"Die! Kill! Murder!" screams the brain-washed mob, in yet another "Wholesome reading for the entire family" classic via Ziff-Davis, and this time from the May - June 1951 issue of Amazing Adventures #3. It's been over a decade since we've seen an evil brain tale at THOIA, --so here comes one now --and it's a big'un too! Featuring some real neato work by legendary, Leonard Starr, an artist who appears to have worked for nearly every single great comic book publishing house ever. Boy, and just when we thought the U.S. was no longer under attack by a big fat warped brain, *sigh...
10 comments:
This reminded me of the Japanese movie "Frankenstein Conquers the World", only it was the heart of the monster that was blasted by the atomic bomb instead of its brain.
This was a neat sci-fi tale of a heroic scientist battling against time to defeat the atomic horror, a trope that would be used in so many fun B Movies during the fifties.
So 1951 was around 5 years from the atomic bombing of Japan, and while we already had b-movie giant atomic monsters, I think this is the first horror comic I've seen (my memory is spotty so it might not be!) that directly tied the creation of a monster to those specific atomic blasts.
Sort of like a Godzilla except he isn't friends to some big goofy robot named Jet Jaguar!
I like this one, it's another weird kind of 40s he-man adventure transported to the 50s with a pretty dystopian slant (civilization seems to be destroyed) and all sorts of hand-waving science. But the art is cool, the brain is cooler, the big heat tank, the super computer, it's all that you'd want from an adventure like this.
This has a very strong B-Movie feel… but much darker… is the world saved? Everyone seems dead. Did the hero win? Or was he dying from radiation poisoning?
Maybe 1951 isn't terribly early for a story to do this, but it's interesting that the wartime Japanese are just regular people. (Aside from the weird scientific stuff, and even that isn't exactly connected to the war.)
But it's sad what happens to Professor Yoshowa several years after the war itself.
And of course, the American scientist who tries to help Donaldson.
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@Brian: There was the comic called, I think, Attack of the Gmklooms, it's here in the archives. That was about mutated survivors in the Hiroshima sewers.
It was "The Metamorphosis Of The Gkmlooms".
I finally tracked it down.
https://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/2008/12/metamorphosis-of-gkmloooms.html?m=0
I wasn't expecting to see such a sympathetic portrayal of a Japanese citizen in this story. And throughout most of page two I was really impressed by the care and maturity with which they were treating the US bombing of Hiroshima. Of course, by the end of that page I realized this was a story about the A-bomb creating a giant, swirly pink peril out of an evil atomized brain, but hey, for a while there this was taking things pretty seriously.
That panel with the brain suspended in the atomic firestorm is definitely my fave; but all the trippy brain cloud art, with their tendrils of radioactive rays, are really aces--the classic apocalyptic refugee stylings of that excellent splash especially. This is some great work by Starr all around.
Looking through the archives, I see a lot of excellent art from Starr, but nothing quite this groovy. I also read a comment or two about his occasional similarity to Jack Kirby. I haven't really noticed that in the past examples, but I do here. The first panel of page three is very Kirby-like, as are many of the figures and faces throughout. Not that I mean to imply anything nefarious. I feel like it's a coincidence. There's literally no Kirby influence detected in any of the design or technology or weird pink explosions. I think those guys just drew people the same way. And in 1951, at nearly the same level.
I forgot about this one in the 2019 archive… so it’s not really a decade since braaaaaiiiin
https://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-immortal-brain.html?m=0
"Futurama" popped into my head when reading this, lol.
I love it when the bad guy, er, brain, wins.
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