Where Monsters Dwell #29: Ozamm the Terrible

Where Monsters Dwell #29 reprints "Ozamm the Terrible," a filler story from Tales to Astonish #39. Tales to Astonish #39 featured Ant-Man. So this is the first one of these Silver Age monster reprints that I've been working through in Where Monsters Dwell that originally appeared alongside Marvel's new line of superheroes.

Where Monsters Dwell #29, with a publication date of July 1974, features new cover art by the great Larry Lieber, Stan Lee's little brother, famous for penciling the daily Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip. Lieber also scripted "Ozamm the Terrible," which had a publication date of January 1963. Stan Lee provided the plot; Don Heck, the art.

"Ozamm the Terrible" tells the story of a nefarious alien, Ozamm, with the head of a piranha and the body of a mountain gorilla, who comes to New York City to assert total domination over the dwellers of the metropolis. This is a standard storyline for Silver Age outer-space alien monsters. What is different is the backstory of machinist Joe Baxter. The tale begins with Joe being laid off due to automation at the factory where he works.

The last forty years of woe for the working class can be boiled down to its inability to share in the productivity gains made from the introduction of new technology. The promise of the 20th century -- i.e., the workerless factory -- was that the working class would share in these gains and be able to reduce the number of hours worked while maintaining the wages and benefits. In fact the opposite has occurred; people are working more for less. (For a study of how the idea of the workerless factory went from a utopian to a dystopian concept, see Jeremy Rifkin's excellent The End of Work, published in 1995.)

Jobs flow overseas because machines can be boxed up and shipped across the border; Detroit goes bankrupt; the mighty Boeing Machinists are in danger of losing their defined benefit pension plan. Who could have conceived of such things forty years ago?

Lee/Lieber end the story on a happy note. Joe Baxter saves the day by realizing that the source of Ozamm's power resides in electrical generation equipment in the alien's flying saucer; he is rewarded with his old job back by a newly appreciative boss, who says,

He is worth a hundred machines! Any human being is! Let's hope we've learned that lesson for good now!

Capitalism is not so ethical.