Number 750


The non-alarming Alarming Tales


I bought Alarming Tales #1 off the drugstore spinner in 1957. It filled me with the sense of wonder and awe I always had when I read Jack Kirby stories. My copy of the comic disappeared years ago, but I never forgot it. "Alarming" is hardly how I'd describe the contents. The word "imaginative" would describe it better.

These scans are from the one-shot Shocking Tales digest Harvey published in 1981, before the company demise. The only story from Alarming Tales #1 they didn't include in the digest was "Logan's Next Life," which I got from an Internet scan of that issue. "The Cadmus Seed" reminds me of the real-life story of Dr. Cecil Jacobson, an egoist fertility doctor who fraudulently used his own sperm to impregnate women. The next-to-last panel in this story cracks me up.

"The Fourth Dimension Is A Many-Splattered Thing" has been shown online before, probably because it has one of the greatest splash panels ever. It's a fairly routine story, but I always remembered the splash. "The Last Enemy" reminds me of Kirby's later Kamandi. "Donnegan's Daffy Chair" I liked because of the ambiguous ending. I was able to use my imagination and think of where Donnegan could have been.

Re-reading this comic decades later was a revelation to me in how much of the contents I remembered despite owning the comic for a short time over fifty years ago.