Tales to Astonish 28

In this issue:

I Am The… Gorilla-Man
7 pages :: Jack Kirby/Dick Ayers
reprinted in Fear 5

Midnight on Haunted Hill
6 pages :: Jack Kirby/Sol Brodsky
reprinted in Creatures on the Loose 13

Young Billy Jones loves to read those silly fantasy comics. But on this dark and stormy night, Dad barks at the lad to get off his duff and go find his dog.

What's that thing in the sky? It's shiny — but I can't make it out!

Well, Billy sure gets a shock when he finds Rex getting all aggressive toward a nearby hill.

Looking up, he sees something big, getting closer. “Jumping catfish! It's a spaceship!”

He can't make out what's happening but it sounds like a criminal alien is being left behind to serve a sentence of one year on earth. Wow, who'd want to suffer such a horrible fate?

Anyway, Billy rushes home to tell everyone what he saw. And, sure enough, everyone blames those dumb comic books for Billy's obviously overactive imagination.

The press decides to make a big publicity stunt out of the UFO story and people begin to flock to the “haunted hill”.

So the townsfolk are raking in some dough and Billy is still the butt of everyone's jokes.

Finally, on the day the spaceship is due to return, the papers put out a special edition. “We'll play this angle for all it's worth!”

To everyone's shock, a spaceship zooms out of the clouds and the awaiting alien jumps aboard. It was the damn tree on the hilltop!

Everyone realizes they lost a golden opportunity to communicate with another race of intelligent creatures. Too bad for poor Billy, and poor mankind.

“What a shame the world is filled with so many laughers and so few believers!”

It sounds like that tree didn't want to communicate with humans anyway. It was there a whole YEAR and just stood there on the hill not saying anything. It probably thought, “It's bad enough that I have to stand here all year, shouldn't make it worse by conversing with dim-witted townies and a comic book freak.”

Bravo on a fantastic blog. I have been a big fan of Kirby monster stuff since I read the 70's reprints in my dentists office as a kid. You guys have done a wonderful job of cataloging this classic material, I honestly didnt know there were still dedicated fans of the 50's and 60's “Big Monster” stuff. Though it seems as if your focus is on Marvel, some of Kirby's “Challengers of the Unknown” work would fit in nicely here…

Again, thanks for doing a great job and I'm looking forward to watching your progress. good luck!

Thanks for the kind words of praise! I, too, became a big fan of these stories from reading the reprints in the '70s. Recently, I returned to these old comics and realized how much I loved Jack Kirby's work.

Many people have suggested expanding the scope of the site to include earlier and later Kirby work, as well as including the monster-era stories of Ditko, Heck and all the rest. I'll be sticking to my self-imposed limits for the time being since I still have so many reviews and articles yet to write.

Comment on Tales to Astonish 28

* Name and email address are required. Don't worry about spam — your email address will not be shared with anyone. Only your name and Web site address will appear with your message.

Comment on Tales to Astonish 28