Journey Into Strange Tales Issue 170: Atlas/Marvel Science Fiction & Fantasy Comics!

The Marvel/Atlas 
Horror Comics

Part 155

September 1957-February 1958

by Peter Enfantino

and Jack Seabrook

Uncanny Tales #56 (September 1957)

Cover by Fred Kida (?)

"The Glass Man" (a: Bob Powell) ★★

"The Thing in the Sky!" (a: Ruben Moreira) ★

"False Face!" (a: Ed Winiarski) ★

"A Cry for Help!" (a: Sol Brodsky) ★

"Out of This World" (a: Bernie Krigstein) ★★

"Confession of Murder!" (a: Frank Bolle) ★

As you can tell, the Atlas Implosion of 1957 resulted in the axing of most of the sf/fantasy titles and several months of empty comic racks (except for Millie the Model and Love Romances, of course). We aren't complaining, mind you.

Herman Buhler's wife has been nagging him to re-silver the mirror in their dingy flat, so Herman buys the material to do so. Unfortunately, Herman is inadvertently given a can of paint that's been exposed to a high level of radiation. When he gets home and starts the refinishing job, the mirror spits out an evil twin of Herman. He and his wife are horrified and flee the apartment in search of the police.

Herman's evil twin goes forward and launches a spree of (admittedly non-violent) crimes across the city. The police at first scoff at Herman's story, but reports of the evil twin begin flooding in and they are forced to admit the possibility of extra-normal activities. Fortunately, Herman and the cops are able to track down "The Glass Man" and destroy him on a city rooftop. All breathe a sigh of relief. About as milquetoast as it gets, with little to no action and a heck of a lot of wordy captions explaining what's going on in the art below. That art, by the way, is the only reason to be patient through the script.

Really smart and brilliant genius, Professor Kebler, has invented a new gizmo that allows you to look back in time and observe what was going on in, say, the streets of ancient Rome (in one eye-opening panel, we see Napoleon Bonaparte taking a leak in a dark alley). Unfortunately, during a ceremony accompanied by two of his smartest colleagues, Kebler tests his theory that his machine can also jump forward in time and watches in horror as his cat, Mephisto, hops into the machine and is magnified into gigantic proportions above the city... I'm just going to stop right there and admit I can't make heads or tails of the climax, where dear Mephisto becomes "The Thing in the Sky!," a dirigible-sized floater that causes panic in the land. How any of this ties in to Kleber's time machine is anyone's guess. Science hokum.

After his vaudeville act goes belly up, impersonator Claude Barnes (a/k/a "False Face!") turns to crime to make ends meet. He arranges his "putty-like" face to resemble the most powerful men in the city and goes on a robbery rampage, terrorizing the population and befuddling the police before stumbling over his own coattails and landing in a cell. These things never cease to make me smile when an otherwise respectable citizen faces hardship and decides he should become a hardened criminal just like that.

A quartet of street hoods don't have but thirty-five cents between them, so they rough up an organ grinder for his pennies. That's when the man's gorilla steps around the corner and takes care of business. "A Cry for Help!" is three pages of drivel with a purely pedestrian art job by "Jolly" Solly Brodsky. In "Out of This World," two knuckleheads break into a lab and interrupt an experiment, making off with a case of uranium. The cops chase them to a nearby cave, where the men disappear. That's because the scientists were testing a machine that breaks into other dimensions and these two clods are now somewhere on a cliff overlooking Saturn. There's no sense in the (uncredited) writer's script and Bernie looks like he took ten minutes to whip this one out. Still, a rush job by Krigstein is something to enjoy.

Hugh Janssen is out of work and desperate. That's what brings him to the mansion on the hill just outside of town one dark and dreary night. Peering through the window, Hugh sees an old man sitting at a table, counting gold coins. Mad with greed, Hugh breaks in, kills the old man, and flees. Wracked with guilt (and a little hungry), he stops at a police station to give them his "Confession of Murder!" After Hugh finishes his emotionally stirring recount, the cops tell him that he broke into the abandoned Craine house, where its owner, Jeffry Craine, was murdered by a prowler a decade before. The cops tell him to show up back at a construction site in the morning and he'll get work as a carpenter. A happy ending for everyone except the pitiful, bored reader.

A truly wretched end to a gawdawful final issue of Uncanny Tales. In the grand scheme of things, Uncanny proved to be one of the better pre-code titles (and just as mediocre as the rest of its brothers and sisters once the CCA came sniffin' around), placing five stories on my Top Fifty list: Fred Kida's "Skin Deep" (from #2), Ross Andru's "Phooey on Phoonga" (#15), Vinnie Colletta's "The Machine Age" (#18), "Proof Positive" (#20), and "Don't Count Your Chickens" (#26). Marvel would resurrect the title for a 12-issue reprint comic from 1973-75.-Peter

Strange Tales #60 (December 1957)

Cover by Bill Everett

"With Just One Stroke" (a: John Forte) ★★

"Rude Awakening!" (a: George Woodbridge) ★★

"The Final Shot!" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★

"Child's Play!" (a: Christopher Rule (?) & Ed Winiarski) ★★

"The Puppet Man" (a: Dan Loprino) ★

"The Abyss!" (a: Jim Mooney) ★★

Criminal mastermind John Durston ducks into an antique shop, the cops in hot pursuit, and asks the proprietor if there's anything small he can buy. Unaware he's talking to a big-time heister/murderer/ extortioner/whatever, the shopkeeper shows Durston a really nice writing pen. When the cops show up at the door, Durston scribbles "I wish I was a thousand miles away" on scratch paper and "With Just One Stroke," the evil genius is whisked away to a remote plantation. 

Absolutely shocked, Durston has the wherewithal to scribble down his wish to be in a Spanish castle and... sure enough... he magically arrives in Spain. This rigamarole continues for at least twenty more panels until John wishes something very stupid and gets his just desserts. Silly but harmless. Another go-to plot device in the late 1950s seems to have been the mysterious gift/antique shop. It's lucky John had the foresight to bring paper with him everywhere he zone-hopped.

Parks dreams he's arrested for embezzlement. That's not a big deal except that he has embezzled from his business and once he wakes up he realizes he has to kill the only person who might suspect him of his crime. Parks pushes the man in front of a subway train and awakens in a courtroom, talking to his attorney. Realizing he's going to go to jail for embezzlement, he sighs, knowing he'll serve ten years for robbery. Parks has a "Rude Awakening!" when his lawyer tells him he's been convicted of murder. A bit confusing at times (that's the point, though, ain't it?), but it's one of those Atlas tales where I can discard quibbles since the writer (Jack Oleck) at least feigns interest.

Mike Dillon spends ten long years in the pokey, his revenge simmering inside his fetid brain. Not your average jailbird, Mike spends the decade brushing up on chemistry and becomes probably the most brilliant chemist in Sing-Sing. Once out, Dillon applies his newfound scientific prowess to a complicated chemical mixture he dubs Compound #41™ (#40™ worked okay but Mike decided to add 10% more sodium pentothal and... voila... #41™!) and hits the streets to locate the five men who put him into prison.

Mike has good luck finding these guys randomly (well, he has a couple of addresses) and shoots them with his tricked-up pistol, filled with bullets of ice made of Compound #41™. The men respond only to Mike's voice and he commands them to do awful, illegal things, thus opening themselves to incarceration. Unfortunately, Mike is as dopey as his Compound #41™ in the end and the police snap the cuffs on him one more time. Our protagonist sighs and proclaims that this time he'll use his sentence to learn how to fix washing machines. This one is uber-stupid from frame one and only gets dopier as it progresses. Mike's slip-up occurs when he accidentally shoots the mirror reflection of one of his targets instead of the real thing!

Zillionaire Rod Manning gets what he wants and so does his spoiled rotten brat kid, so when Manning gets wind of a scientist in his company building a robot, the egocentric rich jerk demands that the egghead hand the bucket of bolts over to him so he can keep his monster son happy. Unfortunately, it seems the robot has a mind of its own and, after killing the family dog (well, Manning says it's only fainted with fright but we pre-coders know better) and lighting the house on fire, Manning admits he's made a mistake and returns the mechanical demon to its maker. 

Professor Lang smiles, sighs, and admits that if a creep like Manning could change his stripes and become a softy then maybe it wasn't such a bad experience after all. "Child's Play!" is good for a few giggles (Mrs. Manning is the only one who seems to have any sense in the household and continually berates her inane hubby) and the art doesn't stink. 

The three-pager, "The Puppet Man!," is about a man accused of a murder he can't remember committing. In the final panel, we learn he's a stage actor and this has all been a role he's playing. Lazy writing, dreadful graphics. In the final tale, "The Abyss!," five refugees are chased into a treacherous mountain region by a band of stinkin' Commies (you can tell the difference between the two groups by the red stars on the ball caps of the bad guys!) and are helped by guardian angels to reach the promised land. The reveal (they were climbing Mt. Olympus the whole time) doesn't make much sense and our male heroes are dressed in three-piece office suits rather than winter wear, but I smiled a couple times. Can't complain much when that's the case.-Peter

World of Fantasy #9 (December 1957)

Cover by Bill Everett

"The Girl Who Fell" (a: Richard Doxsee) ★1/2

"It's Harmless... I Think" (a: Mac L. Pakula) ★

"Spare Me, Please!" (a: Al Eadah) ★

"Quarantine!" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★

"Handsome Harry's Wife!" (a: Christopher Rule) ★1/2

"The Phantom of the Farm!" (a: Bernie Krigstein) ★★★

After having a knock down drag out fight with his old lady, a young adventurer finds himself stuck on an archaeological dig deep in the jungle. Knowing he'll not see his gal again for two years, our hero resigns himself to finding another squeeze. Fortunately, while wandering through the jungle, he comes across a heretofore unknown temple and the comely maiden who lives there. Little does he know, this babe will help him patch things up with Gloria back home. Obviously, the romance comic titles were all filled that month, so "The Girl Who Fell" was dropped into World of Fantasy #9 instead. The Doxsee art is great but, land sake's alive, it's lucky Dr. Wertham never saw this strip. The young lads in the splash look like they're hanging out at a bathhouse.

In "It's Harmless... I Think," a scientist studying the Mogimpo tribe in deepest darkest Africa, stumbles across a trinket the natives refer to as a "Ju-Ju," a small idol purported to have magical powers. The drawback is the owner of said curio sooner or later takes on the personality of the previous owner. And the last guy killed his wife! Ends with the obligatory "oh, it was just a tall tale" exclamation as the next owner down the line heads home to his wife.

Professor Weston is hired by the government to work on a super secret... something, and his lab pals are all envious. Weston gets his own lab, special equipment, gorgeous lab assistants--the point is, no expense has been spared. But just what is the egghead working on? Well, it turns out that aliens from the fourth dimension are itching to get this information as well and they kidnap Weston and threaten him with bodily harm if he doesn't cough up the goods. Weston sighs calmly and rips the mask off one of the aliens. Holy cow! This ain't no alien; it's a stinkin' Commie!!! When did the Reds get so smart? Anyway, Weston wasn't buying the charade in the first place because... ta-da, he's from the fourth dimension, on loan to America to solve their problems. "Spare Me, Please!" indeed!

Inventor Horace Roarke has been sponging off his brother and sister-in-law while putting the final touches on his brand new one-of-a-kind time machine (which, according to 1200 other Atlas tales of the time, isn't that unique). Pressured to finish early, Horace gives Muriel and Ted a demonstration of his machine's power and travels to the year 2000. Back in the "present," Horace regales his audience with tales of factories displaying the Roarke Industry logo, a world where disease and reality shows no longer exist. "It's a wonderland!," Horace raves.

But then big mouth Muriel tells one of her knitting buddies about the journey and that old hen tells another and another and, very soon, Horace has the Feds knocking at the door. As her brother-in-law is hauled away for questioning, Muriel tells her husband they must go to the future and bring back some proof that Horace is telling the truth. What they find will change the lives of the trio forever. With "Quarantine!," Carl Wessler reaches to the bottom of his bag of surprises and realizes it's empty. No matter, he could just patch together bits of previous nonsense and hand them over to Stan for embellishment.

Harry and Helen have just become a married couple and Helen couldn't be happier now that she's "Handsome Harry's Wife!" Harry can't wait to get the little Mrs. on their honeymoon to Rio where he's got a special surprise planned. But before Harry can deliver his poisonous drink, Helen hands her new hubby a surprise of her own. The Christopher Rule art isn't bad, but the climactic twist can be seen coming long before its delivery. 

Leave it to Harvey Krigstein to save an otherwise crappy issue of World of Fantasy with "The Phantom of the Farm!," a humorous tale of two nitwit criminals trying to separate a farmer from his five thousand in cash. Whenever they get close to the loot, an ominous shadow appears behind them. Turns out it's the farmer's scarecrow, who's usually shooing away the lousy birds in the fields. Blissfully free from descriptive word boxes, "The Phantom" is like a macabre Looney Tunes short. More Krigstein, I say! Whole issues of him, I demand!-Peter

Strange Tales #61 (February 1958)

Cover by Bill Everett

"The Laundry Machines!" (a: Paul Reinman) ★★

"The Spectre" (a: Dick Giordano) ★1/2

"The Disappearing Man!" (a: Ed Winiarski) ★

"Menace of the Mirror" (a: Bernard Baily) ★1/2

"Fear Walks on Four Feet!" (a: Al Eadah) ★1/2

"The Eyes That Never Close!" (a: Bernie Krigstein) ★★1/2

A shady real estate man named Donald Trump Nicholas Flood rents a filthy tenement store to a (white) immigrant woman from Haiti so she can open a laundromat. He says he trusts her, so no lease is needed. Soon, her business is thriving, so he jacks up the rent by $50 a month, since she has no lease. Soon, Flood is troubled by insomnia and headaches. The doctor can't find anything wrong, so Flood visits the laundromat, where the woman digs up a box of pills from the dirt cellar floor and Flood returns the extra $50 a month he took from her.

The pills work, but Flood thinks he's clever and sneaks down to the cellar, where he digs up the box of pills and hides it elsewhere. He finds a lawyer and has the woman deported, but before you know it, he's suffering again. This time, when Flood goes to the cellar for the box of pills, he finds endless boxes and has no idea which one holds the cure. I didn't expect much from a story called "The Laundry Machines!" and Paul Reinman's art has that same, tired look we've grown used to, yet the story intrigued me right up to the disappointing conclusion. Too bad the scene on Bill Everett's cover doesn't happen in the story!

He may be the top race car driver in the country, but Burt Malone is shaken up when he sees "The Spectre," a large, ghostly figure, looming over the racetrack two times in a row, right before another driver's car crashes. Burt swears off racing, but his boss won't have it and visits a mystic at a county fair for help. The swami imprisons the spectre in a crystal ball and hands it to the boss, telling him that, as long as the glass orb remains intact, the spectre can't harm anyone. Malone resumes racing and, in the biggest race of the year, he suddenly sees the spectre and his car crashes. He's okay, but his mechanic finds that the glass ball fell off a shelf and smashed. We all saw that one coming a mile away. I never cared for racing stories, but Dick Giordano's art is always professionally done.

A year after a scientist named Farrell disappeared, a pair of his friends break into his house and find that he had built an unusual machine. One of the pair, Ellis, flips a switch and suddenly "The Disappearing Man! returns, wearing a golden crown! Farrell explains that the machine sent him to another dimension, where he made peace among warring tribes and was crowned king. That night, Ellis sneaks in, intending to travel to the other dimension and become a king himself. Farrell discovers him; they fight and Ellis is catapulted into the other dimension. Farrell explains to Clay, the other friend, that he passed a law that requires any stranger who suddenly appears to be arrested and jailed until Farrell returns. He'll fix the machine and head off to rescue Ellis, but it took him a decade to build it the first time! Ed Winiarski's art is pedestrian and, as is so often the case, the twist ending isn't much of a shock. The fact that this and "The Laundry Machine!" are both credited to Jack Oleck in the GCD suggests that his tales weren't any better than Wessler's.

Raynor has a theory that each reflection of his in a room of mirrors has a life of its own. He invents a machine to make one of the reflections come to life, which he'll prove by watching it move differently than he does. He flips the switch but, instead of one of the mirror images changing, he changes! Raynor realizes that the "Menace of the Mirror" must have built an identical machine and used it on him, so now he moves but none of the reflections follow his motions. Bernard Baily seems to be trying harder than Paul Reinman at this point, but this three-pager makes little sense.

Jim Andrews has invented a ray gun that, when used on a jungle beast, renders the beast docile so it can safely be captured and brought back to be exhibited in a circus or a zoo. If the ray gun works, Jim will have enough money to marry Ruth, but Jim's partner, Lester Morse, has other plans. In the African jungle, Lester aims the ray gun at a lion and turns the dial way up. Lester is knocked out and awakens to see a T-Rex! Assuming he's been sent into the past, he hides out for a year until the radiation wears off and he returns to the twentieth century. He finds that Jim and Ruth wed a year ago and Jim explains that the ray gun blast hit a dinosaur egg. The dino grew to full size in two hours, which means that Lester wasn't really in the past--he was hiding in a cave in the present for a year while Jim got rich and famous with his dinosaur exhibit. Hang on--did I write that Jack Oleck's scripts were as bad as Carl Wessler's? This story proves me wrong. Wessler could write bizarre scripts like no one else. Al Eadeh's art is nothing to write home about, either. I gave "Fear Walks on Four Feet!" a charity extra half-star because I like dinos.

Big Jeff Corley shares a cell at Alcatraz with Leo Hutten, who holds an idol that he stole from an Indian mystic and stares into "The Eyes That Never Close!" until he disappears! When Leo returns, he warns Jeff not to mess with the idol, but Jeff will do anything to get out of the cell, so he stares at the idol and disappears. Jeff finds himself on the Titanic, just after it hits the iceberg, and zips back to his cell, where Leo explains that the one who holds the idol gets three voyages. The problem is that those voyages are evil if the person holding it is evil. Jeff tries again and finds himself on the Hindenburg, just as it bursts into flames. Back to the cell! The third and final try lands Jeff in a prison cell in a Japanese city known as...wait for it...Hiroshima, and the air raid siren just sounded. Leave it to Bernie Krigstein to save the issue, even if his art is even sketchier than usual.-Jack

World of Fantasy #10 (February 1958)

Cover by Carl Burgos

"I Went Through the Veil!" (a: Paul Reinman) ★1/2

(r: Journey Into Mystery #11)

"The Silent Street" (a: Ed Winiarski) ★

(r: Uncanny Tales #10)

"The Secret Men" (a: Richard Doxsee) ★1/2

(r: Journey Into Mystery #11)

"The Last Stop" (a: Gene Colan) ★1/2

(r: Fear #23)

"The Mystery of the Smiling Man!" (a: Robert Q. Sale) ★

"The Books That Were Alive" (a: Mort Meskin) ★1/2

(r: Journey Into Mystery #11)

A funny thing happens when Ralph is hiking near a sheer cliff: he sees a pretty, young woman drive a sports car right off the edge and disappear through a veil! Ralph is compelled to buy a sports car and drive through the veil himself; when he does, the young woman appears and tells him that he's the one for her. A wise old man appears and tells her that she can't do that, at which point Ralph wakes up in bed at home. He thinks it was all a dream, but in the future, the wise old man tells the young woman that Ralph looked just like the man she'll marry and, coincidentally, she's a dead ringer for Ralph's wife. Paul Reinman does a decent job on "I Went Through the Veil!" but, once again, a reasonably intriguing story falls flat at the end. I suspect these stories were written backwards, with Wessler or Oleck coming up with a twist and then figuring out how to get there. It's a shame the journey so often is better than the destination.

Officer Greene walks his beat on "The Silent Street" one evening, unaware that a Martian named Nargak lands and is prevented from destroying the Earth by a Martian policeman who follows him. To Greene, it's just another dull night. Ed Winiarski was the perfect choice for this forgettable three-pager, since both story and art are dreadful.

A party of soldiers climb a snowy mountain with one purpose: to determine whether a hidden city exists on the peak. The clouds part and they see the city, but it is quickly hidden by clouds again and the men are convinced it was just a hallucination. One man tries to leap across a crevasse and falls to his doom, so the rest head off, confident that no city exists. The fallen man arises from the crevasse after his companions have left and announces that he is one of "The Secret Men" from the hidden city, whose inhabitants possess the secret of levitation! Richard Doxsee's art is serviceable here but, again, the story goes nowhere.

Nick Taras is a truck driver transporting stolen goods when he runs into a pedestrian and leaves the scene of the accident. The man is not badly hurt, but Nick's conscience trouble him, and every time he goes on a delivery run his truck heads straight for the cemetery. Nick can't take it anymore and confesses to the cops, who learn that his truck's engine used to be in a hearse. The usually reliable Gene Colan didn't waste much time on this one and it's so bland that the hit and run victim isn't even badly hurt.

A prisoner named Mallin has served just a week of a ninety-nine year sentence, yet he's always smiling! What is "The Mystery of the Smiling Man!"? A doctor thinks Mallin replaced himself with a robot! The doc enters Mallin's cell at night to test his theory, only to have Mallin knock him out and take his place. Mallin explains that he smiled all the time so that others would be receptive to the placement of a post-hypnotic suggestion, one he stuck in the doc's mind because the doc looks like him. Mallin switches places with the doc and heads for the exit but is caught, unaware that the doc was also an inmate. Good lord, this has to be the bottom of the barrel! The art by Sales makes Winiarski's work look like that of Neal Adams, and the plot is idiotic.

Even the usually reliable Mort Meskin falls victim to the case of the shrinking paycheck, delivering scratchy, unfinished art to "The Books That Were Alive." A book-loving dreamer named Bert Wells discovers a pile of books on a hillside. When he opens them, he is transported into the exciting adventures they describe! In the end, it turns out the books came from the Stellar Space Traveling Library, whose alien pilot apologizes for crashing his ship into the hillside. I like the concept, but the execution is lacking.-Jack

Next Week...
A Man Enters a Mysterious Fog
and Begins to Shrink...
Who Thinks Up These Unique Ideas?