Where Monsters Dwell #23: "The Monster Waits for Me!" by Lee, Kirby & Ayers, Pt. 2

Here is pt. 2 of the post on the Lee-Kirby-Ayers story of "The Monster Waits for Me!" It is the cover story of Where Monsters Dwell #23, September, 1973. Nineteen-seventy-three is ground zero in Watergate America. With a publication date of September, 1973, this meant that Where Monsters Dwell #23 started appearing in stores around the time Nixon's goose is cooked. The summer of '73 is when Alexander Butterfield reveals that all Nixon's office telephone calls and conversations have been taped since 1971; Nixon then refuses to supply the tapes to Congress and special prosecutor Archibald Cox.

The period 1970 - 1975 that coincides with the early Bronze Age of Comics fascinates me. It is a time when the old post-war paradigm of labor-management cooperation and constant upward mobility gives way to our current downsized, privatized, offshored neoliberal/neoconservative paradigm. I've been exploring the period on Fridays through the lens of "Hippies vs. Punks." By 1975 Ford is in the White House, Saigon has fallen and the Punks are coming. To make sense of how this happened I am of the opinion that one has to understand Watergate as well as the Oil Crisis Recession of November, 1973 - March, 1975. Part of that understanding is to look at the little-appreciated "disposable" media of the era, comic books.

"The Monster Waits for Me!" feature story of Where Monsters Dwell #23 is a reprint of story that appeared in Strange Tales #92, January, 1962, the same month, the end of JFK's first year in office, that Fantastic Four #2 is published. Both comic books feature shapeshifting aliens from outer space: the giant flying-squirrel-like monster in the title of "The Monster Waits for Me!" and the famous first appearance of the Skrulls in Fantastic Four #2.

The story "The Monster Waits for Me!" opens with a young, beautiful unemployed woman who needs a cheap place to live in the city. She goes to a rundown rooming house and ends up in an apartment next to an old man who supposedly never leaves his room. One night after dinner the old man knocks at the beautiful young woman's door and implores her to come back to his room and listen to a tale he has to tell, a story he has told no one else. That story is of his near-death escape from aliens he saw land a flying saucer in the woods. The aliens are large monsters capable of flight. Right when the old man finishes his story there is loud pounding at his door. He panics, thinking the alien monsters have finally found him, and his frail heart gives out. The medical examiner arrives along with the police and landlady and other lodgers (the pounding on the door was from a downstairs neighbor coming to tell the old man that he had left his water running and it was dripping into his room below). The old man's death is ruled routine heart failure. Everyone leaves. The beautiful young woman is left alone. She says to herself:

Well, it's all over! And, in a way, I'm glad . . . 

I'm glad the old man died the way he did -- of natural causes . . . 

 . . . Because it might have been dangerous . . . 

 . . . With a house full of humans . . . 

 . . . To have had to kill him . . . Myself!

And with that the beautiful young woman flies off into the night, shapeshifted back to her true alien form.

What a treat! A beautiful blend of '50s crime/horror and science fiction elegantly told by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers.