Monday, November 04, 2019


A House of Mystery/House of Secrets house ad? Where were you last month! Today's quarter book wasn't scary enough for October, but it'll still find a home here: from 1970, From Beyond the Unknown #3, cover by Neal Adams.

This felt like a much older book, but it was all reprints of Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures stories. After the first story, "When Earth Turned Into a Comet!" there's a third-of-a-page ad for a Revell Apollo Saturn V model, which would've still seemed like complete science fiction when it was published in 1963's Strange Adventures #150. (Story by Gardner Fox, art by Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella.) This one's more nonsense than usual, with some astronauts encountering an odd illusion-casting metal on the moon, then some aliens who want to launch the moon at their enemies, who look like humans but live on some distant and unrelated world. (Again, I feel like that was a fairly standard gambit for DC's aliens!)

"Prisoner of the Electric Eye!" is probably also nonsense, but I like it: an escape artist is drafted to stop a war from breaking out between earth and Saturn. His old mentor has gone turncoat, and he has to outshine his teacher to get out of that one. (Written by John Broome, pencils by Gil Kane, inks by Frank Giacoia.)

In "The Space Hermit" a odd-looking alien lands on earth, trapped in an indestructible bubble. It telepathically tells a professor how to break him out--but should he? (Story by Sid Gerson, art by Henry Sharp.) The twist there leads into the next one, "Escape from Earth!" A couple attempts to, duhr, escape earth, before they are forced into immortality! (Written by John Broome, art by Murphy Anderson.)


No comments: