Reading Room JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY "Alien on Earth"

Yesterday, we told the tale of a misunderstood alien...

...here's an earlier rendition of the oft-used concept, with one of the weirdest-looking Jack Kirby aliens I've ever seen!

Jack Kirby and Christopher Rule, who did the cover of the re-do, illustrated this never-reprinted tale from Atlas' Journey into Mystery #51 (1959).

As for who wrote it, the consensus on various sites, including the Grand Comics Database, is that it's the work of Kirby himself.

For those clever readers who noted both this story and the reworking in World of Fantasy were both published in 1959, this one came out six months earlier, and the "job number" for "Alien" (T-165) is earlier than the one on "Gargoyle" (T-345).

Usually, Stan Lee (either as editor or writer) made sure that such similar plots or reworkings were a couple of years apart.

Reading Room WORLD OF FANTASY "Gargoyle From the 5th Galaxy!"

Is this a kool cover, or what?

But, this sandals-wearing Jack Kirby-Christopher Rule scarlet alien isn't inside the comic!

Instead, we get a more humanoid, less "traditional" gargoyle-looking green alien!

To be fair, he does breathe fire, like the guy on the cover...

Plotted by Stan Lee, scripted by Larry Lieber and superbly-rendered by Don Heck, this tale from Atlas' World of Fantasy #19 (1959) was acutally a re-do of an earlier story (by Jack Kirby, no less), which we'll present tomorrow!

BTW, though the story was reprinted in the 1970s, the cover has never seen republication!

Pity...

Reading Room: BUZZY BEAN AND HIS FLYING SAUCER

The US government finally admits we're using flying saucers...

But sci-fi fans have known the truth about flying saucers for years...nay, decades!

Here's a never-reprinted strip about a boy and his personal flying saucer from the 1950s...

...from a short-lived company that only put out two titles with a combined total of nine issues!

Artist Carl Hubbell (no relation to the Hall of Fame baseball player) illustrated over 300 tales from the late Golden Age through the Silver Age at almost every company in the business.

Sadly, the writer of this premiere installment of the series in Good Comics' Johnny Law: Sky Ranger #1 (1955) is unknown.

BTW, the company name was not a boast, the publisher was Edmond Good, an artist with both newspaper and comic book credits from the beginning of the Golden Age to the end of the Bronze Age.

Reading Room ASTONISHING "The Scientists"

When we presented this tale...

...by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, we had no idea it was a reworking of an earlier tale in Atlas' Astonishing #9 (1952) by Stan Lee and Harry Lazarus!

The original is a page longer and has some rather witty touches which put the lie to the concept "If our meddling with time changed anything, we'd notice!"

This never-reprinted story (like the reworked version, "Those Who Change") is based on one of the basic rules of time-travel; "don't change anything in the past, or you'll alter the future"...which is in direct contradiction to another of the basic rules of time-travel; "no matter what you do, you can't change the future".
Hey, I'm just telling you the rules.
I never said they made sense...

Reading Room TALES OF SUSPENSE "Voice of Doom"

Remember when we presented this kool tale a couple of weeks ago?

We discovered it was a reworking of an earlier story, plotted b Stan Lee, scripted by Larry Lieber, and illustrated by Carl Burgos, that appeared in Atlas' Tales of Suspense #4 (1959)!

The primary difference is that the original tale used a ham radio rather than the blurry tv screen of the later story, so the visualizations of the war were only in Fred's mind, the same way classic dramatic radio dramas of the 1930s-50s used dialogue, music, and sound effects to make the listeners' imaginations create the scenario!
Writer/artist Carl Burgos was one of the seminal creators of the Marvel Universe.
His creation, the Golden Age Human Torch was the cover-featured character on the first Timely (later Marvel) comic called (appropriately) Marvel Comics!
(Burgos showed a marked preference for android heroes, creating not only the original Human Torch, but the White Streak, and the first Silver Age Captain Marvel!)
This particular tale remained lost to history until the first (and only) reprinting in Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Tales of Suspense Vol 1 (2006), over half a century later!
Which version do you prefer?