The Marvel/Atlas
Horror Comics
Horror Comics
Part 128
December 1956 Part I
by Peter Enfantino
and Jack Seabrook
Cover by Joe Maneely
"They Walk Thru Walls!" (a: Paul Reinman) ★★
(r: Beware #8)
"Afraid to Dream!" (a: Jack Kirby) ★★1/2
"Something Waits for Me!" (a: Bob Forgione) ★★★
"No Answer" (a: John Forte) ★★
(r: Beware #2)
"The Face in the Glass!" (a: Dave Berg) ★★1/2
"Voodoo!" (a: Gene Colan) ★★1/2
(r: Strange Tales #172)
Clayton is about to attempt a coup but his efforts are delayed by men who walk through walls. The strangers abduct Clayton and take him to their hilltop prison but, upon arrival, he escapes when he learns that his kidnappers cannot use force against him. Days later, he's picked up and brought to a hospital in bad shape. His rantings about men who walk through walls draw the attention of a psychiatrist who listens intently to Clayton's story. He then gives his findings to the hospital staff, asserting that the patient is indeed insane. Work done, the shrink walks through a wall. "They Walk Through Walls!" is a four-page preachy about hope in a world of violence that feels more like forty pages but is tolerable thanks to the Paul Reinman art.
I have no idea what the uncredited writer of "Afraid to Dream!" was striving for here; it's either a brilliant climax or a cliched twist, take your pick. Usually, a plot device like Kartu would be mentioned early in the story so that when the hammer falls there's a bit of context, but not here. More important than the muddled message is the first appearance of Jack Kirby in a Timely/Atlas/Marvel comic in the 15 years (well, before I'm called out for bad research, yes, I know Jack drew a story the previous month in Battleground, but this is the artist's debut in an Atlas genre funny book), since he and Joe Simon pulled up anchor and headed for the more lucrative waters of DC.
Scientists Ted and Bob discover a bottomless fissure in the desert and Ted enters the crack to investigate. When he finally exits, Ted claims that the fissure is just a harmless hole in the Earth and best left alone. Bob realizes there's something very odd about his pal and, when they get back to the lab, his fears are justified when Ted grabs the super-secret rocket test data and heads for the crack in the desert. Realizing Ted is under some kind of evil spell, Bob races to the fissure and heaves a stack of dynamite into the chasm. Spell broken, Ted returns to normal and Bob decides it's best that his buddy never knows he was about to be a traitor.
Burdock is working on a big gadget called a "Space Transmitter" that will hopefully open new doors for mankind (or at least sell more units than a four-slice toaster) but his boss, Mr. Petty (whose name is a little too on the nose, methinks), is leaning on him for quick results. When it comes time for a demonstration, nothing happens, there is "No Answer" from the great beyond, and Petty fires the young mastermind. Billions of miles away, a message is received and atomic weapons that had been aimed at our world are repositioned. You see, Burdock inadvertently saved mankind from total destruction. I would have liked to see a few more panels explaining why the distant planet was preparing to blast Earth into a zillion pieces in the first place.
Gene Colan's gorgeous penciling elevates "Voodoo!" from a mediocre trifle to something worth having a look at. Claude Carvel uses voodoo dolls (well, actually voodoo statues) to climb the corporate ladder and displace the upper brass who have been keeping him down for years. Carvel becomes CEO after forcing the men to do unspeakable acts (like not replacing the filter in the coffee machine) but, in the end, it was all a dream! Carvel gets his promotion and swears off voodoo forever! I would have thought "voodoo" would have been on the list of CCA no-no words but evidently not. To be fair, this version of black magic wouldn't scare a five-year-old. Overall, one of the best post-code issues I've read.-Peter
Cover by Bill Everett
"I Switched Bodies!" (a: Reed Crandall) ★
"He Came from Nowhere" (a: Gray Morrow) ★1/2
"Prison Without Bars!" (a: Ed Winiarski) ★
"The Unseen" (a: Mac L. Pakula) ★★
"The Perfect Hideout!" (a: Syd Shores) ★★1/2
"The Swirling Mist!" (a: Joe Sinnott) ★1/2
Journey Into Mystery #41 begins with the absolutely ludicrous "I Switched Bodies!," wherein a brilliant (but old) scientist discovers a way to teleport his brain into that of a younger fella. He does so but faces the ultimate predictable irony when the police pick up his new body for missing a meeting with his parole officer.
Meanwhile, a very much younger but still brilliant scientist is busy inventing something so life-altering, so earth-shattering that he doesn't even blurt out what the marvel is! Anyway, he finishes this startling formula and just gets done bragging to his old lady when out of nowhere pops a very strangely-garbed individual who introduces himself as a man from the future. He's there to destroy the scientist's "work, the house, everything!"
He whips out a ray gun and just as he's about to zap the egghead and the egghead's wife with a Proton Projector, the scientist's butler reveals that he's a man from the future as well but he was sent to our present day to protect the professor and make sure the invention got invented. The butler zaps the bad guy and they both disappear back to the future, leaving the scientist and his wife to ponder the insignificance of life and whether it was worth it to risk death for no-tears shampoo. Well, no, I'm just being silly. I have to be to keep reading predictable nonsense like "He Came from Nowhere." What did Jimmy Buffet once say about Atlas post-code science fiction comic readers? "If we weren't crazy, we'd all go insane."
 |
| What in the world is wrong with Mr. Emory's arm? |
I'd like to say Ed Winiarski does what he can with the gawdawful Carl Wessler script for "Prison Without Bars!" but, with the wretched work Ed turns in, it's like a race to see who comes in first place. How will this experiment work going forward into the future? I picture a whole bunch of scientists sitting in a room concentrating on released cons making their way back into society and said scientists not inventing no-tears shampoo or other necessities of today's society.
When a spaceship lands and the hatch opens, scientists are thrown into a tizzy when the insides reveal... "The Unseen!" Yep, invisible aliens are wandering to and fro without even an invitation and scientists are left to ponder their next step. The government wants to destroy the ship and, they contend, "The Unseen" will be captured and destroyed. Meanwhile, eggheads want the ship studied so that voyages to other planets will be possible in months rather than years.
"The Perfect Hideout!" is a clever three-pager about a dictator fleeing from his enemies in a flying fortress. Deciding he'll be better off running on his own, he turns his gun on his three henchmen and orders them to leave him on a deserted island and head back to certain death in their homeland. But these henchmen aren't as dumb as they look. Nice Syd Shores penciling and a great climactic twist make this one the best of the bunch this issue. The finale, "The Swirling Mist!," is about a writer who's researching plantations and falls into one of them pesky time warps where he ends up vying for the hand of a Scarlett O'Hara wanna-be. It's got Joe Sinnott art so we know it's not a complete loss but is it asking too much for Carl Wessler to actually try to come up with something unpredictable and interesting?-Peter
Journey Into Unknown Worlds #52
Clyde Norris invents a radio receiver-transmitter that can pick up the voice of anyone on Earth and translate it! General Henson and his men arrive for a demo and the radio tunes in a voice that says there's a "Dinosaur-At-Large"! He's not from the past but rather the future--1967, to be exact. While running from the dino, the man explains that he raised it from a large egg he found in Arizona. Clyde guides the young man across a bridge and, when the dino follows, the bridge collapses and the dino falls in a lake. Suddenly, Clyde recognizes the voice, runs out to the barn, and smashes the big egg his son just found.
Marvel Tales #153
A group of men build a time machine and draw straws to see who will go back in time to stop John Cabell from discovering the principle of modern weapons. Helen Morrissey is not happy that her husband George draws the short straw, telling him that "It Can't Be Done!" He and the others insist it's no big deal, so it's back to 1756 for George. He breaks into Cabell's workshop and is overcome by Cabell and his assistant; he presses a button and pops back to 1956, where the time machine self-destructs. In 1756, Cabell picks up the gun that George dropped and declares that he's discovered his ultimate weapon.
Cover by Joe Maneely
"The Ice-Creatures Cometh!" (a: Dick Ayers) ★
"They Met at Midnight!" (a: Werner Roth) ★★
"When the Moon Vanished!" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★★
"The Pig That Prowled!" (a: Vic Carrabotta) ★★
"A World to Conquer" (a: Larry Lieber) ★1/2
"Dinosaur-at-Large" (a: Paul Reinman) ★★
Henry Garov is exploring an Arctic glacier when he finds a group of men dressed like Vikings who are frozen in the ice alongside a large cache of gold bars. Although Garov is already rich, greed takes over and he digs out the gold ingots; in the process, the Viking-types thaw out. Their leader, Rahvig, explains that they came from beneath the Earth 2000 years ago and tried to conquer the world but were defeated by Vikings, who sealed them and their gold in an Arctic cavern, where they have been in suspended animation ever since.
In exchange for the promise of the gold and a leadership role when the creatures take over the world, Garov agrees to help them. He flies off and soon returns with a dozen ships. The creatures begin to invade and take over counties one by one, but when they're heading for Henry's country his son signs up for the army to fight against them. When Rahvig arrives, Henry tells him to load all his men onto ships and Henry will make it easy for them to conquer his nation. Instead, after the creatures board the ships, Henry tricks them into sailing into another Arctic glacier, where they are once again frozen. Henry's son is proud of his father for sacrificing his ships to save his son and his country.
Who else but Carl Wessler could shoehorn 50 pages of ridiculous plot into a four-page dud like "The Ice-Creatures Cometh!"? None of it makes a lick of sense and Dick Ayers's art is as uninspired as ever. The final twist, where the greedy Henry turns out to be a good guy after all, is nonsense. He could have stopped the creatures on page one rather than going through this elaborate scheme to refreeze them. And what of the other countries they conquered, where puppet leaders were put in place? What now? The most interesting thing about this story is Wessler's use of the adjective "Quisling"--did kids in the '50s know the term?
Silas Norby may be 65 years old, but that doesn't stop him from lusting after pretty Donna Mack, who is just 24. Silas learns of a man who can help and visits Borovo on Greymist Island. Borov takes a photo of Silas and repaints it to make him look like he's in his early 20s--suddenly, Silas looks younger, too! Borovo wants $5K but Silas only has $100, so he strongarms the artist/wizard and takes off for home with his retouched photo.
Love quickly blooms between Silas and Donna, but one night he returns home to find his photo ripped to shreds and his mirror image 65 years old again. Silas rushes back to Greymist Island and pays Borovo the $5K, which means he appears young again. To his surprise, Donna reveals that she also has a retouched photo from Borovo!
Again, Wessler needlessly complicates what should be a straightforward story, but it works a bit better in "They Met At Midnight!" in part due to the competent, workmanlike graphics by Werner Roth. The happy ending, where Silas and Donna share a hearty laugh when they discover that they are both older folks masquerading as younger folks, is disappointing.
"When the Moon Vanished!" scientists were puzzled, so a pilot named Jeff Stone decides to fly the first spaceship to where the moon was last seen so he can determine what happened. After a month in space, his ship is pulled down onto the dark side of the moon, where one-eyed aliens explain that the dark side is the secret home of the Galaxy Government. When the dark side began to shift, they used shadow lamps to hide their location from Earthlings and, as a result, the moon could not be seen.
The aliens tell Jeff to fly back to Earth and not disclose what he's learned; if he can do that, it will demonstrate that Earth is ready to join the Galaxy Government. Jeff gets home and tells everyone, unaware that he has landed on a parallel world where the people were warned about what was going on. On the real Earth, no one knows where Jeff went!
Yet another story about how Earthlings aren't advanced enough to join the higher beings in the rest of the galaxy. The only good things here are Robert Sale's yellow, one-eyed aliens, who are kind of cute.
Police are amused when Prof. Watson bursts into the station house sounding the alarm that the pig has escaped! He explains that he developed a serum that would stimulate mental growth and gave it to a guinea pig, which quickly became a genius, tied the prof to his bed, and left a note promising revenge on humanity. Watson takes the cops to his lab and demonstrates on another guinea pig; as a result, they put out an A.P.B. for "The Pig That Prowled." Days later, it turns out that the professor actually gave himself the serum and fooled the cops into thinking a crime wave was the fault of the guinea pig. Fortunately, the chief of police also took a shot of the serum and figured out Watson's scheme.
The story is so silly that I enjoyed it, especially the whiplash on page four between the professor admitting that there was no rampaging genius guinea pig and the police chief taking matters into his own hands! Carrabotta's art is just right for the story.
John Lorimer has invented a machine that will take him anywhere in the universe at the push of a button, so he likes to practice planting the flag of Earth in order to be ready when he finds "A World to Conquer." His wife, Helen, worries that things won't go so smoothly. Just as John is about to transport himself to Mars, a Martian appears and plants the flag of Mars on Earth. John hopes the Martian won't be as callous as he had planned to be!
This is the first artwork we've seen from Larry Lieber, Stan Lee's younger brother, and it's not much good. The story is heavy-handed and mercifully brief at three pages. The only notable item is the four-armed Martian.
It's too bad Paul Reinman's art continues its downhill slide--he was one of the better Golden Age comic artists. Once again, Carl Wessler tries to jam too much dialogue into a short story and ends up making things unbelievable. If I were running from a dinosaur, I don't think I'd go into the entire origin story, but that's just me.-Jack
Cover by Bill Everett
"They Prowl on Earth!" (a: Herb Familton) ★1/2
"No One Can See Me!" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★
"It Can't Be Done!" (a: Ted Galindo) ★
"The Last Man Alive!" (a: Ed Winiarski) ★★
"Scare at Sea!" (a: Bill Everett) ★★1/2
"Saucer in the Sky!" (a: Pete Morisi) ★★
Joe Maddon has not succeeded in striking oil. As he sits moping, he realizes he can hear the thoughts of a nearby group of successful oilmen as they discuss a new territory. Joe stows away on their plane, dozes off, and wakes up when it lands. Outside, he sees oil derricks and hears the oilmen's thoughts as they reveal that the men are actually from the planet Mercury! Joe runs to a nearby town to rile up the citizens, but when a mob follows him back to confront the oilmen he realizes that he's on Mercury and they're all against him.
Broken record time: Carl Wessler can't seem to write a story that makes sense from page one to page four. Oilmen? Mercury? Herb Familton's art in "They Prowl on Earth!" is an odd mix of scratchy faces and swipes from photos.
Lyle Mercer orchestrates the death of the professor for whom he works and plans to sell the old man's invisibility serum to the highest foreign bidder. He goes to a swanky party where everyone avoids him, so he thinks he must have gotten some of the serum on himself and become invisible. On his way home, his car crashes in the fog and he dies in the same way the professor did. What he didn't know was that the people at the party were just pretending to ignore him and that the professor left a note saying that the formula didn't work.
Robert Q. Sale's weak art isn't enough to elevate this story to the level of mildly interesting. It mustn't be by Carl Wessler, though, because "No One Can See Me!" makes sense, inane as it is.
The third story in this issue to feature lousy art is the umpteenth version of the time travel story where an inadvertent act changes the course of history. Do they all trace their lineage back to Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder?" Someone more knowledgeable about science fiction would know the answer. Of course, in a 1956 Atlas four-pager, there is no subtlety or consideration of ramifications--George takes a gun to 1756, drops it, Cabell finds it. Done.
Freddy Kruger (!) lives on a colony and works at a machine that teleports goods to Earth in the blink of an eye; it would take two lifetimes to fly from the colony to Earth. Freddy hates living on the colony and wants to teleport to Earth, but that's against the rules, so he comes up with a plan: he sends a note to Earth saying everyone else is dead and begs to be allowed to use the teleportation machine. His ruse works and "The Last Man Alive!" (or so he claims) finds himself on Earth. There's just one problem: he claimed that everyone on the colony died of a plague, so he's locked away alone until a cure can be found!
I was pleasantly surprised by the twist ending of this one, which actually makes sense. Jack Oleck is the writer and it seems like he has the capacity to tell a less complicated story than Carl Wessler. Ed Winiarski is not one of the better Atlas artists, but the final panel is unexpectedly good. When I saw the teleportation device I figured this would rip off The Fly, but no such luck--we'll have to be satisfied with the first appearance of the guy from Nightmare on Elm Street, though Kruger is spelled differently.
Two Chinamen on a fishing boat are scared away by a sea serpent, not realizing that it is a fake that is positioned atop a submarine. The crew of the sub gloat until their vessel is pulled down to the depths by a real sea serpent that was attracted by the sounds of the fake monster.
It may only be three pages long, but "Scare at Sea!" demonstrates that Bill Everett had the ability to draw circles around his colleagues at Atlas. The large panel on page one looks great, as does the final panel with the real sea serpent.
Bart Tearle fills in for the editor of the Clarion-Express and immediately prints a sensational headline about a "Saucer in the Sky!" Scientists demand proof and Searle shows them grainy film footage of Mercurians landing and disembarking. The Army mobilizes in order to respond to the invasion. Editor Frank Bowles returns from vacation and does some digging; he quickly discovers that Bart fabricated his resume. Bart admits it was all a hoax and slinks away. Or does he? Bart hops in his flying saucer and returns to Mercury, where he explains that he has set the stage for an invasion of Earth. Too bad the scientists and leaders on Mercury don't believe that Earth is inhabited! I remember Pete Morisi from his work at Charlton and his art style here looks just the same. The story is kind of funny, but the conclusion is in line with what we've seen countless times before.-Jack
 |
| Next Week... Neal Adams... Thank You, Sir! Can We Have Another? |
