Welcome back to my humble comic book and nerd culture blog. That sentence is mostly for me... welcoming myself back because it's been nearly a year since I've updated this thing.
It's officially my favorite month of the year, so what better way to stretch my atrophied typing, idea-box than to wax a series on the monster/horror/sci-fi tales of yesteryear. I'm calling this surely short-lived series "Tiny Tales" because it focuses on brief stories and back-up tales. Anthologies, or collections of short stories for those not in the know (of anything apparently), were very popular in the Golden Age of comics. That trend continued through the Silver Age, but ebbed in the Copper Age. Back-ups were snippets to help fill out a book, some of which were better than the main story. These are still around, but nowhere near as numerous.
Today's feature takes us back to the pre-Fantastic Four era of Marvel Comics...
Journey into Mystery #65
"Fear in the Night"
February 1961
This is one of three short tales from Journey into Mystery #65. The legendary Steve Ditko (of The Amazing Spider-Man and Dr. Strange of Strange Tales) is credited as artist and inker, according to Marvel Database, but a writer is not specified. This leads me to believe Mr. Ditko probably filled those shoes too.
The text in the lower right of the page states:
"Come with us on a fantastic journey to the 24th century!! Join a man and a robot, alone on a strange planet, as they encounter... FEAR IN THE NIGHT!"
What we have here is a dude and his robot that crash land on an alien planet. Post-crash they salvage enough supplies to last long enough for their rescue ship to arrive. That is until THIS asshole screws things up for them:
Look at that. This alien monster thing is presumably alone on this planet, at least in this immediate area and probably has been for a while, and the first thing he does when he sees someone else's stuff is tear that shit up. It's pretty inconsiderate.
Unfortunately, after the alien has his spoiled kid tantrum, they don't have enough "oxygen concentrates" for both of them to survive the expected three days it will take for their rescuers to get there. So, basically only one of them can survive. They table that discussion immediately because the big green alien chases after them.
They finally come down to the wire and one of them decides to sacrifice himself to save the other. He tosses the gray guy the bag of concentrates and runs toward the alien monster:
BUT, the rescue party arrives early! Just in time to distract the alien monster. Our heroes take advantage of this and escape with their lives!
As was usually the case with stories of this type, things are not exactly as they seem. Remember our introduction: "Join a man and a robot..." Here's where things are flipped:
I have to say I was pleasantly surprised upon seeing this ending. I was expecting some sort of a twist, but I didn't guess this one. It's clever. I've no idea if these characters ever show back up again (they probably don't), but the hallmark of a great short story is it makes you want more. So, here I am in 2014, wondering about these one-off characters from 1961. What's their story? Why human robots? Why is that green alien so mean?
Until next time...
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