Where Monsters Dwell #21: Fin Fang Foom

Where Monsters Dwell was a Marvel reprint title -- its longest running, 1970-1975 -- from the beginning of the Bronze Age of Comics; it reprinted monster and horror material mostly from the Silver Age. The blurb about Where Monsters Dwell from The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide that appears in my ComicBase 16 Professional Edition database reads: "Admittedly reprinting 1950s horror material meant a comic with reduced overheads, but just who bought this lackluster stuff?"

The answer is that I did, a grade-school kid who loved Marvel. The covers were great, often showcasing new artwork. By studying the covers of Where Monsters Dwell one can appreciate the importance of Silver Age monster comics to the explosion of Marvel's superhero books in the 1960s.

No better example is the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby creation "Fin Fang Foom!" reprinted from Strange Tales #89 (October 1961) in the May 1973 Where Monsters Dwell #21. It's classic Lee-Kirby. The art is beautiful. The story is boilerplate Cold War anticommunism spiced up by a sleeping dragon awoken by a Ricky Nelsonesque protagonist named Chan Liuchow. Chan Liuchow uses Fin Fang Foom to stave off a Red Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

At the end of the story our youthful hero manages to subdue Fin Fang Foom with a handful of sleep-inducing herbs, proving his dismissive establishmentarian father wrong. Chan Liuchow's love of reading ancient Chinese texts is indeed powerful stuff "against the armed might of the Red hordes." It's an elegant, rich comic book.

Below are six scans from Where Monsters Dwell #21: the cover, splash page, the two opening pages setting up the story and two pages that show Fin Fang Foom rising from his slumbers. I wanted to see how the old Bronze Age newsprint scanned (some pages better than others):