Time to kick off 2026 with a bang-- or two! Dan Loprino's "One Extra Head" is from the March 1954 issue of Journey into Unknown Worlds #25, and followed by Gil Evans' "He Makes Me Kill!" via the May 1953 issue of Men's Adventure #21. Okay, we're gonna be doing things a little differently around here this new year, just hang tight and all will be revealed over the coming weeks... stay tombed!
5 comments:
Wow that first one has to be the darkest comic I've seen here. It's a really hard read, and it's all the better for it. It says a lot in its four pages and what an ending. That's really a gut punch.
Beaten down, suicidal, and yet falls to the same human condition that lead them here in the first place. Not only that, it's truly timeless and we, as a species, seem to be in the exact same problem as we always have.
Wow.
The second one -- it's hard to see it as anything after the first one. It's a cute ending. The art is great, it's dismal and dark and full of great movement. It'd be a winner if not for the first one.
Again: Wow. That's a crazy first story.
Concerning the first story-
A few decades ago when my brother and I were at the state fair, he convinced me to go with him to the sideshow. There we saw The Lobster Man, a man who on each hand was one finger and one thumb, giving his hands the appearance of lobster claws. No one in the audience jeered or insulted him, everyone just looked at him as he spoke about how he was the lobster man and how he had been born that way. As I said before, the audience showed him respect, no insults or jeers so at least audiences have grown more civilized compared to decades past. Its gotta be tough to make a living as a sideshow performer, though its hard to find anyone nowadays who likes their line of work, especially retail (yuk).
That first story is probably one of the meanest stories I’ve read on this site, no swerve ending, just marching towards its grim conclusion… The second story does have a swerve, perhaps unintentionally funny…. Another in a long line of inanimate objects narrating a tale, something of a trope in the fifties…
The second story was a twist that Atlas was famous for, the reader thought the narrator was the hitman while the storyteller turned out to be the gun. This tale could have been turned into a western and it would still have just as strong an impact.
"All is not gay behind the bright lights of the midway!"
You don't say.
I liked the first story a lot. It subverts expectations; the manager is sympathetic to Harry's plight, not the standard exploitative bully.
I am less sure about Story Two. Was the boss only in the killers head, or was the gun talking all the time and pretending to itself that it was a human hitman?
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