.
Royce Grimm is a pipe-smoking creep who treats his dog cruelly. He doesn't much like it when he suddenly finds himself in a doghouse in the rain. Ed Moore's rudimentary graphics match the throwaway quality of this three-page filler.
By 1989, most people owned a rocket ship and had vacationed on the moon. Not Anton Dwolak! The poor street sweeper can't afford it, so he keeps promising his kids that one day they'll fly to Sirius and be given souvenir puppies by the kind creatures who live there. Anton's prayers seem to fall on deaf ears, so he has an idea: he and his neighbors will rig up a fake spaceship and pretend to fly the kids to Sirius, where costumed neighbors will hand out puppies from the pound.
Everything goes off without a hitch and the kids love the flight and their cute l'il doggies, but the neighbors can't understand how it happened, since the ship went nowhere and they hadn't boarded it yet! Every reader of this issue has to raise their hand if they didn't see this coming right after Anton had his big idea. The old bit about flying to space in a fake ship that turns out to be real has seen so many versions by this point that they're running out of ideas.
Ed Knight, host of the TV show, "This Strange World," talks General Brewer into letting him hitch a ride on a bomber jet flown by Captain Roark in order to record the full fury of a storm. Up they go, and Knight rolls the camera as Roark fires cannons into the hurricane to try to break it up. Surprisingly, the shells come right back and the plane is torn to pieces by the raging winds. The men bail out and Knight rushes to the studio to develop his film. That evening, viewers of "This Strange World" are treated to film of alien ships flying through the hurricane; when Roark's cannons fire on them, they abandon their plan to attack Earth!
We need to coin a new term for these endings--perhaps "Wesslerian"--where the writer attempts to pull off a twist but it comes from so deep in left field that it lands with a mighty thud. Such is the fate of "In the Darkness." The highlight of this story is the art by Hy Fleishman; either he or the colorist made a good choice to depict the scenes inside the hurricane in blue/black and white, which works well.-Jack
Spellbound #29Cover by Joe Maneely
"The Man in the Cellar" (a: Bob Forgione & Jack Abel) ★1/2
"He Walks Among Us" (a: Al Hartley & George Roussos) ★1/2
"They Meet By Night!" (a: Tony Mortellaro) ★
"Someone is Following" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★★
"The Hole in the Ground" (a: Bill Draut?) ★1/2
"None Are So Blind" (a: Steve Ditko) ★★1/2
Jim works hard at his job all day and then comes home and works on his time machine in the cellar till midnight, ignoring his devoted wife, Vera, and their kids. After tireless effort, he sends a guinea pig ten years into the future but realizes that he can't prove it. One day, Jim comes home from work to find that Vera and the kids have sent themselves ten years into the future. Jim joins them and discovers that his machine was a success!
Forgione and Abel don't seem very inspired by "The Man in the Cellar" and neither was I. Vera is so supportive of Jim's hobby that she and the kids never see him. The end where he discovers that his machine worked and now, he's a successful member of the board of directors at his factory is yet another example of Carl Wessler writing a sunny finale that has zero effect on the reader.
Robert Mace is a young actor playing a robot in a movie. One evening, he goes home and finds industrial magnate Carleton Forst waiting for him. Forst explains that Mace is the last of five robots built by a now-dead scientist; Forst plans to use Mace to control industry. After the man leaves, Mace is convinced he's wrong, but his investigation leads to the conclusion that he is, in fact, a robot. When Forst returns to take control, the magnate accidentally falls out a window to his death and Mace realizes that Forst's brain was linked to his own by mental waves. Now that Forst has died, Mace will die as well.
"He Walks Among Us" has an absurd premise and the story unfolds in such a clunky manner that it has to be by Wessler. The pointless ending makes me certain of that! The art, by Al Hartley and George Roussos, is competent but no more.
Al Mortell is a bungler who repeatedly screws up at his uncle's factory. Even worse, he's embezzled money and the accountant is coming tomorrow to check the books! On his drive home, Al encounters a group of aliens who give him a bag full of money to provide them with examples of scientific progress that they can take home. He wonders why they refer to him as a kindred spirit and discovers when he gets home that the money is confederate--the aliens were just as bungling as Al!
Titling this terrible story "They Meet By Night!" doesn't make it the least bit exciting, and Tony Mortellaro's sub-par art continues this issue's trend of pages not worth perusing. Take a look at the panel I've reproduced here, in which Al is smoking a cigarette.
Fred Brown is an ordinary guy who has saved $200 and plans to spend it on a trip to Mexico. He's walking home through dark alleys when he realizes that "Someone is Following" him. His pursuer reveals himself to be a man from the future, who cautions Fred not to give his $200 to Lester Marlin, an old school chum who has invented a matter duplicator. Doing so would wreck the future world economy! Fred agrees, but instead of giving Lester the money he uses the machine to duplicate his own wad of cash and soon becomes one of the richest men in South America.
By default, this is the best story so far in this dreadful issue. Robert Q. Sale's art is a bit of an acquired taste, but it's decent enough and the twist ending actually makes sense for a change.
While walking in the woods one summer day in 1865, mathematician Charles Dodgson sees an elf disappear into "The Hole in the Ground." Dodgson falls through a similar hole and discovers an underground community of elves who keep wonderful creatures in chains and ask him to plead their cause to his brethren, since they want to live on the surface. Dodgson thinks them cruel and, when he returns to the world above the ground, he writes Alice in Wonderland as a coded warning, hoping someone will read between the lines.
The GCD suggests that this is Bill Draut's work, and I can see it in the close up of the elves on page two. Some of the shadows make me think of Mike Sekowsky, too, such as panel three on page three, where Dodgson sweeps away the elves.
Dave Miller is a kind-hearted guy who runs the Flying Carpet ride at the amusement park and gives free rides to smiling kids. The ride isn't making money, so he's forced to shut it down; he also has to listen to his shrewish girlfriend, Jean, who won't marry him until he gets a steady job. Walking home one evening, Dave encounters a flying saucer and sees green-skinned aliens emerge from it. No one believes his story, so he confronts the aliens, who explain that their planet died and they need a new home. Dave insists that they come into town with him to show everyone that he was not making them up. Just then, smiling green alien kids emerge from the ship, and Dave has a change of heart. Soon his ride is up and running again, and crowds come to see the funny green aliens who now work the ride.
Steve Ditko keeps this issue from being one for the recycling bin with "None Are So Blind," which features an uncharacteristically cogent script by Wessler and art that is a mix of classic Ditko (the main characters) and what looks to me like an imitation of Al Capp's style, in regard to the smaller pictures of the backup characters. It's not a bad little story and it's easily the best in the issue.-Jack
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