Journey Into Strange Tales! Atlas/ Marvel Horror! Special Double-Sized Holiday Issue!

The Marvel/Atlas 
Horror Comics

Part Nine

July/August 1951

Sol Brodsky & Christopher Rule

 Mystic #3 (July 1951)

"The Jaws of Creeping Death"  
(a: Gene Colan & Christopher Rule) ★
"The Undead!" (a: Allen Bellman) ★
"The Man in the Moon" (a: Frank Sieminski) ★
"Beware the Eyes of Horror" (a: Paul Reinman) ★★

Poor Bruce has the same nightmare every night: he’s a judge sentencing a man to die in an iron maiden. To get away from the pressures of work, he accepts his boss’ offer to deliver an important cargo. Too late, Bruce realizes his boss has set him up to fall for an embezzlement scheme. To keep him quiet, the boss puts Bruce in an iron maiden. Other than its fabulous pulp-influenced title, "The Jaws of the Creeping Death" is a yawn-fest. And let's deduct a half-star for the cheat of a cover.

In "The Undead!," a scientist works on a formula to raise his dead wife from the grave but research can take time, and time is not kind to the flesh. How is it that Anthony Brenton, “one of the world’s most important men of science,” doesn’t know that his wife won’t look as lovely after being in the ground for 12 years? Allen Bellman contributes some truly awful, ugly art. Not much better is Frank Sieminski's work for "The Man in the Moon," wherein the first man in the moon is captured and made a mind slave by moon creatures who want to conquer Earth. Our hero tricks the moon men though, and Earth is safe. I'm well aware that deadlines could result in rushed, sketchy, and amateurish art but if I'm to judge these stories fairly, I have to put that contributing factor to the side.

"The Undead"

Museum guard Joe Ravek is having problems keeping his domineering wife happy; she wants more dough and thinks Joe is spineless, so Joe shows her. He steals the priceless ruby eyes of a statue at the museum, only to have the idol show up at his doorstep (ringing the doorbell!), to request its eyeballs back. For good measure, it takes wife Mary’s as well. A killer statue who’s mannered enough to ring the doorbell is all right in my book. "Beware the Eyes of Horror" is a not-bad little piece of borderline-humorous fluff.

The murderous but well-mannered beast of
"Beware the Eyes of Horror!"

Sol Brodsky

 Suspense #9 (July 1951)

"Back from the Dead" ★1/2
"The Weatherman" ★★ 
"Step Into My Parlor!" (a: Don Rico) ★★ 
"The Little Men"  (a: Dick Rockwell) ★★1/2
"Norman's Nightmare"  (a: Gene Colan) ★★

Detective Mike Carter is ordered by his Captain to tail the swami, Egon Tarel, who is suspected of murdering two rich clients through a rite known as "projection of the living ghost" (the Captain manages to keep a straight face while explaining this to Mike), and Mike sticks to the fortune teller like glue. His persistence pays off when the Detective witnesses Tarel murdering a third wealthy client and arrests the vicious fiend on the spot. Tarel stands trial and is found guilty of first degree projectional murder and sentenced to life in prison. Tarel, somehow still wearing turban and cape rather than prison stripes, swears he'll get revenge on Mike. Sure enough, Tarel astrally projects his ghost into Mike Carter's room and strangles him but, the joke's on the murderer when the spirit world deems his crimes too evil for him to return to his body.

"Back from the Dead" is stuffed full of wooden dialogue and really strange decisions on the part of its characters. Mike's Captain, for instance, is skeptical about the mystic arts but assigns his top cop to investigate and, similarly, the State decides it's got enough proof to warrant a first-degree murder trial despite the lack of anything resembling evidence (the DA cites Mike's statement and the say-so of the deceased's doctor who claims the man was in good health). Wildly, Tarel is found guilty, so my reservations about the case are obviously moot. The GCD has no artist credited to this story but it sure looks like Dick Ayers' work to this untrained eye (but then a whole lot of artists in the 1950s pumped out average art that resembled Ayers' stuff).

Paul Lowry is out shopping one day when he stumbles upon a small wooden house in a curio shop window. It's not so much the toy that catches Paul's eyes but the uncanny resemblance between himself and the small, carved "Weatherman" standing outside the house. On a whim, Paul purchases the oddity and brings it home, wondering if "The Weatherman" can, indeed, predict the weather. After  seven straight days of accurate predictions, Paul wonders if the toy can see into the future and make him a wealthy man. Horses, stocks, land deals, and a fortune follow until, one day, Paul notices the little man lying on his face in front of his house. What could this mean? Several close calls with death (including falling girder, spider attack, and getting caught in the middle of two trigger-happy gangsters) convince our protagonist that the prone figure is predicting Paul's death. The suspense is killing him, he can't deal with not knowing how he'll go, so he takes matters into his own hands and blows his brains out.

The grim ending for Paul Lowry

"Step Into My Parlor"

A ludicrously simple yarn but one that has a few guffaws and an abrupt, disconcerting climax. The hilarious way in which Paul Lowry escalates the weatherman's predictions, from simple weather forecasts to elaborate stock deals, boggles the mind. Since the little man's only answers to Paul's queries is a frown or smile, you can only imagine my puzzled look at the panel where Paul's stock broker informs him he's made a killing on the "Amalgamated Potash," and Paul answers with, "Thank you... now instruct my brother to sell out all my shares of Consolidated Brass." To get detailed information on Wall Street dealings with a simple smile must have taken hours and hours of questioning, no? This head-scratching delight is a strong contrast to the penultimate panel where Paul takes his own life, transforming a light-hearted romp into something a little more daring.

"Step Into My Parlor!" is a three-page quickie about a man whose house is a museum of murder. Don Rico's creepy graphics (almost like a reined-in Wolverton) are the highlight but, for a three-pager, the script is a grabber as well. In "The Little Men," good-natured Clem becomes obsessed with the tiny mechanical men he sells, much to the displeasure of his overbearing wife. Imagine Clem's surprise when one of the little men informs the henpecked schlub that he can become a little mechanical man and forget all his worldly responsibilities. A nicely illustrated, entrancing fantasy, sure to raise a smile or two, wherein the good guy comes out on top for a change. Finally, a man plagued by a toothache, visits a dentist promising no pain thanks to his Nitrous Oxide. The problem is, the gas sends the patient into a nightmare world that he never really leaves. Some genuinely creepy Colan, in "Norman's Nightmare." Colan was, at the time, just beginning to invest his rather dull art with the noir-ish techniques that would make him famous a decade later.

"Norman's Nightmare"

Bill Everett

 Astonishing #5 (August 1951)

"Death from the Sky" ★
"Menace from the Moon!"  (a: Cal Massey) ★1/2

Two very short science-fiction pieces break up the adventures of Marvel Boy this issue.

The first, the inane "Death from the Sky," concerns a jet pilot who lands on a solid cloud and discovers the sky is being overtaken by a race of "cloud-men" who kidnap wayward pilots and transform them into fellow cloud beings. When the population of cloud clods outnumbers that of the human race, they will conquer Earth. How they'll do this is, blissfully, ignored. Writer Hank Chapman injects plenty of the goofy word play he became (in)famous for years later on the DC war books. Here, we're graced with such gems as "What in blazes is happenin' to this jet crate? The engine's purrin' like a mouse-stuffed kitten... yet I'm droppin' like a ton of GI bricks! This baby ain't foolin'! She's headin' for a boom... an' Mrs. Edison's lil' boy Harry better shake his GI carcass an' hit the silk!" How did we ever get through the 1950s DC war books without Hank? "Menace from the Moon" is a very rare two-pager about the first return trip from the moon. It doesn't go well.

"Death from the Sky"

Sol Brodsky

 Strange Tales #2

"The Egg!" (a: Morris Marcus & Frank R. Sieminski) ★★
"Trapped in the Tomb!"  (a: Norman Steinberg) ★★1/2
"The Pin!" (a: Russ Heath) ★★★
"The Island of Madmen" (a: Ed Moore) ★ 

Canadian scientist Sir Alexander Laurier is summoned to the estate of Sir Humphrey Devonshire one cold Christmas Eve, where he is shown aerial pictures of a giant egg discovered in the Arctic Circle. The next day, a group of four of the scientists fly up (without notifying any authorities whatsoever) in a cargo plane and confront the huge white oval. Since this is the snow-covered Arctic Circle, you'd assume the colorist would naturally leave the ground around the egg a nice white tone rather than the orange or green they settle on. Curiously absent from the professors are any kind of instruments, gauges, pencil and paper or, believe it or not, snowsuits. This would have to be the warmest icy environment ever recorded. The professors decide that this is the greatest discovery man has yet to find but, rather than study it a bit, they feel it best to ram a hole into the egg with a nearby log. Through the hole geysers a black goo that eats anything around it, including two of the scientists.

Never a good idea

Only one, Laurier, manages to make it back to civilization, where he tells of the world-eating ooze. Deemed a nutcase by the society he's trying to protect, Laurier is institutionalized, but escapes and convinces an old friend to loan him a dive bomber and a one thousand pound bomb. Armed only with steel nerves, prayers, and a really big explosive device, the ostracized professor flies right into ground zero and blasts the goo to... well, smaller bits of goo, I guess. Once on the ground, it's discovered that the egg was actually a spaceship, the first wave of an invasion of aliens from the planet Goo. Okay, I made up that last bit about the planet name but all the other events in the story, we're told, are based on an actual incident. Only the names and the clothing choices were changed.  "The Egg" is the perfect example of the sort of bland "horror" and fantasy that made up the first few issues of Strange Tales but still holds quite a bit of warped charm.

George has always shown patience with his friend and mentor, Professor Lapham, whenever the old fool would come around with some crazy new invention but this time is a bit different. The Prof. asks George to babysit his new gizmo, a weird little box studded with buttons, wires, and lights. As George's wife, Helen, prattles on about her less-than-ideal living situation and how George promised her diamonds and minks when they married, he wishes he was on top of a remote mountain as he accidentally pushes one of the buttons atop the box. Magically, he's whisked away to a Utopian tor, complete with waterfall and mermaids. Hot damn! This is the life! But, unfortunately, the spell lasts only one hour and, as his spirit returns to his body, George realizes that, while he was gone, life just rolled on without him. Soon, George is using the contraption to play the stock market and rack up huge dividends. Too soon, the day comes when Lapham returns from his vacation to claim his toy and George must return to his life of "too much wife." Our hero gets the bright idea of murdering his wife with help from Lapham's invention but he arrives at the Prof's home just as the old man is dying. With his last breath, Lapham tells George he can't lend him his golden goose because someone else has borrowed it. George arrives home to find out exactly who that "someone" is as Helen holds a gun on him and explains that she, too, can play that game.

An interesting variation on the "spirit migration" plot, with "Trapped in the Tomb" (perhaps the most misleading title we've yet encountered) allowing its characters to do more than merely visit other places with their spirit; these spirits can take out loans, play the stock market, and hold firearms. George is in the middle of a nasty spat with his shrewish wife when he experiments with spirit travel and returns to his body one hour later (yes, actual time elapses) to find he's still in the same argument with Helen; that's one hell of a rhubarb. Ostensibly, George just sat and took it, without opening his mouth, like any smart hubby would. "Trapped" is a little bit long at seven pages but it's fun and entertaining.

Wally Ambrose opens his door one day to find a basket holding a tiny tot and, after due diligence, adopts the precocious toddler. The baby comes equipped with an odd pin, one that he sticks into Wally one day "by accident." This is no ordinary tot, as Wally soon finds out. Buster, as he's come to be known, grows up very fast, becoming a quite intelligent young man within months, while Walter grows younger by the day. Eventually, the tot is a man and Walter is the baby and the expository comes: Buster is actually "Professor Lungham, age 55," who concocted a miracle drug that reverses the aging process. Unfortunately, the side effect is that Lungham couldn't get back to age 55 and so had to invent an antidote, "The Pin," that needs to be injected into an unwary and innocent bystander and creates an "age-youthexchange" between the two. Lungham pops Wally into a basket, with a pin, unceremoniously dumps him on a doorstep and rings the bell. Variations on this formula have been done to death through the years but "The Pin" is a weird, almost sordid little yarn that keeps you guessing and doesn't disappoint in the end (aside from the wordy, but necessary, elucidation in the final panels). Wally Ambrose is another of those rare Atlas characters who seems to be a generous and kind soul who meets a bad end through no fault of his own. One question though: if Professor Lungham morphed all the way down to a baby, who put his basket on Wally's doorstep?

Three shipwrecked friends end up on "The Island of Madmen," a little piece of property owned by a demon known as Lucretia de Velli, a master of mysticism and soul transference. One by one, the hapless adventurers end up victims of de Velli's evil ways. "The Island of Madmen" is the only real stinker in the bunch this issue but it's a royal odor. Badly-written (the concept of de Velli is introduced and then jettisoned, never to be explained) and illustrated, seemingly, by an artist with both hands tied behind his back. To be fair, Ed Moore was best known for newspaper strip illustration and that's exactly the type of visuals you get here, stripped-down and unattractive, with no flair or imagination. Best line and biggest smile comes when one of the survivors notices a skeleton in the bush and informs his comrades that he knows "enough anthropology to tell these are human bones!"

Bill Everett

 Venus #15

"Escape from Death" (a: Sol Brodsky)  ★★

After years of plundering the galaxy, space pirate Kallam Raa is finally arrested and convicted for his crimes and sentenced to serve 2 years of hard labor in the Salydium mines on Mars. But, while Kallam is being transported to his rocket ship, his guards are distracted by a procession of lepers who are being marched to their space ship to be blasted into space where they will find “sweet solace in death” while the “flesh falls from their bones.” The crafty space pirate blasts the guards (“Out of my way you sniveling sheep, or you’ll be meat for the moon vultures!”) and hijacks a nearby rocket and blasts off. Unfortunately for the nitwitted scalawag, he’s just hopped on the leper ship. Pure pulp nonsense but laugh-a-minute dialogue and a very short running time make “Escape from Death” a pleasant experience. You gotta love a strip that features a vain galaxy pirate (“Close the hatch! This space helmet is bad for my complexion!”) and a group of men walking the plank in space! Nice trick, that. Though just a little guppy in the pool of Atlas artists, Sol Brodsky would, of course, become a permanent fixture at Marvel during its explosion in the early 1960s.

 Journey Into Unknown Worlds #6

"The Day That Saturn Struck!"  (a: Hy Rosen) ★1/2
"The Voice of Death" (a: Russ Heath) ★★
"The World Below" ★1/2
"The Terrible Toy" (a: Gene Colan) ★1/2

Dismissed as a crackpot by his fellow scientists (and banned by the Association of Astronomers!), Prof. Henry Malvern nonetheless continues his monologue on the dangers of the planet Saturn. Malvern believes that, deep under the Saturnian crust, an evil race prepares an attack on Earth that will leave the entire population burnt to cinders. The fire-beings of Saturn get wind of the Prof.'s theories and send emissaries to capture the scientist, his shapely daughter, Adora, and her boyfriend, Lank. Can the brave trio quash the invasion threat and still find happiness in the Rocky Mountains on "The Day That Saturn Struck!"? The Prof.'s theories are, admittedly, a bit out there but you have to give him credit for being right on the money about a species of aliens who live under the ground sixty bajillion light-years away! What I want to know is: can a pair of lovebirds named Lank and Adora find true happiness in the world of the 1950s?

Ham radio enthusiast Mac is chewing the fat with his buddy, Sparks, when Sparks' ticker abruptly fails and he dies in mid-sentence. For some reason, Mac decides that Sparks' death would make for a great piece of vinyl but then discovers the LP has strange powers. "The Voice of Death" turns even whackier when Mac tries to convince the army that this is the way to win the Korean War, with a 78 that's music to the Grim Reaper's ears. The army isn't biting (imagine that) so Mac, now enraged to the point of insanity, cuts a few copies of the sinister slab and sends it off to all the Army brass that scoffed at him. The military is suddenly short its top men but they're convinced so they make thousands of copies and send them to Korea! While I allow that "The Voice of Death" is a little... out there with its theories on death, I do have to admit that I smiled through the entire five-page run. Sometimes, as I've noted before, lunacy is all I need for a good time.

"The World Below" gives us a treasure-seeker who dives "30,000 leagues under the sea"(approximately 90,000 miles!) and gets a little woozy before being saved by a merman and discovering an undersea kingdom that houses more gold and baubles than Jennifer Lopez' jewelry box. It's all a bit silly and not too pretty to look at. Rickie and Dickie, the local JDs, torture and pester toy-maker, Mr. Grisby, until he can stand it no longer. Grisby concocts "The Terrible Toy!," a board game that sucks its player in and transforms him into a marble (no, seriously!) and traps the two little monsters. That is, until an even worse kid moves into the neighborhood and turns the tables on poor Mr. Grisby. Gene Colan brightens up what would otherwise be a waste of reading time; evil youths Dickie and Rickie are almost too ruthless to be believed.

 Adventures Into Terror #5

"The Man Who Was Death" (a: Russ Heath) ★★★
"Find Me! Find Me! Find Me!"(a: Don Rico) ★★ 
"The Clock Strikes!"(a: Gene Colan) ★★ 
"The Hitchhiker"★
"The Hand" (a: Paul Reinman) ★

Dr. Banks of the J. Kling Hospital happens onto a weird conspiracy: some of his fellow doctors (led by the mysterious and sinisterly-shaded Dr. Cragmore), actually from the planet Jupiter, are injecting patients with a serum (2X13 to be exact) that interacts with human blood to transform its carrier into a human bomb. Much easier than setting off atom bombs, according to Dr. Cragmore, and since Banks has discovered the secret of the Jupiterian invasion, he'll be the next to be infected. Once the poison is introduced into the human bloodstream, the victim has about two hours before he goes WHAM! Banks is injected with the serum but he manages to escape and finds his way to the office of Strategic Civilian Defense (and, if you've read a lot of Atlas stories, you know how long the line can be to get in) and lays out his story to the top brass. The suits lend Banks a sympathetic ear and then send him on his way, convinced he's a crackpot. Our poor Good Samaritan wanders the street, warning passersby that he's a human time bomb. Alas, they ignore him or call him insane. They shoulda listened.

What begins almost like a 1950s noir crime-drama heads down into science fiction territory with the outer space connection and then wraps itself up on a very bleak note when Banks takes out an entire city with his eruptive hemoglobin. Russ Heath's penultimate panel of Banks ripping at his shirt and screaming "I hear it inside myself, like a sizzling fuse! I'm blowing up!" is pretty compelling stuff, not your usual kiddie fare.

Speaking of noir, the protagonist (as well as the writer) of "The Clock Strikes!" has definitely been watching some of the latest B-flicks down at the Rialto; how else to explain his proposed suicide by hit man, when he finds he's about to die of a heart ailment? Unfortunately for the poor dope, after he's signed the contract, the doc calls him back and says there might have been a misunderstanding.  In "Find Me, Find Me, Find Me!," an overworked artist gets drawn into his painting of a hand holding a picture of a hand holding a picture of a... (on and on) but, just as the narrative gets interesting, we're cut off as if the writer had no idea to close this intriguing premise.

"The Hand" quiets a yawn

Two more hoary cliches are dusted off and put to bad use with "The Hitchhiker" (man picks up hitchhiker just as radio warns of escaped lunatic but, wait, it's the driver who's the looney -- fooled ya!) and "The Hand." The latter, at least, provides a boatload of guffaws (not sure that's what the scribe intended but take what you can get, I says) with its story of Jack, a mountain climber who loses his best friend in a hiking accident and the hand (belonging to the deceased) that shows up on his doorstep. All manner of terror ensues: the hand tears up Jack's office papers, pours water on his face when he's sleeping, screws up a great game of poker and, in the ultimate betrayal, rings Jack's girlfriend's doorbell! Even though Jack manages to get rid of the offending appendage, it shows up at the most inopportune time (while Jack is enjoying a mountain hike) to exact its final revenge on our hapless protagonist. You gotta hand it to the Atlas writers... they could wring a thousand stories out of the most overused plot line. Oh, and take a second look at that cover as it advertises what would have been Basil Wolverton's first terror tale for Atlas, "The Eye of Doom," which must have been pulled (and had "The Clock Strikes" put in its slot) at the last second, possibly because it wasn't completed. "The Eye of Doom" will arrive in Mystic #6 in January of '52.

Marvel Tales #102

"A Witch is Among Us" (a: Mike Sekowsky)  ★★★
"The Man Who Dreamed" (a: Gene Colan)  ★
"The End of the World" (a: Basil Wolverton)  ★★★
(r: Curse of the Weird #4)
"The Island" (a: Cal Massey)  ★★★

A sleepy New England town is rocked by the disappearance of several new-born babies and the residents of the village blame the kidnappings on an old woman who lives on the edge of town, a woman they all suspect is a witch. Into this maelstrom comes young Dr. Jonathon Poole, who takes a room at the residence of Faith Bonham, an old biddy who believes in the witch theories. Just as Poole is settling, a scream from the garden has him racing outside to find the beautiful Rosa, who claims her grandmother is, at that moment, being burned in her house as a witch. Poole, Bonham, and Rosa rush to the house, only to find it in ashes, Rosa's grandma up in smoke. Poole takes a liking to Rosa and offers her a room at Mrs. Bonham's place (to the consternation of his landlady), where they settle in to domestic bliss.

Faith explains to Poole that "each year of a newborn baby's life extends a witch's life one day." Poole, of course, scoffs but very shortly thereafter, the Harris baby is kidnapped by "a big black creature" and Rosa is suspected of inheriting her grandmother's genes. Mrs. Bonham searches upstairs for the witch-girl but finds something more alarming when she opens Mr. Poole's door -- the young doc sits in the middle of a pentagram, about to slice up the Harris baby! Faith wrests the child from his grip and, sacrifice denied, Poole the witch crumbles to dust. I really dug "A Witch is Among Us," a genuinely spooky little chiller that had me guessing right to the climax. Since we've read millions of these witch stories, we suspect that Rosa's granny is the red herring, a victim of mob madness (although that famous EC story where the accused witch was actually the witch comes to mind when I read these things now), but who could the real demon be? I take shots at Mike Sekowsky's art constantly and though I'm not ready to say things sure have changed, I will allow that there are plenty of good goosebump-raisers here. Those two shots are, of course the ones reproduced here, of Poole holding the Harris baby in one hand, a huge dagger in the other. Like the final panels of "The Man Who Was Death" (in this month's Adventures into Terror), this is pretty nasty stuff and far removed from the silly pablum of "The Hitchhiker," "The Hand," or "The Island of Madmen."

"The Man Who Dreamed" is a forgettable yarn about a guy who has nightmares about being upside-down and it turns out he's not having dreams; he's being visited by aliens who intend to shift the Earth off its axis. Much better if only for historical reasons is "The End of the World," the first of eight Basil Wolverton stories to grace the pages of the Atlas anthologies. Yes, alas, only eight but, scripts be damned, Wolverton could make anything readable, couldn't he? In "The End of the World," we enter a future Earth where man's ultimate goal is the conquest of the universe. Caught in the web is brilliant scientist, Julius Kane, who has developed a world-killer that harnesses "the full power of magnetic force," an explosive device deadlier than an H-bomb.

Kane wants no part of the plan the military has to use the weapon on Mars and so he craftily rejiggers his baby and then tells the army it's ready for testing. The "lethal load" is exploded on the far side of the moon, pushing it into Earth's atmosphere and causing catastrophes all over the globe. Kane manages to jump into his little anti-gravity air car and watches the devastation from above until chunks of the moon send his auto earthward. For some reason, Kane goes into suspended animation and wakes up (months? years?) later to find the Earth completely uninhabited. I absolutely love these apocalyptic, bleak, downbeat sagas that dotted the Atlas landscape, if for no other reason than to remind me that adults like to read funny books sometimes, too. Wolverton's panels are cluttered (in a good way) with all manner of detritus and destruction while his human characters look... anything but human!

Shipwrecked, Bob Archer rides a plank of wood to "The Island," at first a Godsend but later, after Bob meets the residents of the uncharted hunk of soil, a curse. Though friendly, the people of the island are ugly, almost cadaverous in appearance and Bob's only thought is escape. But his savior, Captain Windruff, insists that Bob should stay here for the rest of his life. Our wary protagonist feigns happiness by day, builds a boat by night (crafting a pretty good little ship in no time) and before long he's sailed and made it back to his sleepy little harbor town home. But something's just not right; as Bob makes his way through the village, people run screaming from a man they once called friend. When the bewildered Bob finally arrives at home and looks in the mirror, he finally understands: he never survived the shipwreck and "The Island" was a haven for souls lost at sea. Archer hops back into his skiff and heads out to sea, hoping to return to the island. A really depressing tale, but also one with hints of hope. Why his entrance into the after-life is kept secret from Bob is probably the only false note in "The Island." There's nothing sinister, we discover, about the people of the island, so why not let their new friend in on what's going on? Although, now that I think about it, the Captain's "office" has a flag bearing the skull and crossbones! At first very scratchy and ugly, Cal Massey's art becomes more suited to the mood of the story as it progresses and packs a wallop by tale's end. Except for the hiccup known as "The Man Who Dreamed," this is a solid issue of Marvel Tales!

In two weeks...
Let's welcome famed Batman artist
Jerry Robinson to our creepy neighborhood!