DORIS DANGER!

COMMENTARY:

Inked by DICK AYERS!

HONKING TYPO!

You’ll notice on panel two, there’s a voice bubble pointing at both monsters – so they’re saying the same honking noise at the same time. This was a typo. I accidentally pointed the sound effect at the wrong monster, but I knew I needed to send the page to Dick Ayers to ink, so I didn’t want to cover the page with white-out before he inked it. That would have left an awkward bump on the drawing surface for him to have to contend with. I decided I’d fix it when he returned the page. But when he inked the page, he didn’t understand what was going on, so he changed the voice bubble to ALSO point at the correct monster, and the bubble wound up looking like it does. I considered altering it at this time, but finally decided it made for a subtle clue that things weren’t quite right – that they may both have been projected with a movie projector and microphone.

SINISTER GIGGLING!

With two appearances of the Giggling Scientist, we’ve been hearing a lot of “tee hee” laughing. But now a completely different, and “sinister” laugh – hardy har har – is introduced. Around April and May 2005, I began jotting down notes of Doris hearing sinister laughs, and thinking to herself how she’d heard them before. Often in my notes, the laughs would be accompanied by a propeller hat. I visualized last panel cliff hangers, with our heroine staring off-camera in shock, and a foreboding black shadow with a propeller hat falling over her!  “NO!  THAT SINISTER LAUGH!  THAT PROPELLER HAT!  IT CAN’T BE…YOU!” In addition to “tee hee” and “hardy har”, I began jotting down ideas for making a list of sinister laughs, expanding to “guffaw” and “ahoo.”

CAMERA CATASTROPHE!

In the same panel, Doris drops her camera. I figured, Well, if she’s a journalist, and she’s been around all this giant monster action, how couldn’t she have proved these monsters exist yet, with a photo?  Unless … hm… and so began the running gag of things happening to her camera whenever she gains the opportunity to document what she sees… with unfortunate frequency.

UNMAKSING ROBOTS!

In the second story, I enjoyed the tribesmen unmasking to reveal they were robots so much, I wanted to do see more people unmasking to reveal they’re robots!  And thus panel six here. I liked the idea of people everywhere unmasking and revealing they were robots, as if it were a fairly commonplace phenomenon. There were an awful lot of disguised aliens unmasking in the Old Lee-Kirby stories. Because of course, it was the Cold War Era, so much horror of the time was allegory about the paranoia of Communists infiltrating our peaceful idyllic American lifestyle, and actually LIVING AMONG US – unknown to us – preparing to strike from within! It was our ultimate societal anxiety.  Here are SOME Lee-Kirby “shocking twist endings” where a character unmasks, starting with a couple average robots PRETENDING to be humans among us:

World of Fantasy #18 (Atlas, 1959), “To Build A Robot!”

Strange Tales #94 (Atlas, 1962),  “I Was a Decoy for Pildorr the Plunderer from Outer Space!”

Amazing Adventures #3 (Atlas, 1961) “Dr. Droom Meets Zemu!”

Tales of Suspense 28 (Atlas, 1962), “Back from the Dead!”

The above two are BOTH from Tales to Astonish 25 (Atlas, 1961), “Behold Him! He is a Martian”!  What a DOUBLE shock, because first you’re shocked when the first guy unmasks, and THEN the OTHER guy unmasks!

(above, left) Strange Tales #78 (Atlas, 1960) “A Martian Walks Among Us!”
(above, right) Amazing Adventures #4 (Atlas, 1961), “I Am Robot X!”

And even when the giant monster/horror/Twilight-Zone-style shocking twist sci-fi era began to give way to super heroes, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby continued their unmasking alien stories into the new era, such as with Captain America’s first Silver Age appearance above, in Avengers # 4 (Marvel, 1963).

“Aliens walk among us with the intent of harming us, and we don’t even know they’re here.” Clearly the theme (but not the unmasking) was inspired by films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Invaders from Mars (1953).

More “modern” examples (only thirty years old) would be The Thing (1982) and They Live (1988), both directed by John Carpenter, with the latter starring professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper.

FEZZIE

As for the unmasking robot disguising himself as a man in a Fez – is this particular Fez-man someone who’s been a robot all this time? Or did the robot cold-cock the actual guy and disguise himself to look like him? Or did the robot dress as a guy in a Fez to infiltrate the Fez-men’s summoning ceremony? Or does anyone care if there’s a hint of continuity to all this at all?? More on that … SOME DAY!

Chpt. 3    CHPT. 4   Chpt. 5

FOOTNOTES: See Issue 138!
See Issue 171!

AFRICA 
CAMERA CATASTROPHE 
DORIS DANGER 
FEZZIE 
GIANT MONSTER 
GIGGLING SCIENTIST 
HOAX 
ROBOT 
TRAPPED…UNDERGROUND 

GIGGLING SCIENTIST 
ROBOT 

With reverence and admiration for, and in loving parody of, the Atlas GIANT MONSTER comics of Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Larry Lieber, whose comics you should buy!