Astonishing Tales #3 - Marvel Comics

ASTONISHING TALES No. 3, December 1970

Featuring the fascinating five-hundred year-old origin story of the Petrified Man, as well as the highly convoluted conclusion to an attack upon Doctor Doom’s Latverian throne, there probably wasn’t much time for this bi-monthly’s audience to catch their breath when first reading the comic in February 1971. For whilst Gerry Conway’s “excursion flight into the timeless world” of the Savage Land is certainly more sedentary in its pace than that of Larry Lieber’s cataclysmic destruction of Castle Doom and revelation as to “the secret of the Faceless One”, neither of this book’s two ten-page stories really provide much in the way of an action-stopping pause.

Happily however, such momentum doesn’t mean that any part of this publication is 'padded out' with superfluous fight scenes, as Gerry Conway’s enthralling script to “Back To The Savage Land” strongly attests. Firmly focused upon the tragic creation of a shipwrecked mariner into “a living avatar of the stone god Garokk”, as well as sensationally summarising the desperate desire of Queen Priestess Zaladane to have her Sun-People conquer the prehistoric preserve, this tale’s sole disappointment is that it has no sheet space with which penciller Barry Smith can depict the annihilation of Tongah’s village by pterodactyl-riding attackers.

Regrettably, Lieber’s plot conveying the final stages of Prince Rudolfo’s revolution in Latverian similarly suffers from a lack of panels, as Doom finally manages to bring an end to the threat of the Doomsman by simply impelling “my mental energy into his cerebral apparatus” through “a process of mind fusion”. Considering all the utter mayhem and wanton ruin Victor’s mechanical creation has already caused in this story’s past, it seems somewhat strange that the “would-be conqueror” didn’t put just such an end to the heavily-bandaged robot a lot sooner; “The Doomsman is beyond all reason -- all entreat! There is but one to stop him!”

So minor a quibble though really is nit-picking, especially when measured alongside the sheer breadth of Larry’s extraordinary narrative. Exploding human replicas, alien life forms piloting human-shaped lifeless vehicles, “molecules that expand upon contact with air”, a bombardment by anti-particles and even the teleportation to another dimension, are all crowbarred into this pulse-pounding adventure, and give Wally Wood plenty of sense-shattering opportunities with which to demonstrate his remarkable drawing skills.

Writer: Gerry Conway, Artist: Barry Smith, and Inking: Sam Grainger