Journey Into Strange Tales Issue 168: Atlas/Marvel Horror & Science Fiction Comics!

The Marvel/Atlas 
Horror Comics

Part 153

August 1957 Part II

by Peter Enfantino

and Jack Seabrook

Mystery Tales #54

Cover by Fred Kida

"The Last Lap" (a: Reed Crandall) ★★

"Prisoners of the Valley of Fear!" (a: Jay Scott Pike) ★1/2

"Death of a Gambling Man!" (a: Frank Bolle) ★

"Can of Soup!" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★

"Nobody!" (a: George Klein) ★1/2

"The Labyrinth!" (a: Sid Check) ★★

Race car driver Rex Bilbo will do anything to win and that includes cutting his competitors off at the final lap. This is how Rex wins. Then along comes "The Kid," the fastest racer anyone's ever seen. Rex knows he can't beat the newbie, so he loosens the young man's tires; next day, on "The Last Lap," The Kid hits the wall and... bloooey!

The other racers know what Rex has done but can't prove it. But they'll get him, they promise. One night, when Rex is working on his GTO, The Kid rises from the grave (still wearing his speed racer outfit) and heads for the track. Next thing we see is Rex's new auto, with real human skin upholstery, Rex's eyeballs as headlights, and a tank full of blood. Alas, that's not what happens, but in the early pages it sure seems like we're going to get the first honest-to-gosh EC-style revenge tale in years and the cherry on top is the Reed Crandall art. The CCA wouldn't have okayed my scenario, but the sappy (and inane) climax we're given is safe enough for the 8-year-olds. No nightmares here.

Planes flying through Austria are disappearing from sonar without a trace. Government agent Alfonse Grumet suspects foul play, so he commandeers a dirigible to fly the same path in hopes the truth will unravel. Sure enough, the blimp reaches the same area as the missing planes and is stopped in mid-air by a huge net. The net brings the vehicle to a landing and Grumet and crew are taken prisoner by a group of bald ruffians. Grumet is taken to the wizard of this Valley of Fear, disgraced Professor Kalendru, whose theories of... something... drew waves of laughter from his colleagues.

As his revenge, Kalendru traveled to this deserted valley and created a city of miracles. Kalendru orders his mute slaves to take the dirigible to a populated city and kidnap hundreds of people in order to build Kalendru's army of slaves. But Grumet has an ace up his sleeve and puts the kibosh on the evil emperor's plot. Everything about "Prisoners of the Valley of Fear!" smells like an old cinema serial, with hidden cities, beast-men, and an explosive finale. The elements it's lacking are a good script and excitement. We're never really clued in to what Kalendru's goal is; he builds a "paradise" to get even for all the slights aimed at him through the years. Heck of a revenge.

Larry Hall worked for Matt Trevor, one of the biggest crooks in the city. Trevor is opening a new casino and his biggest enemy is the mayor, whose daughter happens to be in love with Larry. Get all that? Well, when Trevor gets wind of the secret affair, he uses the mayor's daughter as a pawn in his war with her father. Luckily, Larry stumbles on a secret room at the new casino filled with chemicals and stuff. He uses the potions to make the casino disappear, thus preventing any harm to his one true love. Larry has made the ultimate sacrifice. "Death of a Gambling Man!" (hey, spoiler alert!) is cheesy Wessler pulp junk that's good for a couple of chuckles when it changes direction in the final page, but little else.

Starving, a hobo steals a "Can of Soup!" from a truck, unaware that this "soup" is actually nitroglycerine. It's evident right from the get-go what the mystery can is, but what's not clear is why Stan okayed the truly awful Robert Q. Sale art. Yeccch! In the equally brainless "Nobody!," a flight filled to the brim with stinkin' Commies lands in Moscow to find an empty city. Panicked, they jump back onboard and head to the next Red city they can find. Same thing. "Nobody!" In the end, it's all a case of brain manipulation by a stinkin' Commie scientist. They see only what he wants them to see. But the joke's on Ivan when he tries to end the hold on his comrades' brains and the machine goes kaput. So does the plane. 

"The Labyrinth!," the final story in Mystery Tales #54, helps the title go out on a high note (or at least a higher note than the four stories that preceded it). A race of underground men try to make it to the surface world but can't seem to work their way through a maze of tunnels. Turns out the poor chaps are stuck in a subway tunnel. Some nice throwback penciling (meaning it looks like the penciling was done in the 1940s) by Sid Check and a fairly decent twist ending. Quality-wise, the 54-issue run of Mystery Tales was middle of the pack, neither better nor worse than its sister pubs. Two stories from pre-code MT made my Top 50 list: George Tuska's "Marion's Murderer" (from #14) and Bill Benulis's "The Little Monster" (from #15).-Peter

Mystic #61

Cover by Bill Everett

"Someday It Will Open" (a: Richard Doxsee) ★

"The Thirteenth Floor!" (a: Bernard Baily & Gene Fawcette (?)) ★

"Mister Backwards!" (a: Frank Bolle) ★★

"Too Dangerous to Live" (a: Carl Burgos (?)) ★

"The Strange Sea!" (a: Alfonso Greene) ★

"The Face in the Mirror!" (a: Joe Orlando) ★1/2

Professor Klauser returns from the jungles of South America with a souvenir, an odd, stone-like object he dubs a "thought pod." Kaluser is convinced that if he concentrates on something hard enough, that thought will materialize from out of the pod. His colleagues all think he's daft, but Klauser sits in his chair staring at the pod, certain that "Someday It Will Open." And it does. It just doesn't produce anything interesting, unfortunately. Not even the Doxsee art can elevate this one above the basement floor.

Brand is convinced the partying people on "The Thirteenth Floor!" are wearing priceless jewels and he's intent on robbing them. His friends tell him he's nuts since the hotel has no 13th floor, but he's convinced it isn't a mirage. When one of the hotel employees tells him that the hotel used to have a 13th floor but it was destroyed by a fire and never rebuilt, it gives him an idea. He sets a fire and watches as all the "shadow people" run into the elevator. He heads for their jewelry but fate has other ideas. What a dumb story! How can an entire floor of a hotel building be destroyed and removed without affecting the floors above and below? 

Ralph Paval buys a wonderful hourglass at an auction house and quickly learns it has the remarkable power of turning back time. All Ralph has to do is turn the hourglass over and... ta-da!... it's the past. Of course, since Ralph is living in the Atlas Universe, the first thing he does is rob a bank. Then he turns the hourglass over several times and it's ten years before. Ralph takes the money he made from the robbery and invests it in a sure thing in the stock market. Ralph's not as smart as thinks, though, as evidenced by the G-Men who come to arrest him for counterfeiting. The dope used 1957 currency in 1947! You'd think that would be the end of "Mister Backwards!" but, as with Mr. Brand in the previous story, Ralph finds fate has a way of evening things up for time travelers. I thought this one was semi-clever, but my only question would be, if Ralph is going back in time, why does he get to keep the dough he robbed in 1957, a heist he hasn't even committed yet? Am I thinking too much?

Really smart genius Professor Rajec is forced by the stinkin' Commies to build the perfect weapon, an explosive device they plan to use on the enemy. The Reds test three ounces of Rajec's formula and it destroys a square mile of land, but it also gives Rajec a bad case of amnesia; he can't remember the formula. After interrogating and torturing him for weeks, the Commies leave him be, hoping his brain will come around. At last, Rajec tells his bosses he's okay and ready to build another, bigger gizmo. But Rajec has a better idea and a better device to build: an air purifier that will suck up all the radioactivity caused by his first bomb. When last we see the professor, he's driving away with a U.N. escort, and the Commie colonel who once led his interrogation is giving him a thumbs-up. Bar none, "Too Dangerous to Live" contains the fastest (and funniest) transformation from bloodthirsty sadist to peacenik ever portrayed in a funny book strip. 

In the three-page, "The Strange Sea!," Jeff Marlowe yearns to be a seafaring lad like his ancestors, so he signs up to be a sailor. On his maiden voyage, he's swept overboard by a giant wave but, luckily, he's saved... by his great-grandfather. I know just how Jeff feels, swirling around in a whirlpool of bad comic stories. The finale, the last story ever to appear in Mystic, stars a pair of thieves, one of whom has become something of an animal, brutalizing everyone he comes in contact with. "The Face in the Mirror!" has yet another predictable, inane twist ending and uninspired Joe Orlando art. Four Mystic stories placed in my Pre-Code Top 50 list: Sol Brodsky's "The Devil Birds" (from #4, which landed smack dab in the number one spot), Mort Lawrence's "Help Wanted" (from #19), "The Living and the Dead" (from #26), and Russ Heath's "Who Walks with a Zombie" (from #27).-Peter

Mystical Tales #8

Cover by Fred Kida

"Stone Walls Can't Stop Him!" (a: Doug Wildey) ★★

"The Dream People!" (a: Ruben Moreira) ★1/2

"The Lair of the Thunder Lizard!" (a: Bernie Krigstein) ★★1/2

"The Sleeping Man" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★1/2

"Try-Out!" (a: Sid Check) ★★

"The Island of No Return" (a: Sam Kweskin) ★

A convicted killer named Carl Brent walks right through the bars of his prison cell as if they were not there! Even "Stone Walls Can't Stop Him!" and he walks through one of those as well on his way to freedom. Roy Anders, the prison guard, doesn't tell anyone because he thinks he'd be ridiculed. He goes home and his wife encourages him to consult his "scrapbook case histories of all the men who have been executed on Death Row." (Roy is clearly a little off.)

Reading about Brent, Roy recalls that the criminal seemed to have a heart, never taking all the cash when he robbed a store and begging for forgiveness from a young woman he mistakenly shot during a holdup. When the woman, whose name was Molly Spinner, died, Carl was sentenced to death. Roy has an idea and drives to the cemetery, where he observes Carl kneeling on Molly's grave, asking her to forgive him. Roy hears her voice granting forgiveness and the guard drives back to the prison, where he learns that Brent was found dead of a heart attack on the floor of his cell, a contented smile on his face.

Doug Wildey does a decent job with this rather mournful story and I enjoyed it. The final twist, such as it is, comes from the surprise on the face of the guard on duty when Roy tells him he knows Carl died with a smile. Not much of a twist, but a pretty good story.

After dreaming of standing before an audience, a playwright named Baker is convinced his new play will be a hit. "The Dream People!" can't be wrong! Instead, his play is rejected and one written by his roommate, Philips, is accepted. Baker lies to Philips and takes his place, taking credit for the work and watching the rehearsals. Philips catches on and threatens to go to the cops, so Baker kills him just as the police burst in. He is tried and convicted and finally realizes that the audience he dreamed of was the members of the jury. Once again, Ruben Moreira works hard with a run of the mill idea.

Old Edouard Duval likes to spin yarns about seeing dinosaurs in a nearby cave, describing it as if it were "The Lair of the Thunder Lizard!" Young Jacques Rambeau doesn't believe it and enlists two friends to explore the caves with him to show that the old man is making up stories. The trio descend into the cave and photograph what lies in the darkness, certain it's nothing. To Rambeau's surprise, when the film is developed, it shows the thunder lizard! Duval volunteers to visit the cave and Rambeau agrees to film the outing; the old man shoots into the darkness and the film records the death of the creature. The cave is sealed off and Duval is a hero! Days later, Rambeau finds a small lizard that crawled into his camera and looked big in the pictures. He doesn't have the heart to burst the old man's bubble. Leave it to Krigstein to wring some emotion out of a weak story by Wessler. The artists gets the feeling of the French folk right and Rambeau's kind decision at the end seems genuine.

In the year 1457, Wolfgang Roebling invents a machine but when he shows it to the authorities they throw him out, insisting that it's evil. On his deathbed, Roebling entrusts the machine to his faithful servant, Karl Rieger, who promises not to give up until the world recognizes Roebling's genius. In a secret cellar room, Rieger sleeps for a century and awakens to show the machine to a man in Italy, who calls it a work of darkness. "The Sleeping Man" nods off in the catacombs for another century, wakes up, and tries his luck in Paris, where he is nearly killed when one of the king's ministers doesn't react well to the invention.

He sleeps for another hundred years in a cave in the Pyrenees, but when he wakes up, the king's secretary tries to steal the machine and Karl runs off to another extended nap in a tower castle. He gets the same reception in England in 1857. Finally, it's 1957 (surprise!) and Karl stows away on a ship to America. He arrives, but the perpetual motion machine Roebling invented 500 years before is scoffed at. Karl finds an underground spot to doze off and the robot hopes that, in a hundred years, the machine will be accepted. I kind of liked this story, not for the hideous art by Sale but rather for the plucky robot who keeps thinking that, if he just tries again in 100 years, people will accept his inventor's gizmo. I did not know he was a robot till the last panel, so I guess Wessler got me this time.

A booking agent named Stanton yawns through a presentation by a man named Lund, who narrates a travelogue to Neptune, the Earth's core, and the moon while showing images from a projector on a screen. He then suggests a talk on telepathy and ESP, but Stanton is unmoved. After the "Try-Out!" fails and Lund exits the office, Stanton is shocked to discover that Lund accidentally left the projector behind and there's no film in it! Sid Check's regular panels with people talking are smooth and the panels where he depicts the wonders presented by Lund are impressive, but they're not enough to make the story interesting.

Bruce Marner bullies everyone in Merville, a small town on the coast of Canada, and has one thing on his mind when he sees Hover Island, where there's a safe filled with gold coins in a long-abandoned bank. Marner commandeers a boat and heads out to "The Island of No Return," but when he gets the gold and tries to navigate his way back to the mainland, he discovers that the boat keeps ending up back at the island. Sam Kweskin's art on this forgettable story is a hair better than that of Robert Q. Sale on "The Sleeping Man," but the narrative is much less interesting.

So ends the short run of Mystical Tales, which never rose above the level of ho-hum. My highest-rated story was "Someone Behind Me!" by Reed Crandall, in #3.-Jack

Next Week...
Watch Helplessly as Matt Fox
Tries to Save Atlas From
the Deadly Implosion!