Monday, October 28, 2019


The cover promises "3 Mind-Mangling Tales of the Mysterious!" but there are four inside? Maybe one isn't mind-mangling, it's up to you...From 1975, Where Monsters Dwell #37, featuring a bunch of stories reprinted from somewhere else!

I swore I had read the opener, "Behold--the Monster!" before; it's a Stan Lee/Steve Ditko one. As an alien invasion heads towards earth, a hype man builds a giant paper-mache monster to advertise a new movie. Although it seems like a success--and he takes the statue on tour!--the hype man's boss comes down on him like a sack of bricks. The cops are claiming its blocking traffic, parent groups are writing in, and how much did you spend on that thing? Still, he might feel better if he knew the statue foiled that invasion.

"The Strange Prison!" is from Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett, and in it a scuba diver finds an undersea kingdom and a beautiful princess. So of course he's gonna rob it. "The World Beyond" is Lee and Ditko again, as a scientist refuses to let his colleagues stop his experiments, and shrinks himself and his dog into a familiar looking sub-atomic world. No, not the one with the Micronauts on it. (Well, kind of?)

It's Lee and Don Heck for the last story, "Fangs of the Monster," in which a man begs passersby to believe his story about a sea monster that was more than it seemed. You won't believe it either! Which was kind of the point? Ah, it's late, I'm tired.

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