Where Monsters Dwell #18: Lee-Kirby Take Us to Mars

After a hiatus of many weeks due to the NFL playoffs, I am returning to my Where Monsters Dwell project. I began this last October by happenstance. I reached into the closet where I keep an old comic collection and grabbed out a handful at random. What I grabbed was Where Monsters Dwell, a Marvel title from the Bronze Age that reprinted classic Silver Age science fiction from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, usually as the feature story, and then filled the rest of the book with toss-off horror (though sometimes interesting work by Steve Ditko is included). What makes this an interesting exercise is that these Lee-Kirby sci-fi stories directly precede or appear at the same time that Marvel recreates the modern superhero as a member of a dysfunctional family (Fantastic Four), a troubled teenage nerd (Amazing Spider-Man), a Norse god (Mighty Thor), an angry green giant who shares an identity with a scientist (Incredible Hulk), and a playboy industrialist who hides behind a high-tech mask (Invincible Iron Man).

What stands out the most about the Silver Age Lee-Kirby sci-fi is Cold War paranoia. Everything is a monstrous outside threat. Outer space is a minefield of death and destruction. Every alien is bent on domination and annihilation. The people, except for communists and the occasional escaped convict, are decent and simple and know their place in a cohesive society.

Where Monsters Dwell #18, with a cover date of November 1972 (the month Nixon shellacs McGovern, putting an end to the Hippie fantasy of having a president who listened to what they had to say), reprints "The Sacrifice!" from Strange Tales #91 (December 1961). In it, an astronaut, Colonel Chuck Dawson, in the future (1981) travels to Mars, where he encounters a plant creature who has previously wiped out the advanced civilization of the planet. The plant creature captures Dawson and makes him transport them back to Earth where the plant creature plans to repeat what he did to Mars -- annihilate all life on the planet. But the astronaut foils the creature's plans by blowing up the spaceship in outer space. He sacrifices his life so Earth might live. Lee-Kirby play up the bitter irony in the last two panels with man-on-the-street commentary decrying Dawson's incompetence for costing the taxpayers billions of dollars.

According to a good article, "Beings Not Made for Space," by Kenneth Chang that appeared in last Tuesday's New York Times, NASA expects to have a manned mission to Mars by the 2030s. Before blastoff some significant problems must be solved that relate to how human beings survive in the weightless environment of outer space. A mission to Mars is expected to take two-and-a-half years, much longer than the record 438 days Dr. Valery Polyakov spent on the Russian space station Mir in 1994.

At least loss of bone density seems to have been tackled:

NASA turned to osteoporosis drugs and improved exercises, like having the astronauts run while strapped to a treadmill. The up-and-down pounding set off signals to the body to build new bone, and NASA scientists reported that astronauts then came back with almost as much bone as when they had left. 

“That was huge,” said Scott M. Smith, a NASA nutritionist. 

Because both the formation and destruction occur at accelerated rates, “we don’t know if that bone is as strong as when you left,” Dr. Smith said. But the scientists now feel that bone loss is not a showstopper for a long-duration mission.

But a new trickier problem has cropped up recently -- squashed eyeballs:

NASA officials often talk about the “unknown unknowns” — the unforeseen problems that catch them by surprise. The eye issue caught them by surprise, and they are happy it did not happen in the middle of a mission to Mars. 

In 2009, during his six-month stay on the International Space Station, Dr. Michael R. Barratt, a NASA astronaut who is also a physician, noticed he was having some trouble seeing things close up, as did another member of the six-member crew, Dr. Robert B. Thirsk, a Canadian astronaut who is also a doctor. So the two performed eye exams on each other, confirming the vision shift toward farsightedness. 

They also saw hints of swelling in their optic nerves and blemishes on their retinas. On the next cargo ship, NASA sent up a high-resolution camera so that they could take clearer images of their eyes, which confirmed the suspicions. Ultrasound images showed that their eyes had become somewhat squeezed. 

NASA is now checking astronauts’ eyesight before, during and after trips to the space station.

The issue turns out not to be new. Many space shuttle astronauts had complained of changes in eyesight, but no one had studied the matter. 

“It is now a recognized occupational hazard of spaceflight,” Dr. Barratt said. “We uncovered something that has been right under our noses forever.” 

Dr. Barratt said the vision shift had no effect on his ability to work in space. The concern, however, is that the farsightedness may be just a symptom of more serious changes in the astronauts’ health. “What are the long-term implications?” he said. “That’s the $64 million question.”

Then there is the issue of radiation exposure. We are protected from high-energy radiation found in space because of Earth's magnetic field. Scientists don't know what years of cosmic rays in outer space will do to the human body. (It turned Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben into the Fantastic Four and birthed the Marvel Universe.)

Regarding radiation, NASA operates under a restriction that astronauts should not have their lifetime cancer risk raised by more than three percentage points, but that is an arbitrary limit. Mark Kelly, for one, said he would be willing to accept twice that if he had a chance to go to Mars. 

There may be other complications, though. At Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, scientists are bombarding mice with radiation that mimics high-energy cosmic rays that zip through outer space. Those mice take longer to navigate a maze, suggesting that the radiation may be damaging their brains.

Scientists say it may damage other organs, including the heart, nervous system and digestive system. “Those could be acute effects,” said William H. Paloski, the head of NASA’s human research program. “We just don’t know. It’s one we’re looking at.”

Finally, there are the mental health issues. Being confined for years in a small space with coworkers, always on the clock, will, according to studies -- guess what? -- drive you crazy.

So interplanetary spaceflight seems like a tall order. No wonder in the movies the problem is dealt with by putting the crew in neat, clean, high-tech suspended animation pods.

One way that "The Sacrifice!" is visionary is the way that it articulates, albeit in clunky movie monster fashion, a version of panspermia, the idea that biological material -- life! -- exists throughout the Universe, traveling on asteroids, meteors -- like the 120 meteorites from Mars found on earth -- and other forms of conveyance. Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, hypothesizing in their book Evolution from Space (1981), think that large clouds of viruses exist in outer space, and that when the Earth travels through one it can explain such devastating pandemics as the 1918 influenza outbreak that killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people.

Maybe comic-book kings Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are not far from the mark in the last panel of "The Sacrifice!":

Meanwhile, out in the vast expanses of space, remnants of the deadly plant creature float along aimlessly!