Oddly enough, the Russians had a hand in launching pre-hero Marvel, and so did DC. The Ruskies heated up the space race with the Sputnik-satellite they shot into orbit in 1957. One result of this was another wave of popularity for the science-fiction genre. And DC, in 1957, published Jack Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown to an enthusiastic audience. So when Kirby showed up at the door of the all-but-dormant and maybe-moribund Atlas, telling Stan Lee that it could be done again, he knew whereof he spoke. The post-Code marketplace may have been a smaller pie, but if you could cut yourself a big enough piece...

     The herald of the new Marvel-to-be was Strange Worlds #1, cover-dated December 1958, and the deluge began in 1959 with Tales Of Suspense and Tales to Astonish joining World of Fantasy and the revived Journey Into Mystery and Strange Tales. World of Fantasy and Strange Worlds both ceased publication with the August 1959 issues, probably because Marvel's distribution contract limited them to a certain number of titles, and they wanted some room to try something else. But Strange Worlds, despite lasting only five issues, is the first pre-hero title and therefore a key silver age run.

     Thus convinced of this title's importance to comics history, I volunteered for a voyage into alien realms that could easily snap my sanity with their desperate deviations from all we know as true and real. I undertook to chart a pathway through the harrowing heartland of Strange Worlds.

     Strange Worlds #2 (February 1959) starts that great year with an awesome Steve Ditko sci-fi cover. Inside, "I Was the Scourge of Atlantis", illustrated by Dick Ayers, highlights the issue. This is an intriguing variation on the city that sank into the sea story - rendered in vivid visual terms. The Ditko story (almost every pre-hero issue had one), "Little Lost Planet" is modestly told but handsomely drawn. "I Was a Prisoner on the Planet of Plunder" is an OK yarn whose title shows the kind of alliterative wordplay that would soon combine with the mumbo-jumbo monster names to yield some of the most memorable rhetoric of the silver age. "Planet of Plunder" features art by the late and much-lamented Don Heck, another one of the "stable" of pre-hero creators who gave the books their trademark look.

     Strange Worlds #3 (April 1959) has the first cover in the remarkable series of menacing creatures that month after month invaded the America of our (if you are one of the many "baby boomers" who were getting four-color kicks back then) youthful fantasies. The goofy names would come later, but "the Creature From Planet X" was formidable enough - let it however be noted that the mayhem all started with purple prose and a pink monster! Appropriately, this cover was drawn by the king of the monsters, Jack Kirby. Kirby also drew two stories inside - the cover yarn, where a young woman gets locked into the zoo that houses a stranded alien, and "I Fly to the Stars" a ho-hum treatment of the theme of the star pilot whose six-month trip brings him back to an Earth where decades have gone by. Ditko adds some class to the lukewarm plotting of "I Was a Human Satellite", but top honors this issue go to "My Job: Catch a Robot". The story is slick enough and the main character is engaging, yet it is unquestionably the art by Joe Sinnott that makes this one happen. Sinnott is one of the key 1950s science fiction artists - with a clean style that has that extra something that pushes it over the top.

     Strange Worlds #4 (June 1959) screams into high gear with an excellent Kirby S-F cover for "Manhunt on Mars". The splash panel for the first story is also superb - a Joe Sinnott full-page panorama of the "Journey to Jupiter". The story itself leaves something to be desired - but when Big Joe goes interplanetary - invite me along anyway. Next up comes one of my favorite Ditko pre-hero fantasy stories: "A Magician walks Among Us". Casting "spoiler warnings" to the wind - this is the story of a man who invents a time machine and travels back to the days of King Arthur to discover the truth about Merlin the Magician. And, with brilliant inevitability, the time-traveler himself ends up taking on the identity of Merlin, and his knowledge of 20th-century science indeed seems like magic to the people of ancient Camelot.

     "The Man Without a Past" is a clever yarn about a robot who imagines itself to be a human with amnesia. It's well told, with some suspense, and "his" robot nature coming as a nice twist at the end. Art is by Paul Reinman, who along with Kirby/Ayers, Ditko, and Heck would go on to form the nucleus of the pre- hero Marvel Bullpen, with each being present in each issue of the four fantasy titles. This is followed by a tale drawn by an artist whose presence usually causes that issue to bear a higher price-tag than the ones around it - Al Williamson. "I Was the Changing Man" is hokum that has a wimpy inventor building a machine that will allow him to take over anyone on Earth's body - the theory being that some rich and famous souls have much more of a life than the dweeby protagonist. But after he takes over a few "most likely to succeed" types, Mr. Helpless finds each of his new lives shooting down the tubes... Masterful plotting it isn't, but there is the elegant art - including a couple of bathing-suited beauties and the nice splash panel of the inventor's disappearance into the mental essence that then drifts around seeking a noggin to crawl into.

     "Manhunt on Mars" wraps up this superlative issue; the red planet becomes a weapon in the war against the "earthly Reds" in this extrapolation of the space race that has the Commies shooting off the first rocket to Mars. The rendering of the Martian landscape and the aliens that inhabit it is particularly good - the work of Don Heck.

     Strange Worlds #4 shows pre-hero-Marvel at its best. #5 was the last issue of the magazine that spearheaded the revival of the company that would eventually capture the silver crown from DC and reign for many years. The Atlas/Marvel fantasy titles are among the last noteworthy non-continuing character anthology of short stories comics of the era that began after World War II; a style of books that for many collectors represents the peak of perfection of the four-color form.

Pat Calhoun has been collecting, researching and appreciating comic books since the early 1960s, and is a nationally recognized comic book historian. Pat resides in Santa Rosa, California.