Journey Into Strange Tales Issue 165: Atlas/Marvel Science Fiction & Horror Comics!

 

The Marvel/Atlas 
Horror Comics

Part 150

June 1957 Part II

by Peter Enfantino

and Jack Seabrook

Mystical Tales #7

Cover by Bill Everett

"The Secret of the Haunted Picture" (a: Angelo Torres) ★★

(r: Beware 7)

"Hide and Shriek" (a: John Forte) ★1/2

(r: Journey Into Mystery #12)

"The Living  Shadows!" (a: Doug Wildey) ★★

"It Happened in the Attic!" (a: Frank Bolle) ★

(r: Marvel Chillers #1)

"Too Smart to Live!" (a: Ed Winiarski) ★★

"The Man Who Can't Be Stopped" (a: Joe Orlando) ★★

Artist Nelson Arne is in a bit of a slump... well, maybe the word "slump" doesn't apply. Nelson doesn't have a career at all, thanks to his unimaginative doodles and some prickly critics. Then one night, while feeling sorry for himself, Nelson meets a man in the park who promises he can grant the artist fame and fortune for one year if he then hands over his soul.

Nelson scoffs and tells the man to go away (important detail that). The next day, two delivery men arrive at Arne's door and drop off a pane of glass meant to replace one that had broken in his apartment. Nelson looks long into the glass and a nightmarish scene appears. Overtaken by the horrid image, he begins to copy it on his canvas. The result is a masterpiece that immediately sells for a really big price. Sure enough, Nelson Arne the artist has arrived. After one year of success, the bill comes due. There's a twist in the climax of "The Secret of the Haunted Picture" that is simultaneously effective and ridiculous. This could be the first "bargain with the devil" story since the code came along (even though Satan is never named); odd too since Arne never agrees to the pact. 

In "Hide and Shriek," George Karus loves a good practical joke, as long as it's being played on someone else. At one of his ritzy parties, the wealthy Karus stages a couple of particularly annoying acts of "humor" on his guests, leaving them fuming. To make amends, he announces there will be a treasure hunt and the winner will take home fifty grand. But, while the hunt is on, his guests all disappear and in their place stands Khala, Voodoo Headman of the African Veldt! Years before, George had played what he considered to be one of his best jokes on Khala, but the native found it somewhat less funny. Now, Khala tells George he must play this new kind of game, find the guests by the stroke of midnight, or face the consequences. Poor George has never been on the receiving end of these games and he's not finding this very funny.

Howard and his friends find an old map to a buried treasure, but the dang thing has no landmarks other than a tree and some rocks. How will they find out where this incredible sum is buried? Well, naturally, they decide to visit a swami and contact the spirit of the dead man who wrote the map! When the mapmaker, Lloyd Barton, materializes, he brings with him his beautiful fiance, Alice, and the two promise to lead the men to the treasure. Are Lloyd and Alice really spirits or con artists running a game? Well, at the climax of "The Living Shadows!," you certainly find out. It's a wordy and dopey tale, one that would have fit more comfortably in the pages of an Atlas romance title, but it's fairly entertaining. The Wildey art, however, is very 1940s and fits well with the story's World War II setting.

Roger has always been a selfish man but when his best friend invents a time machine, Roger does the unforgivable. Believing he can go back one hundred years and talk his great-grandfather into better investments (and thereby establish a larger inheritance for himself!), the scalawag steals the device and heads back in time. These time travel novices never end up better than before their trip and Roger, the lunk-headed protagonist of the three-page "It Happened in the Attic!," is no exception. 

Running from the law, Mike Morse falls off a cliff and finds himself trapped in a steep ravine. Luckily, a hiker comes along and offers to help the wanted man; unluckily, the new guy meets the same fate as Mike and very soon there are two trapped rats. The newcomer seems to have a case of amnesia and, quicker than you can say "I know I'm trapped in an Ed Winiarski strip where all the characters look alike anyway," Mike has convinced his would-be rescuer that he's the fleeing felon. Pretty brilliant scheme until the new guy starts thinking like a criminal. "Too Smart to Live!" has utterly atrocious graphics (Winiarski has a problem with human anatomy here as the arms of our characters seem to change shape and size every other panel) but I was surprised by the clever twist. Could be I'm that guy just searching the penny jar for a dime.

Professor Thornton has invented a gizmo that enables his mind to be a receiver of other thoughts. Yep, he can read minds! So, naturally, the brilliant and really smart genius decides to use his tool to rule mankind. Alas, poor Thornton didn't bank on the fact that the machine allows him to read billions of minds at the same time. The result is brain overload. "The Man Who Can't Be Stopped" is a strange title for a story about a deviant egghead who's stopped in the first couple of pages. The artwork is average; this one won't be found in any Best of Joe Orlando collections.-Peter

Spellbound #34

Cover by Carl Burgos

"In the Room of Darkness" 

(a: Al Williamson & Ralph Mayo) ★1/2

"The Man Who Was Twice" (a: Richard Doxsee) ★★1/2

"The Missing Nail!" (a: George Roussos) ★

"The Silent Shriek" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★

"The Mysterious Cargo" (a: Frank Bolle) ★★

"The Crooks Who Couldn't Be Caught!" (a: John Forte) ★

Swami Ram is helping rich Mrs. Peters contact her dead husband, Walter, through his mystical powers and doing a pretty good job, according to the old woman. That is, until the sage delivers a note supposedly written by the deceased, not knowing Walt couldn't write! The twist for "In the Room of Darkness" is pretty silly stuff (yeah, I know, it's all pretty silly stuff), considering the woman is buying the fact that her dead husband is actually contacting her but not quite buying the fact that St. Peter might have given Walter a lesson or two in penmanship before sending him through Heaven's turnstiles. GCD claims this one is penciled and inked by the great Williamson and Mayo, and those guys are so much more knowledgeable than I, but if it's Al & Ralph it's not their finest hour.

While the other wives boast of their husbands' virility, paychecks, and bravery, Joyce Haywood can only remain mum. Her husband Henry is a timid, sexless, half-man and she's so ashamed of him that she pays brilliant and really smart inventor Bernard Baldwin a small fortune to create a robotic twin of Henry to prove her friends wrong. While the real Henry is off on a business trip, the women invite Joyce and "Henry" along on a boating excursion and a fierce storm hits, tossing the women off the catamaran. Rather than hide under the picnic basket, "Henry" dives overboard and saves the girls from a watery doom, becoming the talk of the town for his bravery. Henry comes home from his trip and professes surprise that the women are bragging about his masculinity just as the doorbell rings. (To no one's) surprise, it's Professor Bernard here to deliver Robo-Henry with apologies for his lateness. You mean... brave Henry was the real Henry? Well, there's one more twist that makes "The Man Who Was Twice" much cleverer than its lame title. And then there's the tame GGA from Doxsee, who makes it worth the look as well.

A brilliant but forgetful chemist takes his horse in to be shod but forgets the incredible serum he created (to send man back to ancient times) on the back seat of the carriage. Not bothering to wonder if the substance is toxic or not, the blacksmith downs the potion and is sent twirling back to the time of King Richard III. King Dick is just as unhappy about his horse throwing a shoe and takes his wrath out on the hapless blacksmith. "The Missing Nail!" has a moronic script that's good for a few laughs but the whole thing seems like a mini-history review, complete with bad textbook illustrations.

When brilliant but meek inventor John Kent brings his new bug-killer gizmo to Mr. Carpenter to manufacture, the businessman is not impressed. That is, not until Kent warns the entrepreneur that if the machine's high frequency is turned way up, it could kill a human. Coincidentally, Carpenter is looking for a way to murder a business associate and get away with it! "The Silent Shriek" is just as mind-numbing as the previous tale and not much better to look at. 

In the three-page "The Mysterious Cargo," the world one hundred years in the future has witnessed severe climate change due to atomic testing and the temperature has increased dramatically. Within a specially refrigerated vehicle, two men race against time to deliver a precious item to a faraway museum. The item in question is a surprise but more surprising is how accurately the (uncredited) scripter predicted our current ecosystem's problems. Last up is "The Crooks Who Couldn't Be Caught!," wherein small-time crook Al Jenkins hits the big time when he starts dating a gorgeous telepath who doesn't seem to catch on when Al keeps asking her to read the minds of jewelry store owners as they're opening their safes. But the joke's on Al: the babe-a-licious blonde is really a stinkin' Commie sent to enlist an oaf to help her steal top secret blueprints from the defense department! 

And so closes the final issue of Spellbound after a long and bumpy run, the first victim of the apocalyptic "Atlas Implosion of 1957" (a good history lesson on the Implosion can be found here). Though there wasn't much to shout about in the eleven post-code issues (with Bill Benulis's "Eye Over the City" back in #24 being the only obvious standout), the pre-code version could be counted on for some solid thrills and chills. Two of the stories featured in those first 23 non-CCA issues made my "50 Best Atlas Stories" list: Bill Everett's "Horror Story" (from #2) and Tony DiPreta's "The City" (#18). -Peter

Strange Stories of Suspense #15

Cover by Carl Burgos

"Doomsday!" (a: George Woodbridge) ★1/2

"The Liquid of Life!" (a: Richard Doxsee) ★★

"The Man Who Forgot" (a: Sam Kweskin) ★

"The Sinister Suit" (a: Bernie Krigstein) ★★

"I Went Inside the Hidden World!" (a: William Weltman) ★

"The Terrible Timepiece!" (a: Paul Reinman) ★

When Tanya the gypsy looks into her crystal ball and says what she sees, you'd better listen! She announces that a stranger fleeing like a fox will arrive at their camp and, sure enough, a crook on the run named Foxy Bertram turns up. The gypsies take him in and Tanya tells him that a falling, glowing rock will play a great role in his life. He discovers a gold nugget and convinces the gypsies to leave the area by telling them that a meteor is hurtling through space and will soon crash on the campsite. After they leave, Foxy stakes his claim and encounters "Doomsday!" when his prediction comes true and the meteor lands right where he's kneeling.

Who would have thought that would happen? George Woodbridge's art on this one is average and the reader can't say they're surprised by the ending, since Tanya spelled it all out for us.

Ralph Porter puts on his diving suit and descends to the ocean floor to plunder a sunken galleon's gold. While avoiding hungry tiger sharks, he sees people swimming under water with no breathing apparatus and follows them, finding an ancient Spanish civilization that features the Fountain of Youth. Ralph assumes that these folk are the same as those who were on the sunken galleon--they drink "The Liquid of Life!" and never age. The governor is not interested in Ralph's plan to bring machinery down to bottle the stuff and throws him in  jail. That night, Ralph escapes, grabs a sample of the special water, and returns to the surface, where the others on his ship scoff at his claims. Ralph drinks the water and suddenly begins gasping for breath--he now has gills and must be tossed back into the water to survive.

Leave it to Carl Wessler to present us with such a dizzying series of twists and turns that lead to a clunker of a finale. At least we have four pages of Richard Doxsee's artwork to enjoy; he has quickly joined the top tier of Atlas artists in 1957.

The first man to test a new time machine is disappointed to land on a deserted island, not knowing the date or where he is. As time passes and he struggles to survive, he becomes "The Man Who Forgot," unable to recall anything but his own name. He spies a ship and hopes to be rescued. At the same time, the inventor of the time machine realizes that the man will never return and crosses his name off the list of those willing to try it; the name is Robinson Crusoe. Hoo boy, this barely has enough to fill three badly drawn pages! In this month's Spellbound we had an appearance by Richard III and now we get this. The well is running dry.

At the 10th Street Rescue Mission, a bum named Danny puts on a fancy suit that had belonged to John Fletcher, a millionaire who disappeared last week and whom the police are still looking for. Danny takes a nap on a park bench and awakens to find himself in Fletcher's bedroom, where the butler tells him that the car is waiting. The chauffer takes off and Danny finds himself locked inside the car and left to drown when the driver leaps out just before the car sinks in a lake. Danny wakes up, back on the park bench and still clad in "The Sinister Suit"; he leads the cops to the lake, where they find Fletcher dead in his car, clutching a note that implicates the chauffeur.

When I see that Ed Winiarski or Robert Sale has drawn a story in an Atlas comic, my expectations are low and I am rarely disappointed. But when I see that the artist is Bernie Krigstein I expect more than we get in this tepid mystery-fantasy It looks like he, like the rest of the Atlas crew, is playing out the string until the big implosion.

A pair of scientists invent a microscope that shows them a microscopic world and that would allow someone to shrink to tiny size and visit the world for an hour before returning unharmed. The janitor overhears the men talking and, when they're gone, looks through the microscope and sees a giant diamond! He enters the machine, shrinks, visits the tiny world, steals the diamond, and returns to normal size, but when he reaches into his pocket he realizes that the diamond stayed microscopic.

Once again, I saw that one coming a mile away. William Weltman's art reminds me a bit of the work of Steve Ditko in certain panels, but overall it's nothing special.

A petty thief named Konrad Brugy robs an old man and drops his pocket watch as he runs from the police. Returning to look for it, he finds that it was crushed beneath their boots. Konrad visits a pawnbroker and buys a replacement that doubles as a very special stopwatch--when he presses the button, everything around him begins to defy gravity. Like every other Atlas protagonist, Konrad sees this as a way to make money and takes it to a series of important people, demanding ten million dollars for it. He finds a buyer in Colonel Ivan Gorovsky, whose government is about to drop a bomb on Konrad's Soviet-bloc republic. Konrad joins the colonel in a bomber plane, assuring him that the stopwatch will keep the plane in the air if it's hit by enemy fire. Sure enough, this comes to pass, but when the bomb is dropped it floats upward due to the anti-gravity field and blows up the plane.

"The Terrible Timepiece!" is yet another Wessler story with so many twists and turns needed to set up the conclusion that it is a chore to plod through, even at a mere four pages. Poor Paul Reinman wasn't doing his best work by the point in his career. All in all, a poor issue.-Jack

Strange Tales of the Unusual #10

Cover by John Severin

"Menace of the Unseen Man" (a: Richard Doxsee) ★1/2

"The Man Who Said 'No'" (a: Angelo Torres) ★★

(r: Journey Into Mystery 16)

"Don't Answer the Phone!" (a: Gray Morrow) ★★1/2

(r: Uncanny Tales #9)

"Mass Murder" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★★

(r: Vault of Evil #18)

"The Threat!" (a: Paul Reinman (?) & John Tartaglione (?)) ★

"The Nightmare Men" (a: Mac L. Pakula)

(r: Uncanny Tales #9) ★1/2

A hobo named Barney Lowry is given two hours to get out of Haysville, but when he eats some berries from a tree just outside of town and becomes invisible, Barney heads right back into the sleepy borough. His invisibility wears off and he is jailed, but a few more berries allow the "Menace of the Unseen Man" to begin as Barney escapes from his cell, robs a jewelry store, steals a police car, and heads into the countryside. Eventually, Barney gets tired and lies down for a nap in a new building under construction; too bad for him it's the new jail and he wakes up back in a cell and visible!

I know we've seen this ending before. Doxsee's art is passable but the story is so tired that there's not much he can do with it.

Jonathan Bascombe is a cruel, rich man who enjoys watching ants climb up the side of a mound of sand and knocking them back down just before they reach the top. A scientist named Max visits and asks Bascombe for money to finish a cellular project, but the wealthy man enjoys barking "no." The next night, Jonathan drives to Max's house to torture him some more but finds no one home. He reads the scientist's journal and learns that he can't complete his serum without a dynamo. Just then, a handy bolt of lightning comes through the window and hits a beaker of serum.

Bascombe blacks out and awakens to find himself at the bottom of a mound that he starts to climb. Just as he nears the top, a giant finger knocks him off. We see that the finger belongs to a little boy who enjoys torturing ants just as Jonathan does; Max the scientist walks by and thinks of his cellular shrinkage serum that just needed a dynamo to activate it electrically. He blames himself and thinks that Bascombe, "The Man Who Said 'No,'" would never have given up.

Angelo Torres makes this obvious story bearable with some nice graphics, but the events are far-fetched and predictable. It's odd that Max ends up respecting Jonathan for being so strong; it's supposed to be ironic, since Bascombe ends up at the base of the mound, but it doesn't really work.

Hal Terrance is a successful businessman until he begins to be tortured by phone calls from Lydia. At a meeting, on a dinner date, in the middle of the night--she keeps calling and it's driving him crazy. Finally, he goes to the police station and confesses to her murder. The phone rings and the detective tells the caller that Hal has just confessed--Lydia replies that no more calls are needed and hangs up.

"Don't Answer the Phone!" is a moody, spooky mystery that works due to the evocative artwork by Gray Morrow. It gradually becomes apparent that the caller is a dead woman, but until Hal's confession, it's not clear what he did. The conclusion is satisfying.

Harrison from the Defense Department lands secretly by parachute on a remote atoll, where he is met by Dr. Peter Farnum, who announces that Operation Nullify is an unqualified success. Farnum and his team have created an atmospheric dust that will protect the nation from atomic bombs. Six months ago, after realizing that there were two methods that needed to be tested and only enough geniuses to work on one, an inventor named Barnaby used a machine to create duplicates of the scientists. The images, or duplicate scientists, went to the Pacific to work, while the real ones worked in the Arctic. Now that the problem has been solved, Farnum uses a ray to dissolve them. Harrison is shocked and accuses Farnum of "Mass Murder"; the scientist is tried in a courtroom, where the prosecutor argues that the images had the power to save mankind and thus the right to live.

For a change, an Atlas story is thought-provoking! In today's world, with A.I. on the rise and 3-D printing creating lifelike duplicates, the question posed by this story could soon be a timely one--how close do the duplicates have to come to having human characteristics before they deserve human rights? The story is so intriguing that even Robert Sale's art is bearable. The only slight glitch is that the images would have dissolved on their own anyway had Harrison not sped up the process. I like that the end is left ambiguous--the story ends before the jury returns a verdict.

Disappointed by his inheritance from his father, Lester Harlow reads his grandfather's diary and comes up with a moneymaking scheme. It seems that the old man had built a machine that brought people over from another dimension and they still live in town. The machine is still running in the attic, so Lester invites the inter-dimensional visitors to his house and issues "The Threat!" Pay him $25K each or he'll shut off the machine and they'll return to their old dimension! The three couples think Lester is nuts, so he turns a dial on the machine and vanishes! Poor Lester did not read far enough into the diary to learn that his father married one of the people from the other dimension, making Lester himself a visitor subject to return.

The GCD suggests that Paul Reinman penciled this three-pager and that John Tartaglione inked it. The pencils definitely look like Reinman's chicken-scratch, circa 1957, while some of the characters' faces do have that Tartaglione look and seem more finished, especially in the last couple of panels. Whatever the case, Wessler's script is terrible! Only he would have a character discover a machine that brings people over from another dimension and immediately have that character's thoughts turn to blackmail.

A tyrant is feared, but every night he is visited in his dreams by "The Nightmare Men," whom he fears are coming to take him away. The only man who can help him is Dr. Peter Rostov, whose brother the tyrant sent to a concentration camp. Rostov agrees to help and that night the tyrant sleeps soundly. The next morning, he is gone! Did the nightmare men finally take him away? Unaware of what has happened, Rostov laments his cowardice in aiding the tyrant.

The lack of an ending doesn't make a weak story worth reading. Mac Pakula draws a few decent panels but that's about it.-Jack

Next Week...
The Implosion Continues to Scorch Earth.
Help Us Bid Fond Farewell to Three More Titles!