The Marvel/Atlas
Horror Comics
Horror Comics
Part 156
April-June 1958
by Peter Enfantino
and Jack Seabrook
Cover by Joe Maneely
"The Girl Who Walked Thru Stone!" (a: Ruben Moreira) ★
"The Man Nobody Knew!" (a: Joe Maneely) ★★
"The Invaders!" (a: Werner Roth) ★★1/2
"Filled With Hate" (a: Angelo Torres) ★★
"It Happened That Night" (a: Herb Familton) ★
"Alone in the Night!" (a: George Roussos) ★★
Rollery is just another mine-digging grunt when he stumbles upon Lialda, "The Girl Who Walked Thru Stone!" One day, deep in the mines, the fetching beauty materializes from a thick slab of stone and begs Rollery to halt the digging of the mine. The excavation, the beauty claims, is destroying her home world of Shala. The inhabitants are readying a journey to what will become Shala II, deep beneath Australia, but they need a few months to (ostensibly) dig their way further underground (nearly missing the core, I hope); could Rollery throw up a bit of confusion in order to stop the dig? Lialda promises she'll come back for him.
The circulation for the Wickston Star-Times increases one thousand fold when its obit editor, Tom Thurty, begins running news items before they happen. Naturally, mobsters want a piece of Thurty and, in the end, they get their just desserts. The reveal for "The Man Nobody Knew!" is from out of the blue (seems Thurty was a ghost the entire time!), but I've learnt that I'll even read through a Carl Wessler script like this if it's adorned with Joe Maneely's pencils.
In "It Happened That Night," George Bowers insults a fakir while the man is performing in the street and suffers the magic man's wrath. George is given a pair of seemingly harmless glasses but he can see into the future... including his own fate. On page one, I saw into the future. Last up is "Alone in the Night!," wherein con man Fred Standish is wandering the docks looking for easy prey. He finds it in Nora Nichols, who owns a nice yacht moored at the pier. He tells her how gorgeous she is and he's not at all interested in her millions. She buys it... or does she? The reveal (that Nora is also a thief who was cursed to travel in this yacht until she could lure someone in to take her place) is a variant we've seen several times before, be it the adventurer and the temple of gold or the genie in the bottle, but the final panels of George screaming from the bowels of the seabound yacht are fairly chilling.-Peter
Cover by Bill Everett (?) & Joe Maneely
"Prisoner of the Fantastic Fog" (a: Angelo Torres) ★★
(r: Weird Wonder Tales #7)
"Nightmare at Midnight" (a: Jim Mooney) ★
(r: Weird Wonder Tales #7)
"The Sinister Stone" (a: Ed Winiarski) ★1/2
(r: Vault of Evil #11)
"He Never Reached the Ground!" (a: Alfonso Greene) ★
(r: Crypt of Shadows #19)
"He's Coming to Get Me!" (a: Ted Galindo) ★
(r: Giant-Size Werewolf #5)
"The Mad Scientist!" (a: Ross Andru & Jack Abel) ★1/2
(r: Frankenstein #11)
In a panic, Sam races out the door and nearly into the arms of a beat cop. As if fortune were smiling down upon him, Sam is suddenly surrounded by a thick mist. When the mist clears, he's about two inches tall and an alley cat is eyeing him as a toy. Sam swears he'll go straight if the powers that be will only return him to normal size. Just like that, Sam is his old self again and turning himself in to the beat cop. Meanwhile, his brother sighs and admits his formula will probably never work.
The (uncredited) writer of "Prisoner of the Fantastic Fog" was obviously influenced by the recently-released The Incredible Shrinking Man, which also uses sinister mist and a big cat. The difference (well, there are a lot of differences, quality-wise) is that the CCA demands a semi-happy ending, so Sam Morgan lives to see another day (albeit as a jailbird), whereas the film's Scott Carey keeps shrinking into nothingness. A fun bit of trivia is provided by the GCD: brilliant but fashion-blind junior scientist Jerry Morgan would later resurface as a member of "the Headmen" in Defenders #21 (March 1975).
Wait, did I say "Nightmare at Midnight" contained the clumsiest twist of the month? Well, let me just correct myself here and state outright that "He Never Reached the Ground!" is even more inane. Window washer Wally Ober loses his footing and takes a tumble thirty-five floors to the street... or rather, he would have hit the ground if his grandfather had not discovered the land of the magical Lamas and therefore earned a sort of security force to save his descendants, should they be in peril. Luckily, Wally disappears about two feet from the ground and reappears in the land of the Lamas, where he vows to stay for the rest of his days. Seemingly stitched together from various parts of discarded scripts, "He Never..." is, literally, three pages of panels depicting Wally falling past the windows of each floor and a final page of exposition. Wally never reaches the ground but Atlas is nearing the bottom of the barrel.
A man bearing a comatose young boy appears in the laboratory of really smart genius scientist, Dr. Mark Ferris. The stranger tells the Doc that the boy has contracted a strange disease and must be put into Ferris's experimental cryo-chamber. The boy must be frozen for a while until a cure can be found for the disease and Mark's research may have already drummed up the foundation for that cure... at least that's what I think all the scientific mumbo-jumbo boils down to. To make a really long story short (SPOILER ALERT!! but if you can't guess the holy smokes surprise from the first page, you're pretty thick), the visitor is Mark from the near future, where they've perfected time travel, and the kid is Mark's future son. The trip back to his younger self triggered Future-Mark's memory and now he can cure his son. Or something like that. How should I know? This is the kind of thing Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein would do just about every other month in Weird Science and Fantasy and the worst variation those boys cooked up is much better than this microwaved pap. At least the art's decent.-Peter
Cover by Bill Everett
"He Never Came Out!" (a: Alfonso Greene) ★
"Uncork It... If You Dare!" (a: Howard O'Donnell) ★★
"The Drowning Man!" (a: Christopher Rule) ★
"Flight Number Thirteen!" (a: Ruben Moreira) ★1/2
"The Melting Pot" (a: John Forte) ★1/2
"Too Good to Be True!" (a: Don Perlin) ★
A shady local character named Joe Morse admires the statutes in Cartel's wax museum but doesn't believe Cartel's story about creating them from real criminals by means of the head of Medusa. Joe's pal Atkins wants nothing to do with Joe's plan to rob the wax museum and, after Morse headed in to do the deed, "He Never Came Out!" Cartel changes the number on the sign outside from 36 to "37 Lifelike Figures" and Atkins has an idea of where Joe ended up.
Alfonso Greene's art is about on par with this poorly written opener. First of all, if Cartel uses the head of Medusa to turn baddies to stone, why are they in a wax museum? Does he cover the stone statutes with wax? And how hard up must Joe be to want to rob a place that charges 25 cents to get in?
It's 1962 and Harold Simpson is a sad sack whose wife complains that he should ask the boss for a raise. He inherits a bottle of a strange substance that his Uncle Abner picked up in India and Harold reads that, if he uncorks the vessel, it will release a gas that can reverse a man's personality. Planning to make himself into an assertive, successful fellow, Harold walks by the United Nations building and hears world leaders threatening each other. He uncorks the bottle and the diplomats become madmen, physically attacking their fellows. Harold chooses the better part of valor and runs into the building, where he smashes the bottle on the floor. The diplomats revert to their original personalities, stop arguing, and avert war. No one knows that Harold saved the world!
I know it's corny, but I kind of liked "Uncork It...If You Dare!" I don't know why Carl Wessler (the GCD thinks he wrote it) set it five years in the future, but it's an accurate picture of the way things would be. I expected Harold to become a jerk and learn his lesson, but I never guessed he'd use the gas on the men at the U.N. The end, where they work out their differences, is predictable, but at least the parts leading up to it were unexpected.
After giving a man a free lunch at the Beachtime Diner, the man gives Joe Fulsom a coin that appears to come from Atlantis. Joe follows the man to the beach and sees him walk into the water. Diving in to save what he thinks is "The Drowning Man!," Joe witnesses guards from the lost city banishing murderers to live above the water. Joe blacks out and awakens in a hospital room in Atlantis, where he is happy to hear that the telepathic inhabitants determined that he is a good man and may stay in the perfect world.
That's an awful lot to pack into three poorly drawn pages. Christopher Rule's art looks like something we'd see in the back of a 1940s comic and doesn't do the writer any favors.
The pilots of "Flight Number Thirteen!" from Bulgaria take off with a plane full of passengers but are shocked and dismayed to see that all of the passengers are sitting in their seats, completely still, with sad looks on their faces. Franz and Ivan, the pilots, don't really care--they're only concerned with letting the passengers off in a forest and getting away with the cash from last night's bank robbery. The plane suddenly goes out of control, diving to avoid a storm and landing on its own power. When it lands, the passengers exit, suddenly cheerful to no longer be stranded in a parallel world. The pilots think they can hide out here and enjoy their wealth, but they will soon go into a trance and feel only sadness, as the passengers did. It's too bad Ruben Moreira's artwork is wasted on such junk. This story is utterly pointless.
A prisoner named Sam Barlow invents "The Melting Pot," a gizmo that melts all the steel in the area when it's turned on. He uses it to escape from the slammer and, once he's safely ensconced in a hideout, Sam uses the pot to steal a ton of gold bars. Satisfied with his haul, he bends the machine's oscillating lever out of shape so that it will no longer affect steel. Unfortunately, now it melts gold, and soon Sam is swimming in liquid gold, begging the cops to rescue him. I don't know how John Forte managed to do it, but the art on this one isn't half bad, even though the story is ridiculous. I read the Wikipedia page on Atlas Comics (though we're now into the Independent Comics period and Atlas is no more) and learned about the supposed discovery of scads of bad comic pages in a closet. This led to most of the artists being let go. I have to wonder if the comics we're reading now feature some of that found bad work.
The last story in this issue is called "Too Good to Be True!" The best thing about it is that it's only four pages long. A kid named Danny is jealous of the other boys, whose aunts and uncles give them swell gifts, so he invents an Uncle George. To his surprise, Uncle George appears and begins to shower the lad with gifts. His friends grow jealous and start to suggest that Uncle George is made up. Eventually, Danny begins to wonder if his uncle is a thief and brings a cop to his trailer. Uncle George then fades away, telling Danny that he was the product of his faith. Now that Danny can accept reality he has taken the first step toward manhood. When I saw that Don Perlin drew this one, I suspected we were in for trouble and I was right. His art is not much different than it would be years later on Werewolf By Night. That's not a compliment.-Jack
Cover by Bill Everett
"The Face in the Glass!" (a: John Forte) ★1/2
(r: Frankenstein #10)
"The Next World" (a: Richard Doxsee) ★
(r: Giant-Size Chillers #2)
"Bedlam in Barnesville" (a: Jim Mooney) ★1/2
"Hallucination" (a: Alfonso Greene) ★★
"The Enemy!"(a: Manny Stallman) ★
"Hiding Place!" (a: Al Eadah) ★
Running from the cops after robbing a jewelry store, Boris Hann hides out at the cottage of Johan, the mirror maker. When Johnan sounds the alarm, Boris tackles him, leading the roly poly man to promise Boris a magic mirror that will change his appearance to that of anyone he wishes when he looks at "The Face in the Glass!" Suddenly young and handsome, Boris (being an Atlas villain) vows to use his newfound tool to help him commit more robberies. He blows open the safe in a mansion, grabs the jewels, and is spotted by the caretaker. Boris heads back to town and his magic mirror, knocking an old man to the ground in his haste. He reaches his room, looks in the mirror, and makes a wish. The cops burst in and find Boris, lying dead on the floor and gazing into the mirror. He wished to change his face into that of the old man he knocked down, unaware that the old man suffered a fatal heart attack--and the same thing happened to Boris.
Some Atlas stories elicit yawns. Some elicit eye rolls. Some elicit groans. This one elicited a "huh?" When Johan gives Hans the magic mirror, he says it will change his appearance. There is nothing about suffering the fate of the person whose appearance he takes on. I guess that's the trick and we're supposed to think Johan held back that bit of information on purpose? The ending doesn't really work and Forte's half-page first panel is awful.
Out in the desert, a mirage looks like a city and a scientist named Benson has invented a machine to pull living things out of the mirage and into our world. He demonstrates by pulling a bird into the desert and now wants to take it one step further by summoning a man. His colleagues try to stop him, but that night he goes forward with his experiment and finds himself in "The Next World," where everyone thinks the desert is just a mirage. Richard Doxsee should be commended for taking this disaster of a script and giving it visual life. I had to go back and forth and read it a few times to make any sense of it.
When a string of home robberies create "Bedlam in Barnesville," the neighbors blame eccentric old coot Hank Brody. Nick Gabel leads a posse of torch-bearing citizens to Hank's house and the old man runs off. In the days that follow, entire houses begin to vanish! The stolen goods are found in the space that used to be occupied by Nick's house and it turns out that Hank had been feeding termites, which made short work of all the houses. Jim Mooney can always be counted on for solid, if uninspired, artwork, but this is yet another story that makes absolutely no sense. At the start, the townsfolk think Brody is nuts because he appears to be spreading birdseed and then shoos the birds away with a rolled up newspaper. At the end, it turns out that he was feeding termites and keeping the birds away. But why? And what termites could devour house after house overnight? Don't fantasy stories require some internal logic?
Cooper insists that something is getting into his mind, but Dr. Morse insists it's just a "Hallucination." Eventually, Cooper insists that his mind is being searched by aliens who are investigating the possibility of invasion. The doctors thinks he's nuts, but one night an alien force exits Cooper's mind and heads back to outer space to report that humans are completely irrational and Earth is worthless to invade. The doctors agree that Cooper thinks he's the only one who can save humanity--no wonder he's been in the State Hospital for the Insane for years!
Now that's an ending I did not see coming. What a relief! This story is in the vein of others we've read, such as the one where aliens take over a dog and think it's a representative of the highest form of life on Earth (which it actually may be). Still, any glimmer of originality or entertainment is welcome at this point.
A bolt of lightning zaps a dinosaur egg that had been lying in a cave for a very long time. A T-Rex hatches and grows to its full size. It encounters "The Enemy," another great big dino that defeats it in battle, and it limps back to the cave from whence it came. On a movie set, two workmen wonder where the other dino came from that just battled their robot dino.
This one definitely elicited a groan and Manny Stallman's dinosaurs are nothing special.
Richard has invented a machine that he calls an electronic receiver. It can look into the past, see what someone was doing, and retrieve things thought lost from their "Hiding Place!" His no good gambler cousin Herb sees dollar signs and uses the machine to find out where a fortune was hidden a decade before. Herb rounds up some other gamblers and they all head to the Brazilian jungle to get the loot, but Richard discovers that the machine has been used. He finds Herb with the aid of the machine, retrieves the map, and destroys it and the receiver, leaving Herb in the jungle with three angry crooks. If the rest of this issue (save "Hallucination") weren't so bad, this story would be the worst, but it benefits from the bad company. Art and writing are well below average.-Jack
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| Next Week... Blink and You'll Miss the Atlas Career of Richard Bassford |
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