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This is another one where I missed Volume 1. Anyway, this is volume two which collects Journey Into Mystery #’s 11-20, a collection that starts in August of 1953 and ends in December of 1954. As Dr. Michael J. Vassallo notes in his exhaustive foreword (it clocks in at over 5 pages!), this was just three months before the Comics Code Authority shut down almost all the horror stories like this.
Vassallo talks a lot about the artists and talent used in this collection which is something I really appreciate. There is just a ton of people who worked on this collection, and on the first two Tales of Suspense and JIM collections. Vassallo notes that in those combined 40 issues of both titles, 75 different artists were used. It’s nice to see some of these forgotten names given their due. Atlas Era was a rough time for what would become Marvel, as their books weren’t selling in the numbers they did during the height of the Golden Age, and it was years before the birth of the Marvel Age of Comics. The War years of comics saw greats like Jack Kirby, and the Silver Age at a wealth of talent, but many of the names here just aren’t as fondly remembered. What I love about Vassallo’s introduction is how truthful he is when talking about these tales. If a story was middling, he would say it. He doesn’t just say that since these are classic stories they are good. He’s straight-forward with his words and focuses more on those who made these comics than the content of them and you can tell this was written by a fan of these guys’ work.
Spoilers Ahead
-Journey Into Mystery #11- We start with vampires being uncovered thanks to blood-thirsty mosquitoes followed by a good novelette of a painting forecasting people’s deaths. An ugly person wants a new face and gets one, but still has his old on the opposite side. A coat leads to missing people, but the story never actually offers a good conclusion. A séance story doesn’t lead to anything terribly shocking, and the issue stumbles to a conclusion with a plot right out of Face/Off, though the end to that story is appropriate.
- Journey Into Mystery #12- A man wants to steal from Dragmoor Castle only to fall prey to the ghosts in there. The prose story tells of a greedy man finding Atlantis only to die miserably. A with falls in love and turns human for only a few hours before she dies. It turns out she fell in love with a statue. D’OH! An ugly man gets plastic surgery before he lands on Mars, and his beautiful face is now the ugliest thing there. A ghost looks for help to save a young boy and it is the crazy patients who escaped from their hospital who are the only ones who help. A strange boy in a fire is really an alien and he helps the only person who was not greedy in helping him. That last story was pretty boring, but the other ones were pretty good. There’s a little thing about polio prevention listed in this issue. It seems that to not get polio you have to do a few things; Don’t Mix With New Groups, Don’t Get Overtired, Don’t Get Chilled, But Do Keep Clean. Wow, medicine has come a far way.
- Journey Into Mystery #13- A man who kills vampires and werewolves suffers a terrible twist of fate when his son is the new lord of vampires and werewolves. A group of three castaways make a deal with the devil, except for one man who sees what the deal really did to the other two. A silly grass story follows with a grass monster killing the man who messes with the grass. A swami who “speaks” to the dead is exposed as a fraud and brought from the land of the living thanks to a séance from those who he helped kill. A silly future story follows and a man sees into the future and is driven by his own jealousy to fulfill that future. The final story is of a man who marries a rich woman to practice piano, then plots her death, and then has his hands cut-off by a group of hand-hunters deep in Africa.
- Journey Into Mystery #14- A man hypnotizes his brother to believe he’s a slug but the twist is he actually becomes a slug! There’s a great prose story about a cave with sculptures of people who all end up dead. The novelettes in these last four issues have been the highlights for me. A man hides his vampirism from his wife, but of course, his wife is hiding the same thing from him. You know, all they need is some communication! A man creates a mini-world and finds out that the person he hates the most in this world was himself. A hunter gets his just desserts by getting hunted by a strange beast and a boy dreams of going to the stars, gets there, and then gets turned back when the aliens find out that humans aren’t ready for the stars yet.
- Journey Into Mystery #15- A guy doesn’t believe in evil or the devil but makes a deal with someone pretending to be the devil. The twist at the end was actually very intriguing. The novelette features a man’s wife trying to find his money and being revealed as a monster at the end. I’m sure a lot of married guys feel that describes their wife, too. A man wants to kill his cheating wife but atomic war bonds them together like Siamese Twins. See, if you’re gonna kill someone, don’t wait, lest you be bonded together and atomic war does break out the next week. A criminal escapes from prison but is killed by a double-crossing, greedy man who wants the criminal’s hidden money. The criminal says his face will haunt this fool and it does, since the guy is killed by police thinking he was the criminal. We head to 1626 Salem and a witch being followed by the villagers with a twist at the end that the woman was actually a witch. Finally, a man has no records of any events of his life but there’s a reason for that, he’s a spy from Mars. So that’s where the origins of Secret Invasion came from!
- Journey Into Mystery #16- A man wanted for murder claims it was a vampire but no one believes him. He unwraps the cloth surrounding his body and he’s just bones. He wanted to kill the vampire that killed him. The prose tale was a fun one about a family curse and pirates. I like family curses (as long as they are not mine) and pirates so combining them is always a win. Our first Communist story sees the Koreans train a man to be a village idiot but the final twist of fate is that the man actually becomes the idiot and messes up their plans royally. There’s another tale of a man who wasn’t in this issue and we see a man that’s been in an old people’s home since before the Civil War. A scientist has a serum that will reverse the aging process and we find out he’s really an alien and as soon as his alien form is revealed the rest of his country men invade since him becoming an alien again was their signal to invade. An old man on his death bed has three vultures for sons, but a loving stepdaughter. Once he’s dead the sons want his money and duck his funeral since they are assholes. So they see the will and learn that the monies will be split evenly among those who went to the funeral. Sucks to be them. Finally, a man makes a machine that will forecast the future and when he asks about when his wife will die, his overprotective tendencies make this a self-fulfilling prophecy. These are two really fun issues in a row.
- Journey Into Mystery #17- A miserly old bag tries to take his wealth with him but his miserly ways proves his undoing. You could say he got what he deserved. A cautionary tale about man and machine follows, with machines eventually taking over the world. Another machine causes problems the next issue, as an Electro-looking machine is guided by a midget but the twist is the machine takes over the midget’s murderous ways. A bumbling loser tries to kill the man who stole his wife but really his own idiocy ends up hurting himself. A man falls victim to a TV that can give him whatever he desires. It’s interesting that new things like TV’s even brought a bit of fear and the unknown. A woman is tricked by a man who makes her into a witch. It was a lackluster end to the title but it was a good issue.
- Journey Into Mystery #18- A man can swim back in time but it only ends in death for him. He tried to evade the taxes too long. The prose story is a good one about a wife’s revenge and the power of hatred and is a reprint from Strange Tales #13. A hidden man is shooting people in the park but it turns out to be a monkey that is having a little bit of fun with a gun. A man won’t stay dead but he’s really just dreaming. That was a crap ending. A swami takes revenge on a hateful father who makes his son steal. Finally, two witless yokels try to steal well water but don’t realize that it had been poisoned. Oops.
- Journey Into Mystery #19- A man has a robot built for him by a woman who gets jealous of his nights alone. She doesn’t know he’s stealing while the robot stays home and the man doesn’t know that the robot is building a girlfriend. So the man breaks the robot because it’s making noise and then the woman kills the man, not knowing that the woman he was with was in fact a robot. That had a lot of story and plots laid down in 5 pages. An alien takes over the mind of a man and learns the true kindness that men can have. A man finds out that the statuettes his wife buys house real animals. So he buys a snake for her, to kill her, but doesn’t realize his wife switched it with an atom bomb. He smashes it; it goes boom, and bye bye asshole husband. A crazy fish story follows and we end with a witch-hunting story.
- Journey Into Mystery #20- A boy can change into any mythical creatures but the device he’s using is stolen by a woman, only to have her meet an untimely end. A man uncovers a plot for starling birds to take over the world from the moon. The prose story features a man making a deal for eternal life, but basically being paralyzed while he lives to eternity and is a reprint from Strange Tales #14. A woman has a perfect husband but no one realizes it is a robot. A messenger from the future arrives at a prankster’s job and he ends up going crazy. We end with a car that needs no gas. A man kills the inventor and takes it and robs a bank. He runs from the police but finds out too late that the car runs on human energy and he withers away.
-The Bottom Line- There are a lot of fun stories in here. It’s not the greatest of horror stories but what is here is wholly enjoyable and I breezed through most of these stories. It’s interesting to see what people were worried about back in the 50’s. A lot of horror stories are responses to things that are currently happening, like the television story, or the car stories. I enjoyed this series and the old-time horror art was really a pleasure to view, too. Recommended.
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