The Marvel/Atlas
Horror Comics
Horror Comics
Part 116
August 1956 Part III
by Peter Enfantino
and Jack Seabrook
Cover by Sol Brodsky
"The Weeds" (a: Mort Meskin) ★★
"In the Shadows" (a: Reed Crandall) ★1/2
"Flee For Your Life!" (a: Paul Hodge) ★
"The Secret of the Black Forest" (a: Angelo Torres) ★★
"The Crisis!" (a: Vic Carrabotta) ★★
"The Long Sleep!" (a: John Forte) ★
A small scientific party finds itself stranded in the Sargasso Sea while searching for a particular brand of seaweed. They come upon an island populated by people dressed as pilgrims and soon discover that the seaweed surrounding the land has a magical quality to it. The atmospheric Mort Meskin art found in "The Weeds" reminds this reader of the fact that Atlas stories once contained an aura of mystery and danger. The band of intrepid travelers face an interesting realization at the story's close but we never worry that any bodily harm will come to them.
Brad Norton walks away from a small plane crash into the arms of the lovely but mysterious Arla. Before long, Brad pops the question and Arla says "Sure!" It's one night while they are dancing that Brad notices his wife doesn't cast a shadow. "Don't freak," the woman says, "but I'm from another dimension and I came here to look for the beauty my world lacks. You dig?" Brad does not and he shows Arla the door. Suddenly, he's back in the plane crash, remarking about what a miracle it is he's alive but, man, would he like a hot babe right now. "In the Shadows" is another in the seemingly unending stream of nonsensical fantasy tales that pulled themselves free from the Atlas lunchroom and splatted on the pages. It reads like vintage Wessler but I'm no expert. The Crandall art is not great but remember the old adage... "Even bad Crandall is ten times better than great Paul Hodge."
Speaking of which... Paul Hodge is responsible for the doodling that tells the story of Ian, a boy abandoned on Earth by his Martian father. Ian has a sibling on Earth somewhere and he spends decades trying to find him, only to discover he's a she! I know we've read something very much like this recently but my brain is like a pasta strainer. "Flee For Your Life!" is not only a great title but, in this case, it's good advice.
There's something odd going on in the small village of Grausberg, Germany. The oddest buildings are popping up in the center of town and no one knows who's been building them! Then Hans Schmidt finds an odd little frog-like creature in the forest and takes it home as a domesticated pet. Meanwhile, a thought strikes the town's burgomeister... this strange architecture must be the work of invisible aliens from outer space. What else could it be? Hans puts two and two together and decides his new pet is not safe at his home. The villagers drive the creature into the forest and tell it to never come back or else... The frog gets back in its spaceship and heads home to Jupiter. It's silly to call this silly because all these stories are silly so I'll accentuate the positive which is, as usual, the art. Angelo Torres's work on "The Secret of the Black Forest" is stunning, a visual feast, simple yet intricate.
Though "The Crisis!" is a three-pager (and we know how successful those are), it's a very clever little fantasy about troops fighting an alien force in a small tunnel. The final panels reveal that the war is being fought in a hospital patient's lungs! "The Long Sleep!" is a predictable yarn about a scientist who worries that the human race is sliding downward on the intellectual scale (wait until he gets to 2025!) and preserves his body in suspended animation for one thousand years in order to help out future generations with his brilliance. Guess what? When he wakes up, he's the dummy. Mankind has advanced past his knowledge threshold. Another lazy script and crude graphics sink this one from the get-go.-Peter
Strange Tales #49
Cover by Bill Everett
"Inside the Black Bag" (a: Mac L. Pakula) ★★1/2
"The Girl Who Saved the World" (a: Joe Orlando) ★★
"Not Quite Human" (a: Christopher Rule?) ★1/2
"What Happened to Mr. Smith?" (a: Harry Lazarus) ★
"The Animal" (a: Bob Brown) ★
"The Man Who Cried" (a: John Forte) ★★
In the opener, gruff and heartless explorer Dennie Craig is abandoned by his jungle guides and left to fend for himself in the wild. A starving and dehydrated Dennie stumbles into a veritable paradise in the middle of the jungle, populated by incredible architecture and beautiful people and ruled by the village's elder, who can turn small stones into priceless gems with a wave of his stick. Dennie grabs fistfuls of the gems and heads out into the wild, unaware that the gems and the paradise were all illusions crafted by the old man. "Inside the Black Bag" has some nice work by Mac Pakula and a climax that's especially downbeat for this era.
Vickie Lund's only hobby is reading about Florence Nightingale and dreaming that, one day, she too could help her fellow man. One day, while reading on a bench just outside her university campus, Vickie is approached by aliens who have come to Earth to conquer and seem a little put out by Vickie's calm demeanor. When one of them blasts a nearby tree with his Beta Ray Gun, the BEMs are convinced that humans are unafraid and therefore unconquerable. They run to their ship and blast off, never to return. Vickie turns her attention back to her Braille edition of The Life of Florence Nightingale.
"The Girl Who Saved the World" seemed hell-bent on becoming just the latest dopey alien invasion tale until its clever reveal (I assumed wrongly that Vickie was a Venusian in disguise). The Orlando art looks like it would fit better in a romance comic but that doesn't mean it's bad. Neither is the art for "Not Quite Human," which may or may not be the work of Christopher Rule (based on a comparison between this one and three of Rule's confirmed jobs, I'd say it's probably Rule). The story is another... story... altogether. Authorities bust into the mansion owned by an eccentric scientist, only to find the man dead, seemingly killed by the robot he built. But then one of the investigators finds the egghead's notes and gets the rest of the story.
Atlas's latest pilfering of A Christmas Carol (well, minus the holiday) is "What Happened to Mr. Smith," in which the titular tightwad sees his entire fortune and legacy disappear in a matter of moments but is redeemed in the end by a little boy who needs help with his balsa wood glider. Only redeeming feature of this tedious yarn is the panel where Mr. Smith witnesses all his belongings vanish, culminating in his visit to the skyscraper that bears his name. Now it's just a big hole in the ground! Worth the price of admission alone.
Like most of the three-pagers, "The Animal" is a waste of space. Fred Hobson is a miserable example of living flesh, mean to his wife, his kid, and especially the kid's mutt. Even when the mongrel saves Fred from a UFO abduction (the ships resemble baseballs), he has no gratitude. I'd be pissed too if I resembled a Kindergarten doodle. The finale, the respectably-illustrated "The Man Who Cried," follows the final space trip of a grizzled old captain. The final panel is supposed to be a shocker (he's actually sixteen years old and the "men" taking over his command are much younger) but it comes off pretty lame without any context.-Peter
Strange Tales of the Unusual #5
Cover by Bill Everett
"The Moving Stairs!" (a: Steve Ditko) ★★1/2
"The Last Tomorrow" (a: Reed Crandall) ★★
"The Threat!" (a: Harry Lazarus) ★1/2
"The Parrot Speaks!" (a: Ed Winiarski) ★1/2
"Mary's Robot!" (a: Howard O'Donnell) ★1/2
"One Mistake!" (a: Bob McCarthy) ★1/2
After three customers mysteriously disappear while riding the up escalator in a department store, the store detective, a 20-year veteran named Mallon, decides to investigate. He discovers that each member of the trio disappeared right before they would have received heartbreaking news. Unable to explain it, Mallon rides the escalator and disappears right before he would have been informed that it was time to retire.
"The Moving Stairs" sets up an intriguing mystery but delivers no solution. What it does deliver is four pages of Ditko's art, looking similar to what he'd do a few years later on Spider-Man.
"The Last Tomorrow" could come any day for Don after his doctor tells him that he has a rare, incurable disease. Don is walking through the woods, unhappy about his fate, when suddenly he is captured by aliens and taken aboard their spaceship, where they tell him that he will be used to mine a substance on a small asteroid. They need the substance to keep their civilization going, and the sun's powerful rays would kill them if they tried to mine it. Don is sent to the asteroid, where he and another human dig rocks day after day; both are in bulky space suits and helmets. Don suspects that the other miner is a woman, so he grabs a weapon from one of the aliens and demands that he and the woman be sent back to Earth. The aliens chuckle and admit that they had planned to free the humans all along. The woman is a knockout and the sun's rays cured Don's disease, so the new couple look forward to a happy life back on Earth.
The first two stories in this issue are a treat in the art department; this one is drawn by Reed Crandall, whose work is always competent and often much more than that. His aliens are cute little guys with orange skin who wear clear helmets that have antennae atop them. The story is slight and the ending is schmaltzy, but Crandall's work is usually worth a look.
Les Foster is a janitor who rents an attic room in a tenement building to a strange man named Yurka. Les sneaks upstairs one day and peers into Yurka's room, where he sees the man building a strange device using the power of his mind. Yurka is "The Threat!" He observes Les spying on him and uses his mind powers to pull him into the apartment. Yurka admits that he's an alien who is building a machine to go home before he ceases to exist. Yurka tries to kill the janitor, but Les fights back and manages to survive until Yurka and his machine vanish.
Harry Lazarus draws some good panels, but a couple of times the perspective seems off and Les seems like a miniature man. The story is pointless.
A bird breeder named Fry unexpectedly receives a pair of unusual parrots in a shipment of parakeets from Australia. Unable to find any other examples of the species, he christens them Fry Parrots and begins to breed them and sell their young all over the U.S. Noticing that his own parrot seems unusually bright, he is shocked when "The Parrot Speaks!" It can read human thoughts and solve scientific conundrums, so of course government agents come to take it. Fry and the bird make a run for it and the bird hides itself among his other parrots, all of which look alike, swearing never to speak again.
A silly story in which my favorite line hearkens back to earlier days; one of the government agents, for no reason I can glean, exclaims, "Come on, you Commies!" Ah, the 1950s. Happy Days!
Mary Weston is tired of her husband Emil not asserting himself, so she asks her brother Bryan to build a robot duplicate of her husband who will stand up for himself. Two weeks later, the robot shows up and she tells it what to do. In the morning, the robot Emil demands and gets a raise; the next Saturday, he plays a smashing game of golf. Her husband's self-confidence grows, so she tells her brother that she no longer needs his robot. Surprise! Bryan announces that he just finished building it!
It's the old "Banquo's Chair" twist all over again, where someone thinks a character arrived and is doing things when, in actuality, that character has not arrived yet. "Mary's Robot!" makes no sense, though, since we see the real Emil sitting in his chair when the robot Emil arrives, and Mary tells the robot to stay in the garage. Howard O'Donnell's art is adequate, but the three-page story has such a cliched ending that it's a letdown.
Carl Wessler wraps up the issue with another confusing story called "One Mistake!" A crook named Tom Redmond is sentenced to ten years in prison, so he jumps out of the courtroom window, makes his way to an R.A.F. base (this being England), and stows away on a plane to Africa. He is discovered mid-flight, so he grabs a parachute and leaps out of the plane. As he descends, he passes through "the dark veil of time" and finds himself in what appears to be Ancient Egypt, where he falls for and proposes to Wahima, the pretty daughter of a man he assumes is the pharaoh. Tom is suddenly pulled back to 1956, where he's once again a crook on the lam. He finds a scientist with a time machine who sends him 2000 years into the past, but the pharaoh says he has no daughter and Tom is jailed for ten years, unaware (stay with me) that Wahima was actually 100 years in the future, when people dressed like ancient Egyptians (?) and her father was just a rich man who looked like a pharaoh.
Bob McCarthy's art is pretty good, but Wessler's script takes such bizarre twists and turns and has an ending so out of left field that it just makes me shake my head and wonder what magic mushrooms old Carl was snacking on when he wrote these things.-Jack
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