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These Atlas Era episodes are just rolling along now. I really like that these Atlas era books have been released more frequently than they were in the past. This collects Strange Tales #’s 21-30 and I guess we only have about 7 more volumes to go before we get to the Torch stories. The issues were released monthly from August 1953 to July 1954 (though November and January are skipped – damn delays!!!!). There’s way too much talent here to list it all so I’ll just list the prominent ones that get top billing on here. We’ve got art from Joe Maneely, Joe Sinnott, John Forte, Jack Katz, Gene Colan, John Buscema, Bernie Krigstein and Tony DiPreta. I’ll reiterate again just for any new readers. These are anthology type stories where there’re 5-6 stories featured each issue with one written story (so that they can be sent through media mail) included. The great Michael Vassallo writes the introduction and he does his usual fantastic job of going over each issue but more importantly talks about the great forgotten Atlas talent that are featured in this volume. Are you ready for twists and turns around every corner?
Spoilers Ahead
-Strange Tales #21- We start with a man trying to kill his wife by shocking her death. He wants her money (that’s a common theme in these stories). The big shock is that vampires are on their field. Of course, the woman ends up being the vampire and the husband is killed. Our written story features a ruthless landlord trying to milk money out of a tenant but that’s a bad idea because the tenant is a witch. He got his comeuppance. A weird ball of fire story follows with a very unsatisfying payoff (it’s otherworldly and sucks up a greedy guy) before we move to a Flying Saucer story where an ugly alien shows up and us humans kill him before we realize he was offering world peace. We humans should stop thinking with our missiles and be more accepting! A continuation of a story from last issue features a man going to the future and witnessing the devastation caused by nuclear weapons. He tries going back to warn everyone but no one will believe some crank who went to the future. We end with a man taking monkey gland serum to keep him young so he can outlive his brother but he ends up turning into a monkey. Wow. We start off this collection with a bit of a turd. These twist endings weren’t all that interesting and it was bordering on awful.
-Strange Tales #22- We start with a good story of a wealthy man in India and using his loads of food while everyone starves. He comes across an untouchable and his greediness turns into his undoing. Cautionary stories are always decent. The text story features Easter Eggs landing on Earth but they are really tiny aliens that plan on taking over the Earth. Unfortunately, they can’t live in oxygen. Total War of the Worlds stuff here. A man builds a robot in the next story but these robots are too smart and he builds an army of robots that takes over the world. An opera singer is featured in the next story and he uses his golden voice to plague shop-owners by singing and breaking their mirrors. He ends up injured when a chandelier falls on him. He needs surgery on his head but he returns. He sings but unaware that the plate in his head was glass. Chalk up one asshole to the dead list. A man makes a deal with the devil to make himself lucky but he wins so much the people he gambles with thinks he is cheating and he’s killed. We end with a man getting hypnotized into thinking he killed his partner but he didn’t and when he sees his partner he ends up running into a roller coaster and dying. This was a much improved issue with some decent moral tales woven into these horrible demises for the characters.
-Strange Tales #23- Okay, we start with a less than virtuous body builder winning all contests on Earth and competing on Pluto. He wins but his prize is worse than he expected (he’s just dinner!). Our written tale features a man taking a longer way to work, ending up in a life of crime and coming full circle with his demise. An editor hires a man who knows everything to take his employers down a peg. They get jealous and confront him. Of course this man is just a robot and he ends up busted and the workers are dead. A fantastic story follows where a man uses an alien device that ends up turning the Earth into a negative of itself. There is fantastic art here of black and white negative imagery from artist Louis Ravielli and this is a highlight of the book. A real dud follows (an argument of what men evolved from and one turns into a fish and the other into a monkey) and we end with another picture themed story (a man can make pictures come alive – his wife is suspicious and ends up mauled by tigers). Everything on here was great (except that terrible scientist story) so this is almost worth the price of admission itself.
-Strange Tales #24- A man gets a job in a graveyard just to really watch it. He gets too curious and digs up one of the unmarked graves only to have Plutonian aliens pop up and plan to take over the world. Our written story is your usual vampire woman drawing in wayward men. We move along to men going to Mars to make peace and the bumbling idiot among their crew is the one who brought the two sides together. There’s a bizarre Russia story that tells the story of Anastasia and her disappearance and murder of her family caused Russia’s eventual downfall. A seer tells a man that he won’t die in war but fails to tell him he’ll die immediately upon exiting her booth. That was a fun story. A fat man and two of his shipmates end up on a little life raft after their ship sinks and the fat man is eating all this hidden food he had stashed. They end up on an island and the fat man is the perfect meal for the island of cannibals. He had it coming I guess. There are two alien stories here, an odd historical one that didn’t belong in a book like Strange Tales, and a cautionary tale about fat people. This had more misses than hits.
-Strange Tales #25- We start on an advanced Earth free of war, famine and all other ills that plague us now. So what do we humans want to do? Be content? HA!! WE WANT TO CONQUER!!!! We head out and end up getting eaten by a huge blob that kills all humans and leaves the lowly robots around to control Earth. That’s why we humans need to change the way we think. Speaking of humans the next story sees a woman in disguise going to Mars to steal their plans to invade Earth. The Martians are on to her but are shocked to see she’s actually a robot! The robot leaves and we see the robot is actually a woman! A woman dressed as a robot dressed as a woman! BRILLIANT! The text story (Purple Shoes) is as ridiculous as it sounds. We see the Last Man on Earth who gets a strange knock on his door. Who else could it be but the LAST WOMAN ON EARTH! Wow. Anyway we finish with a man trying to sleep his way through trouble (like Rip Van Winkle) but ends up as a human bowling pin and a story about overcrowding on ALL NINE PLANETS leading to each planet agreeing to UNIVERSAL WAR. Where do they come up with these stories? This stuff was so childish. It’s like they had 6-year olds coming up with these stories. There was just no originality present here.
-Strange Tales #26- A bum wants to kill himself. See, his wife and kids were gunned down by the mob (Frank Castle) after getting caught in a drive-by. The twist here is that the man was the one who pulled the trigger! We continue with a man sending animals to space and they were coming back more powerful (the FF?). So he sends his small assistant who is given the powers by aliens and he comes back armed with only hatred. The main scientist is killed because all bad people get theirs in the end. The text story was a funny one. A woman takes the candy and money of one of her tenants and even ruins her relationship. She eats a box of candy the man sends only to learn the man poisoned them in rage! She won’t interfere in any one else’s affairs anymore! A small-time crook turns gravediggers into a union but he just exploits both sides for his own gain. He ends up getting buried alive by some of the dead corpses that haven’t been buried because of his interference. See what I said about bad people getting theirs in the end? There’s a somewhat sentimental story about a father worrying about his son going to the stars and how apples don’t fall far from the tree. This was a rare touching story in this “horror/fantasy” book. We end with a man writing a cautionary tale warning us that we could be the man who saved him but is doomed to destroy Washington DC. This was a very interesting issue because you can see possible influences of other Marvel stories. This may be the best book of the bunch from beginning to end.
-Strange Tales #27- Our first story up features an old man who is given all he wants from the devil but is willing to give it all up to save the life of the woman he loves. You can see the ending a mile away but it was a fun ride in getting there. Some travelers find an old wine maker living with his daughter alone in the mountains. They share a drink and through the old man’s story they learn that it’s just a trap to feed the vampire that saved his daughter. This is one of those stories where the main characters aren’t inherently bad but still face a terrible ending. A man is driven crazy by clocks in the text story and the less said about it the better. An old man wants to stop progress in the form of building a highway through his property. He stops them at all turns so they build UNDER him. He goes crazy and ends up dead anyway. There’s a short three-page story about Death and Earth being her garden (and loving the mushrooms – i.e. Nuclear Bombs). We end with two people who choked their aunt to death meeting their own end via suffocation.
-Strange Tales #28- We start with a very good story about a spy trying to figure out how people are escaping. He learns they are going through coffins so he and the leader hatch a plan where the spy will have himself in a coffin and the boss will dig him out. Of course, the coffin the spy ends up in is the one of his now-dead boss! That was a really good twist with some great art. Our text story is about an amnesiac man who wakes up next to a dead woman and it leads him to more murder. Eventually he finds out he never killed her but he has to pay for his crimes. We move to a story about a surgeon who operates on mobsters but when a man brings in his woman (surgeon’s wife) he goes mad and kills himself. A cowardly man meets his demise because of his cowardly ways. We continue with some ham-radio enthusiasts playing a trick on their friend who can hear things from the future. He “hears” his death report and so he kills himself, too. Finally a man goes back to slums looking for his girl but learns she’s dead after she became a bum and she was given fake money (incidentally by the returning guy). He kills himself as well. There’s a lot of suicide going on in the tail end of this comic.
-Strange Tales #29- We start with a man dressing as the devil to force a confession from someone he had accused of being a witch. His dressing up gets him killed by the villagers while the woman (who is really a witch) flies away. The text story was my favorite of the book as a ghost tries convincing a captain to hear his story of being killed and creating super-steel. It sounds weird but it was well-told. A crooked guy plans on selling fake stock and send the money home. He returns home expecting 25 Grand but his girl had invested in that same stock! It’s a shock that will kill him. We meet with two guys going on a dig underground but one realizes there is only food for one man! He kills the other guy but then learns he was a robot with the way back home. It’s a good lesson. Speaking of lessons, we learn the lesson of the evils of Communism thanks to a dead Soviet speaking against the Reds. We end with four people lying about the death of a man (including the dead man lying himself) but the Hindu God of Justice shows up and delivers justice to all four liars. The book started out well but couldn’t hold its momentum through to the end.
-Strange Tales #30- We start with a silly alien story that falls under the category of: person is really an alien but impersonating a human. A mob tough guy is trying to get “protection money” but one woman holds out so he destroys her store. She gets the last laugh however. We look at a man who looks like a vampire so he has surgery to look human (after stealing and murdering to get the money). Unfortunately for him his surgeon is a vampire and kills him to keep his identity secret. We head out West where a person was put in prison and the people don’t know why. Stories are exaggerated and soon a lynch mob is after him. He is killed (and it was kind of graphic with the hanging) but soon they realize he wasn’t evil but was sick and was being quarantined. Now all the villagers are screwed because of the mob like mentality of people. A man finds an alien plot but no one can see or hear him. It was too short to be meaningful. We end with a man creating a super-frog to kill his boss but his boss unknowingly puts the frog back to the scientist and our bad guy is killed.
-The Bottom Line- I know I was down on some of the issues and there is a wide variety of quality here. Some stories are just fantastic and would stand up today (I’m thinking specifically of the Negative story) but mostly you’re left with short stories with a very forced twist at the end. This is considered pre-code (although they have a Code on the front page) and the art is more in the vein of EC than what you’d see later on in the Silver Age. So story-wise I’m going about in the middle on a recommendation. At the end of the day these collections work well because of the value. You get 10-comics from the Atlas Age of Marvel for about $50.00. Check your Overstreet Price Guide to see how much these issues run for (about $475 an issue). Furthermore, and I’m surprised that Vassallo didn’t mention it; Issue #28 was featured in the Senate investigation. It was the Jack Katz story (the surgeon and his wife) that probably helped lead to the creation of the CCA. This is truly historical stuff. Yeah, some of the stories are misses but for the value this cannot be beat, especially for fans of pre-code horror and fantasy.
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Questions? Comments? Shoot me an email.
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