Where Monsters Dwell #27: Grogg

Where Monsters Dwell #27 features "From Out of the Black Pit Came . . . Grogg!" which originally appeared in Strange Tales #83 (publication date, April 1961).

Almost a carbon copy of "Fin Fang Foom!" but appearing a half-year earlier, "Grogg!" is another Lee-Kirby Cold War anitcommunist faerie tale.

A hibernating colossal dragon-like creature is awoken by a secret nuclear test staged by a totalitarian Central European state bent on world domination. Once aroused Grogg! goes after the Reds. Note the Red Army uniforms bear an 'X' insignia rather than Soviet sickle & hammer. The pencils are by Jack Kirby; the inks, Dick Ayers.

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.

Where Monsters Dwell #23: "The Monster Waits for Me!" by Lee, Kirby & Ayers, Pt. 1

I didn't have a copy of Where Monsters Dwell #23. So I went online to AtomicAvenue.com via my ComicBase 16 Professional Edition and found a copy graded "Good" for not too much more than the current market price. Since I feel like I'm starting to hit some sort of wounded stride with weekend posts devoted to Where Monsters Dwell, Marvel's early Bronze Age title devoted to Silver Age monster, sci-fi, horror reprints, I wanted to keep the run up.

The title story of Where Monsters Dwell #23 is "The Monster Waits for Me!" Though there are no credits, the work is obviously vintage Jack Kirby. You have to go to ComicVine.com (the first link at the top of the post) to find out that Kirby's inker for "The Monster Waits for Me!" was Dick Ayers. And you have to go to MarvelWikia to learn that Stan Lee wrote the story and that it originally appeared in Strange Tales #92, published January, 1962.

As you can see from the scan below, one could quibble with the seller's grade of "Good." Grading isn't easy. But if it had been me evaluating the condition of this comic book, I would have graded it "Fair."

I was just happy to have received it in five business days. I read the issue this morning, and it's a great one.

Not only does Where Monsters Dwell #23 feature a "state-of-the-art" Silver Age Lee-Kirby collaboration, but it also has a Lee-Ditko backup story, as well as a rare Lee-Infantino crime/horror tale. Carmine Infantino is the artist credited with helping to usher in the Silver Age with his clean, crisp, suburban-based The Flash.

But what I really would like to talk about is the concise perfection of "The Monster Waits for Me!" In this post look at the beautiful first page following the splash, in particular the depiction of the rundown boarding house our gorgeous unemployed Sue-Storm-lookalike narrator finds herself in. In later posts I'll deal with the rest of the story and the Lee-Ditko and Lee-Infantino backup stories.

But for now check out the old lath and plaster walls: first, in the panel where our comely narrator talks to the battle-ax landlady as they ascend the staircase; then, in the panel where she appraises her room while unpacking her bags.

 

When I read "The Monster Waits for Me!" this morning and I studied the panels showing the old rooming house and its deteriorating walls I was immediately reminded of the loft I slept in with my live-in girlfriend (who would become my wife). The apartment we lived in was part of building that was older than the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which it weathered, though with its architecture altered. Originally it was two separate structures. But the earthquake shifted the foundations to such an extent that a decision was made to conjoin the two buildings where they face the Durant Avenue, creating a large horseshoe. At least this is the story my landlord liked to tell drinking a 16-ounce can of beer, his handyman coveralls open down to his pendulous belly.

In any event, my father, who is a amateur carpenter, built me and my girlfriend a sleeping loft with closet space underneath. He did this because the bedroom was not much larger than a double bed. The loft provided space for shelves.

We climbed up a wooden ladder, which my father also made, to get into bed at night. There was not much space between mattress and ceiling up there. You could prop yourself up on a pillow and read but you couldn't sit fully upright without banging your head.

One night my girlfriend and I were arguing up in the loft; I have absolutely no memory what the argument was about. Whatever it was, my girlfriend, who could be tempestuous and had no qualms about violence, became so agitated that she started kicking the ceiling. The ceiling crumbled, exposing the old lath and plaster in a good-sized hole.

In the months that followed the hole widened and dusty, rocky grains of old mortar showered down on us as we slept. We attempted half-hearted repairs with packing tape and paper bags. But invariably the tape would lose its adhesion and a pile of dust and mortar would drop down on top of us.

The hole got bigger, and the problem got worse. How long did we live that way -- sleeping beneath that gaping wound as the old Victorian-era building breathed its decay into us? Finally during one of his visits my father took pity on us and repaired the hole; I can't remember if he used a thin sheet of plywood or a piece of drywall.

Seeing the exposed lath and plaster in the Lee-Kirby-Ayers story brought it all back. I felt ashamed.