Where Monsters Dwell #19 (January 1973) is noteworthy because it features original cover art by the great Gil Kane, Marvel's go-to cover artist in the early Bronze Age.
In "The Insect Man" a U.S. Army sergeant is sent far underground in a space capsule as part of a preparedness program for a flight to the moon. The brass is worried about man's ability to survive long stretches alone. Putting a man in a capsule and dropping the capsule far below the surface of the earth is a way to gauge his suitability for space flight.
Once underground the sergeant is captured by a giant race of insects. He becomes a plaything for an adolescent giant insect. Right when the sergeant is about to be vivisected by the curious giant insects he makes his getaway. Back on the surface the military brass assure him that the giant insects must have been a hallucination brought about by his isolation.
These Lee-Kirby scifi stories from the early 1960s all seem very quaint now with their preoccupation with monsters from outer space or from deep underground. Nowadays science is far more scary than any fiction we could dream up. Take for example Dahr Jamail's "Are We Falling Off the Climate Precipice," an article that appeared on TomDispatch.com earlier this month and that generated some interest. In it Jamail assesses the current predictions of some well-established climate scientists who are a little more pessimistic than their colleagues.
Jamail mostly focuses on what happens to the planet when the methane and carbon that is trapped in the Arctic are released into the atmosphere as the permafrost thaws, as it is now. Here is a sample:
How serious is the potential global methane build-up? Not all scientists think it’s an immediate threat or even the major threat we face, but Ira Leifer, an atmospheric and marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the authors of the recent Arctic Methane study pointed out to me that “the Permian mass extinction that occurred 250 million years ago is related to methane and thought to be the key to what caused the extinction of most species on the planet.” In that extinction episode, it is estimated that 95% of all species were wiped out.
Also known as “The Great Dying,” it was triggered by a massive lava flow in an area of Siberia that led to an increase in global temperatures of six degrees Celsius. That, in turn, caused the melting of frozen methane deposits under the seas. Released into the atmosphere, it caused temperatures to skyrocket further. All of this occurred over a period of approximately 80,000 years.
We are currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or “background” extinction rate. This event may already be comparable to, or even exceed, both the speed and intensity of the Permian mass extinction. The difference being that ours is human caused, isn’t going to take 80,000 years, has so far lasted just a few centuries, and is now gaining speed in a non-linear fashion.
It is possible that, on top of the vast quantities of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels that continue to enter the atmosphere in record amounts yearly, an increased release of methane could signal the beginning of the sort of process that led to the Great Dying. Some scientists fear that the situation is already so serious and so many self-reinforcing feedback loops are already in play that we are in the process of causing our own extinction. Worse yet, some are convinced that it could happen far more quickly than generally believed possible -- even in the course of just the next few decades.
Read Jamail's article. It is a clear-eyed appraisal of approaching system failure. Capitalism is of course killing us. We're not even listening to our scientists anymore. Here is how Jamail puts it:
Not surprisingly, scientists with such views are often not the most popular guys in the global room. McPherson [Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and ecology at the University of Arizona and a climate change expert of 25 years], for instance, has often been labeled “Guy McStinction” -- to which he responds, “I’m just reporting the results from other scientists. Nearly all of these results are published in established, esteemed literature. I don’t think anybody is taking issue with NASA, or Nature, or Science, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Those] and the others I report are reasonably well known and come from legitimate sources, like NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], for example. I’m not making this information up, I’m just connecting a couple of dots, and it’s something many people have difficulty with.”
McPherson does not hold out much hope for the future, nor for a governmental willingness to make anything close to the radical changes that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; nor does he expect the mainstream media to put much effort into reporting on all of this because, as he says, “There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.” The destruction of the planet, on the other hand, is a good bet, he believes, “because there is money in this, and as long as that’s the case, it is going to continue.”
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