Reading Room FANTASY MASTERPIECES "Beware!! The Ghosts Surround Me!"

"This great yarn, which might have taken place today..."

"...gives concrete evidence to the claim that Dashin' Donnie Heck is perhaps our most sophisticated artist!" --Stan Lee

The odd choice of panels to illustrate the story on the bottom left of the cover...

...does give away a crucial plot point, that the "ghosts" are nothing of the kind!

(I would've used a cropped version of the splash page which gives more of a "ghostly" feel than obviously-alien interdimensional beings.)

Penciled and inked by Don Heck, this appearance in Fantasy Masterpieces #1 (1965) was the tale's second reprinting since its' debut in Strange Tales #76 (1960)!

The first was in Strange Tales Annual #1 (1962).

It appeared one more time, in Vault of Evil #19 (1975), which still makes it 40 years since the story's last publication, and many readers of this blog have never seen it.

As for who wrote it, the consensus is that Stan Lee plotted it, but his brother Larry Lieber (Stan's real name was "Stanley Lieber"*) wrote the captions and dialogue.

Tomorrow, another sci-fi/fantasy tale by one of the artists who defined the Marvel Age of Comics!

*Stan had his name legally changed to "Stan Lee".

50 Years Ago...FANTASY MASTERPIECES!

Face Front, True Believer...

Beginning tomorrow, and for the rest of the week, we'll be presenting the tantalizing tales Smilin' Stan described lurking behind this colorful cover 50 years ago.
(And dig those MadMan-era threads!)

The anthology proved popular enough to keep going for several years, adding Golden Age superhero reprints, and, eventually, becoming a launch platform for both Captain Marvel (The third one, aka Captain Mar-Vell of the Kree) and the Guardians of the Galaxy!

But it was these sci-fi tales by the guys who were doing the Marvel super-heroes, that grabbed my attention!

(Not to mention the sheer chutzpah and showmanship of Stan the Man, linking the tales to the artists who were already becoming the first nerd culture celebrities!)

Be here tomorrow to discover (or re-discover) the magic!

Happy Mother's Day

Design of the Week USA IS READY!

Each week, we post a limited-edition design, to be sold for exactly 7 days, then replaced with another!

This week: As hawks beat the drums of war against everyone from Iran to North Korea, we offer a kool cover from a one-shot comic produced just before we entered World War II...U.S.A. is Ready!
The book itself was re-presented on our "brother" RetroBlog War: Past, Present & Future several years ago.
You can read those posts HERE.
Besides being the basis of the perfect kitschy Memorial Day gift for the veteran in your life, it's a symbol of a time when we were ready to fight because we were the Good Guys and we had to oppose the Bad Guys simply because they were Bad and we were Good.
Unfortunately, since WWII, our military efforts have not always been for the right reasons.
And now, the same conservatives who created the current power vacuum in the Mid-East want us to go back and screw things up further.
But, let's look back on a simpler time when Good and Evil were clearly defined, and we knew that, eventually, we would have to enter a war we had no part in creating.

Reading Room ADVENTURE COMICS "Invasion"

We wind up our week of "lost" stories with...

...a pencil and ink job by Silver Age legend Don Heck!

Heck had an undeserved reputation as a hack artist, mostly due to poor inking by actual hacks like Vince Colletta, who was notorious for leaving out pencilers' linework.

When he had a good inker or inked himself, his work was on a par with any of the other acknowledged greats of the field.

But since he was almost as fast a penciler as Jack Kirby, publishers didn't utilize his inking talents as often as they could've.

This tale hasn't been seen since it appeared in the back of DC's Adventure Comics #424 (1972).

We're pleased to present it (and the other stories we've featured this week) to an audience that was probably unaware of their existence.