Sci-fi magazine cover artist Frank Johnson, desperate to top his previous efforts, tries out a set of "three-dimensional paints" offered by a mysterious sttanger, that cause whatever he draws to not only exist as a three-dimensional object...but also to come to life!
Accepting the paint set as a gift, he is suddenly-compelled to journey to a remote part of Mexico, where he paints his greatest monster of all, Zzutak, on a giant canvas!
But...why?
Now, all shall be revealed!
You'd think the colorist of the cover for Atlas' Strange Tales #88 (1961) didn't communicate with the colorist for the story itself, since he transposed the coloring for Zzutak and his unnamed adversary...
...except the two colorists were the same guy, Stan Goldberg!
I can only speculate the cover and interior were colored at two different times and, in the confusion, someone lost track of who was orange and who was green!
When the story was reprinted in Marvel's Fear #3 (1971), the unknown colorist got the second monster right, but still got Zzutak wrong!
When the story was reprinted in Germany, a new, painted cover got Zzutak's color right, though not all the details of his design/anatomy!
Poor Zzutak is postitively unreocognizable on his most recent reprint appearance in Marvel's Monster Menace #3 (1994), even though he's rendered by the guy who inked his story back in 1961...Steve Ditko!
(And he's portrayed correctly in the "character box" in the upper left corner of the cover!)
Zzutak was the cover-featured monster on #4 of Marvel's Monsters Unleashed (2017) with this superb Francesco Francavilla variant cover...
This mini-series featured a new character named Kid Kaiju aka Kei Kawade, an Inhuman who could control giant monsters he illustrates...including Zzutak!
Bur a decade earlier, Zzutak, Frank Johnson, and the Aztecs, returned in a never-reprinted adventure featuring a team of Marvel heroes!
You'll see
that story next Monday!
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