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This is the first edition of the Atlas Era Tales of Suspense and the second Atlas Era Masterworks I have reviewed. It is definitely interesting to read these as they are not the usual superhero tales we are accustomed to reading from Marvel. These issues ran bi-monthly and this collection spans from January 1959 to July 1960. It was released post comics-code so it wasn’t anything like the EC stories from a decade before but it was a virtual breeding ground in legendary Silver Age Marvel artists who worked on the title, from Jack Kirby to Don Heck to Steve Ditko. Each issue followed a similar pattern. There would be four illustrated story and one prose story. Usually these stories end with a twist that you can see miles away (see: The Twilight Zone) but I loved these types of stories when they were reprinted in the X-Men reprints and in various other places I have read them. Let’s see how it holds up 50 years later!
Spoilers Ahead
-Tales of Suspense #1- We start with an alien story, as it is set way in the future (this time in the year 2000!) The point of the story is an alien landing on Earth and that we humans can’t accept aliens unless they look like us. The prose story is a funny little tale of a reporter with a prolific nose (a nose for the news) marrying a woman with great ears (ear for the news). Another space story follows (this time in 2478) with some pilots looking for another planet to inhabit since the Earth is almost overpopulated. Two very short stories follow, one being a man who had an outer body experience and used a lawyer to try to free himself, only to have it backfire and a man getting bored with his life and setting sail on the seas (he turned out to be Robinson Crusoe). Finally, Ditko draws a story of aliens wanting to invade Earth and testing their shrinking ray on a human. He shrinks but somehow grows back (I don’t think it was explained adequately enough why) and the aliens leave. It was a good opening issue.
-Tales of Suspense #2- The first space story has a man tricking the world into destroying their armaments by faking an alien invasion. The prose story was actually a very weird story of a man traveling the world and returning home to find his nephew is a sorcerer. It didn’t make sense and was pretty pointless. Our first time travel story follows with a man stealing a time machine, brining modern appliances to the time of King Arthur to impress only to realize they have no electricity or anything that will make his devices work! He ends up like he did in his time, as a janitor. A future (2026) story sees a man trying to reach a planet only to have his daughter die in the frequent tries and failures. He was trying to get to Earth. We then head to Planet X where an emperor goes to take over another planet, only to be taken control of by flowers that inhabit the planet. Finally, a robot in 2834 seeks out in hiding the ruler who banned robots. He shows the world that this ruler was a robot himself!
-Tales of Suspense #3- Time Machines return for the opening story, as a man plays with time, meets a version of himself in Egypt, gets knocked out, loses his memory, and ends up living in the Egyptian world. The prose story features an espionage story combining a bridge of mystical powers. Ditko inks a follow up to Planet X as a flower heads to Earth to try to take it over but the pilots resist his command and destroy the plane. Another robot story (this time in 2000) has a man not trusting robots at all, until he is saved by one on a flight to the moon. We see two convicts who hide out in a house, pretend it is haunted to scare off the kids and finally getting scared off by invisible beings from the fifth dimension. Finally, we see a whole bunch of aliens landing on Earth, ready to invade, until a general stands up to their destructive rays using only the power of faith. Interesting twist there.
-Tales of Suspense #4- A man in a dictactor led country builds an invisible ray that the ruler wants. The ray doesn’t actually make the troops invisible but transports them to another dimension, allowing the despot to be overthrown. A snowstorm leads a man to a secluded cabin where an alchemist has converted useless metal to gold in the prose story. He tries to tell everyone but they won’t believe him. A space crew in 2500 flies to another planet where the trees are alive and capture some of the spacemen before they are saved by the pilot. A boy with a ham radio picks up signals of an invasion and has visions of space ships! It all seems to be transmitted from ants below him! A man who hates robots loses his job to them but makes a better living writing about them then decides they aren’t too bad since they take up all the menial jobs while man can think freely. The final story is a humurous one of a Martian trying to stop a human rocket from blasting off and he seems to do it, until we realize the Martian is one-inch high and just destroyed a toy rocket!
-Tales of Suspense #5- An alien invades Earth in a robot frame in preparation to warn his fellow invaders. He doesn’t count on being deactivated and having his mind stuck in the robot. The prose story sees a painter lock himself in his room to paint a masterpiece. He later ends up in the painting, getting happiness at last. The second story has a man going to an island in Africa and finding a dinosaur egg. The egg hatches spawning a T-Rex which the man has to kill to save himself. A criminal breaks apart an invention and puts it back together, and it enables him to walk through walls. He steals a lot, then gets a trap sprung on him by a cop (who determines the only he’s doing this is by having a device that will allow him to go through walls). The man ends up captured and the device destroyed. Another time travel stories features a spy being sent back in time to avoid escape. He takes the place in the past of Benedict Arnold, right as he’s captured. Sucks to be him. A noted construction architect has a great idea, he will use his fortune to build a tunnel from the US to Europe. He ends up near an alien home underwater and they blow up his tunnel. The man sees the aliens but no one believes him and blames his carelessness for the tunnel’s destruction.
-Tales of Suspense #6- We start with a monster in a swamp attacking a group of travelers. Turns out this monster is actually a child alien. The written story is a silly one about Lady Luck and one man’s disbelief of this. A man finds out his imagination can take him places he never imagined in the third story and in the fourth story a man finds out that mutants exist, and he is one! The penultimate story sees a crook using a mask to commit a crime, then getting caught when the mask becomes his face! Finally, we see a group of space travelers landing on the moon in 1966 and making a community. They are besieged by luna lizards that are actually trying to help them!
-Tales of Suspense #7- An alien from the shadow dimension shows up on Earth but is tricked into trying to steal something and is blasted with light that destroys him. The written story is a very weird one about people working with a mysterious alien light. It was definitely out of the ordinary. A girl wishes for a genie in the third story and wishes away everyone on the planet, very reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode featuring Billy Mumy. A man uses a robot for criminal gain but ultimately gets imprisoned when he forgets to oil the robot and he gets stuck while the man is inside a bank. Another man (in 1975) flies to Mars to negotiate a deal and he figures out the mystery of the Martian Maze when all of Earth’s most brilliant scientists could not. The final story features The Molten Man-Thing attacking a small tropical island. A man on vacation saves the place by using the turbine engines of a plane to cool it off and send it away.
-Tales of Suspense #8- Monstro attacks a Russian port and the US is asked for help. A US scientist goes to help and finds out that it is a regular octopus that was enlarged by radioactivity, which confirms the Russians are testing with it. A man in our second story steals money from a bank and heads to a Mars spaceship used as a movie prop. Of course, he ran into a real Martian ship and is now a prisoner in their zoo. Steve Ditko illustrates a changing man (sort of like a Skrull) who gets sent to earth to spy but is trapped when he impersonates a dog in space. This is an early prototype for the Skrulls. The written story is a silly one featuring a tomboy whose mother wants her to cook. She gets a book but it turns out it is a witch cookbook and she is a fairy. I told you it was weird. We return to the comic stories with a runaway planet heading towards Earth. Only one scientist believes the Earth will be safe and right before the planet hits it turns away. The man had faith and it turns out the planet was just a spacecraft. We end with another robot story, where a man tries to build a robot, which had become outlawed. He gets discovered but escapes. It turns out he is a robot just looking to build a brother and this story is actually going to be continued in the next issue.
-Tales of Suspense #9- An adventurer learns of a smoke monster near the Aztecs and goes to investigate. Turns out that the smoke monster is from another dimension and wants to take over the world! The man tricks the monster by using a lighter. The written story sees a man looking back on his life through a mirror and wanting to have fun instead of living his multimillionaire life. We meet a mystic named Chondu who has incredible powers of the mind and sends a criminal to another dimension. A man in the next story takes a time machine to the future to get inside information on horse betting but finds that time travel is illegal and his machine gets destroyed. A creature wants to invade Earth but the twist at the end is that they are on the Earth, but microscopic. A scientist washes them away at the end. We end with the return of the robot from last issue. He captures a prominent politician and says robots are now allowed. Of course, the politician was really a robot, too, and he comes back to destroy the original robot.
-Tales of Suspense #10- We start with a man unleashing a Cyclops onto the world, but having to freeze him to stop the threat. The written story was a weird one about gorilla’s living in our society. A man takes a walk through a nightmare valley where the trees are alive, and are aliens, and a volcano wipes them out. A man in a strange store has a stone sculpture that was the workings of Medusa. Finally a scientist tries to escape the police and becomes a gorilla, which backfires on him. This was the weakest issue of the lot, so far.
-The Bottom Line- Dr. Michael J. Vassallo imparts his tremendous knowledge of Marvel’s Atlas Era to us readers with four very in-depth pages on the artists who worked for Timely at the time, as well as when these stories were scripted. It mentions he is writing a comprehensive book on a lost legend from the Atlas era and it is something I would really like to read. He is a great writer and really sheds some light on the time these stories were written. There are som great extras, too, like a letter from Stan Lee to inker Dick Ayers praising his job on ToS #8 and a pencilled ToS #9 splash page by Don Heck. It’s actually very interesting to see how the time these were written affected the stories. This was a few years after WWII and the Communist threat was very real. A lot of the stories took place in the future (2000), dealt with robots, aliens, overpopulation of the Earth, threats from unknown assailants, and especially space travel. The stories always had a twist at the end (I find myself thinking about the Robot Chicken M. Night Shymalan spoof, Oh what a twist!). I have never read any of these before as the reprints I read were from later issue, but this is two things for me. It is a great collection of sci-fi tales that also represents a certain time in United States History, as the very real fears and aspirations of the time were very evident in these stories. Definitely recommended.
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