Journey Into Strange Tales Issue 99: Atlas/ Marvel Horror

 

The Marvel/Atlas 
Horror Comics

Part 84

July 1955 

by Peter Enfantino

and Jack Seabrook

Journey Into Mystery 25

Cover by Carl Burgos

"The Man Who Lost Himself!" (a: Vic Carrabotta)  ★★

"At Your Service!" (a: Jack Katz) ★

"The Little Man!" (a: Dick Ayers & Ernie Bache) ★★

"Foster’s Fate!" (a: Ann Brewster) ★

"Miracle on Maple Street!" (a: Joe Sinnott) ★★★

Charley Sims enters the cellar of his rooming home and discovers the building is an alien spacecraft. Unfortunately, no one will believe Charley’s story; in fact, no one will acknowledge they even know him. That’s not the worst aspect of his life, though, since he's slowly but surely losing his memory. In the end, we discover that Charley really did stumble on an alien "visit" and the creatures have erased his memory to ensure they won't be discovered.

A hazy climax to what was a decent enough story. Sure, I acknowledge that the plot of "The Man Who Lost Himself" has been done to death (in fact, a variation on the theme will be done almost verbatim again in two months), but Charley's angst comes right off the page. What the denouement means, I have no idea. The aliens fly away, having ruined Charley's life, but profess that the man will be just fine. What might have been termed an "invasion" some months ago is now labeled a "visit." The Carrabotta art is barely professional; in one panel, Charley seems to be puckering up for a diner cook.

Jack Katz puts in an even worse job of pencils in "At Your Service," a quickie about a genie who grants wishes to the greedy and finds happiness when his final client is a boy who wishes he had a nice puppy to play with. This must have been a rush job for Katz, since his art is usually done to a higher standard. Here it almost has a photoshop look to it, with body parts that don't seem to fit their bodies.

Elmer considers himself "The Little Man," a human being incapable of making an impact on others' lives. That all changes when Elmer's walking his dog and accidentally foils the plans of two terrorists who are on their way to bombing the U.N. building. No idea why this one is collected between the covers of Journey Into Mystery, since there are no fantastical or horrific elements to speak of. Unless you're pointing at the art of Ayers and Bache, which continues to be painful.

D-Day interrupts the love affair between Wally and Joyce, but Wally seems to see Joyce in every country where he's stationed. His buddy, Steve, says Wally is shell-shocked and should come back to the States after the war to meet his sister, Barbara, but Wally is intent on marrying Joyce, no matter what iteration she may be. When the war ends, he revisits each country, but finds no trace of Joyce or her clones. Resigning himself to a life without love, Wally heads back to the States to visit Steve and meets Barbara, who is the spitting image of Joyce! There's no rhyme or reason to the hogwash known as "Foster’s Fate!" No matter how many times you run it through your head, you can’t come up with an answer to explain that final panel. The name of Ann Brewster (in her one and only Atlas genre appearance) was more commonly found in the romance comics published by Ace, St. John, and Fawcett.

The children on Maple Street are kept entertained by Papa Roberti's wonderful puppet show, but their parents have more pressing matters to attend to. The town council is expecting the governor to visit within a week, but their main street is unappealing and the buildings are run down. The day after they discuss the dilapidated condition of their town hall, the building is magically transformed overnight into a beautiful structure. Though rumors are passed among the townsfolk, no explanation is found for "The Miracle on Maple Street!" and no benefactor comes forward.

After the same conversation is held in the town square about the shoddy condition of the homes that line Maple Street, another miracle occurs, and each house has been granted a new coat of paint. Seeing a pattern forming, the mayor deliberately stands in the street and screams that a few maple trees here and there on a street that is, after all, named after that particular tree, sure would be sweet. Sure enough, the next day, trees line Maple Street.

All that's left to remove is the ugly, ramshackle wagon that Papa Roberti runs his puppet show out of, so the mayor runs Papa out of town. The governor arrives, deems the city prosperous and beautiful, and raises the taxes! Outside of town, Papa Roberti sighs and watches over his army of puppets, now sleeping after their days of arduous toil.

What a fabulous twist, one I didn't see coming for some reason. I assumed Roberti was a gypsy with some kind of power and the beauty he'd created would vanish after he was escorted out of the city limits, but writer (and pulp veteran) Carl Wessler confounded my expectations. Thankfully. It's no surprise, however, that Joe Sinnott's art is the best of the batch this issue, though it's not quite the Sinnott we’ve become enamored of. His dark, nasty edge seems to have been escorted to the city limits by the CCC.-Peter

Marvel Tales 136

Cover by Carl Burgos

"Mystery of the Blocks!" (a: Pete Tumlinson) ★

"Ceiling… Zero!" (a: Ross Andru & Mike Esposito) ★1/2

"The Thing That Wouldn’t Stop!" (a: Ed Winiarski) ★

"The Man From Nowhere!" (a: Dick Ayers & Ernie Bache) ★

"And There You Are!" (a: Bob Powell) ★

Young John is fascinated and obsessed by building blocks--not the silly toys the other kids are playing with in his elementary school, but real building blocks. His teacher is worried that the boy isn't fitting in with the rest of his class, but when John's adopted dad takes a picture of his block city to a construction engineer friend of his, the man says John's designs are decades ahead of current technology. Turns out John is actually an alien who's been sent to Earth to teach us advanced tech.

"Mystery of the Blocks!" is a laughable sci-fi tale with an entirely predictable outcome, but the scene where the architect wonders aloud how advanced John's toy block construction is has to be seen to be believed. The Tumlinson art is unbearably pedestrian; harsh on the eyes and free of any kind of flow.

Bad art also helps sink "Ceiling… Zero," about an Army plane forced to fly through a terrific storm. While in the sky, the pilot passes out and a doctor must fly the plane with the help of a voice over the radio. Of course, once the plane lands, the doctor is informed that the radio has been dead for three hours. Whose was the mystery voice? Well, our heroes look to the heavens in the last panel, so that's as good a guess as any, I suppose.

The bad graphics display continues with Ed Winiarski's "The Thing That Wouldn’t Stop," about an inventor who designs a clock that synchs with the owner's heartbeat. The script is a dog and Winiarski's art lacks the kind of excitement that a Colan might have brought to the story. It's truly amazing how the bad art is similarly synched with the onset of the Comics Code.

Wouldn't you know the very next story shoots that theory straight to hell. Dick Ayers was around in the pre-code days and continues to spread his "magic" throughout the post-code times as well. The protagonist of "The Man From Nowhere!" is a homely magician who accidentally conjures up a leprechaun who teaches him all new tricks. In the end, the magician accompanies the elf back to his own dimension. In the final story, "And There You Are," a TV crew shooting a documentary about the assassination of Caesar gets an unexpected visit to the set by the real Brutus. Bob Powell helps put to bed a truly wretched issue of Marvel Tales.-Peter

Mystery Tales 31

Cover by Carl Burgos

"The Phone to Nowhere!" (a: Pete Tumlinson) ★1/2

"Danger Signal!" (a: Tony DiPreta) ★★1/2

"Two of a Kind!" (a: John Forte) ★★

"The Tree That Wouldn’t Fall!" (a: Ed Winiarski) ★★

"The Man Who Never Came Back!" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★★★

Homer Horner arrives at his usual bank of phone booths to collect change for his phone company, but when he gets there, he's greeted by a young child who's lost his mother. She simply vanished in the booth! Skeptical, Homer enters the booth to make a call to the police, admonishing them for lazy patrolling. Poof! Homer vanishes from the booth and reappears in another dimension, floating in some kind of web with several other people.

With a little sleuthing, Homer deducts that every one of his companions was making a negative call, one that would hurt the person on the other end of the line. Homer instructs each person to dial again and change their tone (yes, the phones are in Purgatory as well!) from negative to positive. That does the trick. What doesn't do the trick, for me at least, is the simply awful artwork in "The Phone to Nowhere!" by Pete Tumlinson, barely more than sketches with coloring. The script isn't awful (it is pretty simple, though) but Pete's visuals are the pits. Excuse me while I call the Atlas office to complain…

When Moss Junction discontinues train service and pulls up its tracks, Ol' Pop Moss knows it's the end of an era. But when a virus hits the junction and planes can't land to distribute the antidote, Pop puts on the "Danger Signal," hoping a train will see his message of urgency. The next morning, the junction has its serum and fresh train tracks lay embedded in the grass near the old station. Not a bad little "ghost story" (I guess you could say the train is a ghost), with some decent DiPreta art and a heartwarming message. I do want to know who loaded the serum onto the spectral locomotive.

Roger Knot heads out to his jalopy one fine morning and finds an odd, yellow contraption parked next to his vehicle in the garage. He calls to his wife and the befuddled couple decide to pull the handle on the side of the gizmo. Suddenly, a beam of light shoots forth and Roger and his wife have a second car, an exact duplicate of the first!

So Roger and Helen do what any couple in their situation would do… they begin to "borrow" cars, clothing, and furniture from stores and duplicate them, effectively creating a world of comfort around them for next to nothing. But every miracle has a rational explanation and the yellow gizmo that creates "Two of a Kind" is no exception. The aliens who own the machine come to claim it and bring it back to their planet, also repossessing all of Roger and Helen’s new goodies. Greed is bad. Let this be a lesson to anyone in a similar situation; grab a stack of cash and start duplicating. It's much easier than doing all that shopping.

A quartet of lumberjacks have a philosophical discussion about whether trees have feelings or brains as they saw a particularly large specimen right in front of them. But the darn thing refuses to fall even when it’s been sawed completely through. The secret to "The Tree That Wouldn’t Fall" is the eagle that nests in its high branches. Nature sticks together.

The best is saved for last. In "The Man Who Never Came Back," Mark Bond finds no happiness in the surface world, so he volunteers for a dangerous deep-sea dive in a one-man submarine. Reaching depths no man has ever reached, Mark is excited until the engine stops working and the sea's pressure begins to crush the sub. At the last second, he is saved and emerges from the craft into an undersea world. Mark's found Atlantis. Above, his comrades mourn the loss of their friend.

What could easily have been maudlin junk evolves into a genuinely sweet story of a man who just doesn't fit in and finds his little bit of heaven in the least likely of places. The Sale art is not bad, but it's a bit primitive and safe.-Peter

Mystic 38

Cover by Carl Burgos

"The Man Who Listened" (a: Paul Reinman) ★

"When Time Stood Still" (a: Ed Winiarski?) ★1/2

"To Touch the Stars" (a: Dick Ayers & Ernie Bache) ★★1/2

"The Man Who Mailed a Dollar" (a: Art Peddy) ★★1/2

"She Saw Tomorrow" (a: Jay Scott Pike) ★★1/2

Mort Snyder was "The Man Who Listened": to complaints every day from disgruntled hotel patrons. He begins to let it get to him and it affects his behavior at home, until one night he has a dream. The next day, he's cheerful and happy to listen to complaints. Why not? In his dream, he witnessed St. Peter demonstrate how to listen to complaints for almost 2000 years!

I doubt any kid in 1955 was happy to reach page five of this tepid morality play and see St. Peter sitting there in the last panel. What could placate the Comics Code Authority more than a story with the guy who has the Keys to the Kingdom? Not a vampire or a ghoul in sight.

People had differing reactions "When Time Stood Still" all over the world. Bosses were happy that 5 o'clock never came, but employees weren't thrilled. In a barn out in the country, a farmer awakens Father Time, who dozed off. Suddenly, all of the clocks resume keeping time.

This story is slightly better than the one before it for two reasons: the art is a bit more appealing, and there is one less page. I was hoping for an appearance by Klaatu, but no such luck. Check out this video on a related topic.

When members of an alien race land on the moon and discover that a scientist on Earth has invented a time drive that will allow humans to venture into space, they decide that an alien named Ackt-Muur must travel to Earth and kill the scientist before he shares his discovery. Ackt-Muur hops in a spaceship and flies to Earth, where Dr. Caleb Howard, the man who invented the time drive, ignores the frantic barks of his faithful dog outside. As Ackt-Muur approaches the house, ray-gun at the ready, the pooch attacks and kills him. Dr. Howard welcomes two scientists, excited to share his discovery, and pokes his head out the door to holler at his dog to quiet down, unaware that the hound has saved his master and made space exploration possible.

Now we're talking! "To Touch the Stars" may not win any awards for originality, but the art is decent and the story is fun. There's one especially nice panel by Dick Ayers and Ernie Bache that I've reproduced here.

Gus Marek is a construction worker who yearns to do something productive in his spare time, so he becomes "The Man Who Mailed a Dollar" in response to an ad. A five-page mimeographed course in art arrives in the mail, and Gus devotes his days off to learning to paint. He starts to appreciate the beauty all around him and, after a year, seeks out the man who mailed him the course.

He soon finds a starving artist who says that, while he's been painting all his life, he's never made any money, so he decided to advertise an art course by mail "'to lure dollars from dreamers.'" Gus was the only person to respond! Gus gives his heartfelt thanks to the artist, who is shocked to hear Gus's name, since he knows that Gus Marek is the subject of a sensational one-man show at the Municipal Museum of Art! The artist rushes home to search for the art course but can't locate it.

This is a clever, enjoyable story that plays off of the sort of ads one would expect to see in comic books like Mystic. In fact, two pages after the story's end, a page of small ads includes one that reads, "Song Poems Wanted. To be set to music. Send your poems for free examination. Phonograph records made." Who knows? Perhaps a young Keith Richards wrote off in response to this ad and learned the craft of songwriting. If not in this world, perhaps in one of the infinite number of parallel worlds that surely exist.

The citizens of Somerton don't care for Rosella, the fortune teller. Loudmouthed Emil Parkins gives her 24 hours to pack her things and leave town. Rosella tells Parkins that she'll tell his fortune and, if it doesn't come true, she'll leave Somerton forever. Looking into her crystal ball, she predicts that he's about to go on a journey, but he scoffs at the suggestion. The next morning, Emil wakes up to find himself in bed, but his bed is in a town square 50 miles away!

Rosella tells more fortunes for free and they all come true. Jeff Morse, the town loafer and the only man who shows kindness toward the fortune teller, suggests that if people actually paid Rosella to tell fortunes, they might get better news. This works quite well and, before you know it, Rosella has a big pile of cash. Half of the money flies out of the tent and into the abandoned shack that Jeff calls home. What the heck is going on? Don't ask Rosella or Jeff--ask the microscopic men and women who inhabit her crystal ball and have been using their wonderful powers to make the crazy predictions come true!

Arrgh! "She Saw Tomorrow!" was shaping up to be a good story until that last panel, which was supposed to be a surprise twist but which was just plain stupid. Rosella, Jeff, and the greedy folks in Somerton made for a nice narrative, but the uncredited writer was not satisfied with leaving things unexplained and had to rely on a group of little people with antennae (and a miniature jeep, to get around, I guess). Too bad. Wait a sec--did I enjoy three stories in a row in an Atlas comic? I need to go and lie down for a while.-Jack

Uncanny Tales 33

Cover by Joe Maneely

"The Man Who Couldn't Stand It!" (a: Bill Benulis) ★★

"The Warning!" (a: Manny Stallman) ★★1/2

"The Silent Man!" (a: John Forte) ★★

"The Vending Machine!" (a: George Roussos) ★

"A Secret Life" (a: Pete Tumlinson)

In the year 2034, all of man's needs are taken care of by robots and other mechanical devices, but Ben Olsen is "The Man who Couldn't Stand It!" Sick of the comforts of the future, he tells his wife Alice that they'll escape to the country and live a simpler life. When they arrive, he discovers, to his dismay, that she's brought along a few essentials--the robot servant and maid, the mechanical kitchen, bar, and cleaners, etc. Ben realizes that if he ever wants to get away, he'll have to do it alone.

In some ways, the world of 2034 is not unlike the world of today, with one big exception--Ben is not spending all his time staring at his cell phone! This story has a bit of a Ray Bradbury feel to it at first but, once again, the "twist" ending is a disappointment.

No one believes Dr. Abbott when he issues "The Warning!" about an army of four-armed invaders from space that is headed toward Earth. Everyone laughs at the doctor, whose attempts to tell the leaders of countries around the world fall on deaf ears. When the invaders finally arrive, Dr. Abbott is revealed to be one of them and he is gleeful at having proved that it will be easy to conquer Earth, whose inhabitants ignore warnings.

Manny Stallman draws some nice panels in the midst of these five pages, though when Dr. Abbott travels the world to warn the Queen of England and the Russian premier, the famous leaders are drawn utterly still, as if they are mannequins. The end of the story surprised me, but that doesn't mean it's very good.

A handsome young man saves pretty Helen Evans from drowning in a lake and, before you know it, he's having dinner with her parents and she's pining for a marriage proposal. There's only one problem: the man never says a word! What is the secret of "The Silent Man"? Helen learns, to her dismay, one evening when she attends a vaudeville show and sees the man sitting on the lap of a ventriloquist--he's a dummy!

Our old pal Carl Wessler penned this story and it makes about as much sense as so many others we've suffered through. If Theodore (at one point, the silent man points to a name written on his shirt pocket) is a wooden dummy, how can he do everything he's able to do? I suppose the point of the surprise ending is that he is given voice only by the ventriloquist, but that doesn't explain his ability to walk, save people (he also saves a little boy from being run over by a car), swim, and woo a pretty blonde.

An inventor at a vending machine company comes up with a new machine that he calls "Pick-A-Mate!" Long before internet dating sites popped up online, this machine would spit out a card with a photo and a phone number (for only a dollar!) of your perfect mate. It works great at first, with everyone finding their partner and marrying them, but eventually the machine malfunctions and the inventor discovers that it's getting ready to pick another vending machine as its own perfect mate!

George Roussos is a decent artist, but this story is filled with people talking to each other and pictures of a vending machine. For the umpteenth time, the twist ending falls flat. Why would the machine be looking for a mate? And why would that cause it to malfunction, as it does right before the inventor looks inside? Wessler doesn't bother to tell the reader--it just ends.

Old Tom, the night watchman at a Hollywood studio, never talks to anyone while he's working. Every night, however, when he's alone, the sets come alive and Tom seems to be in one movie after another, living out exciting lives. In the morning, he's quiet again and the actors and actresses remark on what a dull life he must lead.

"A Secret Life" doesn't even have a surprise ending--I think we're supposed to chuckle at the irony of the studio denizens' lack of understanding of Tom's inner/fantasy life. It makes sense for a change, but it's not particularly entertaining.-Jack

Next Week...
The Debut of Aquaman!