Where Monsters Dwell #28 (May 1974
) features a reprint from
Tales to Astonish #9, "I Saw Droom the Living Lizard!" (May 1960). The story is by the great
Stan Lee; the pencils,
Don Heck.
Tales to Astonish started as a showcase for Stan Lee's science fiction before eventually becoming
The Incredible Hulk in issue #102 (April 1968); in the interim it featured
Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Hulk and
Prince Namor the Submariner.
Tales to Astonish was split between Hulk and the Submariner from August of 1965 until it became
The Incredible Hulk. If you want to sample the vibe of American power at it's apex during
LBJ's Great Society, check out the 1960s
Tales to Astonish featuring Hulk and Namor. It is all there.
First, to return to the question of why Marvel would reprint
Silver Age science fiction monster stories in a separate title during the iconoclastic Watergate-era
Bronze Age, an answer can be found below in the character cameo trademark that appeared beneath the price, issue number and publication month.
Where Monsters Dwell allowed Marvel to trademark the individual monsters that paved the way for the company's industry-leader status as a factory of iconoclastic superhero books.
For instance, "Droom," with its mix of serums and scientists and reptiles, prefigures in broad strokes the appearance of Spider-Man archenemy the
Lizard three-years later in
The Amazing Spider-Man #6; it tells the story of a scientist who wants to solve the problem of overpopulation and hunger by creating a growth serum for food. In the opening panels, the scientist successfully tests the serum on a tomato which balloons to the size of a cantaloupe; he then rushes over to show his friend, a museum curator who has just happened to have received a gift of a vicious lizard. While the scientist is demonstrating the growth serum to his museum pal, the lizard escapes its box and spills a tube of the growth serum on itself.
This weekend on the
Counterpunch web site there is an excellent article, "
The Real Cost of GM Animal Feed?" by Andrew Wasley, investigations editor for
The Ecologist. If you ever wanted an accessible introduction to the issue of
genetically-modified (GM) food, a.k.a.,
Frankenfoods, you can find it in this story. Wasley focuses on the findings of Danish pig farmer Ib Pedersen that GM animal feed and particularly the
glyphosate herbicide -- originally developed and patented by Monsanto and is still marketed as
Roundup -- associated with it cause birth defects and illness:
The farmer’s research, and outspoken stance, provoked a storm of controversy in Danish agricultural circles after the respected farming publication Effektivt Landbrug featured the story, interviewing Pedersen in detail and referring to the pig farmers’ suggestion that DDT and thalidomide – linked to deformities in up to 10,000 babies – could be regarded as trivial compared to the potential risks from GM and glyphosate.
Critics accused him of scaremongering and slammed the findings as unscientific and “without merit” – pointing out that if the claims were true, thousands of other farmers using GM feed would be recording similar problems.
Despite this, Pedersen’s work has prompted the Danish Pig Research Centre (VSP) to announce an in-depth study to test the effects of GM and non-GM soya on animal health. The findings of the research have yet to be published.
It is important to remember that the foremost genetic modification in most GM crops is a resistance to herbicides like glyphosate. The crops can be slathered with it and still survive unlike nearby weeds. The point that the Danish pig farmer Pedersen is making is that the GM feed retains some portion of that herbicide and it adversely impacts the health of his livestock.
While
we can't pass any GM-labeling laws in this country thanks to that opulent spending on TV commercials by the likes of Monsanto and PepsiCo, in the UK they already have GM food labeling. But a loophole in the labeling law is animal feed. Meat sold does not require a label saying whether it was raised using GM or non-GM feed.
Another problem that Wasley points out is that non-GM feed is becoming increasingly difficult for farmers to acquire:
They say that although the availability of non GM feed is disputed (producers organisations in Brazil maintain there is an ample supply of conventionally grown soya but say poor infrastructure at ports has held some shipments up) some major feed supply companies are now only offering their customers GM options, or organic.
“It’s a nightmare trying to source non GM feed,” a supermarket source said. “The reality is that trying to source it on the scale needed [by large retailers] is very difficult. The feed companies own the boats, the mills, they control the supply chain.”
One UK feed merchant told The Ecologist that GM is now effectively being forced onto farmers: “As a farmer you are constantly under pressure, you are busy, you’ve got to be good at finance, a good production manager, so when someone offers [GM] feed that’s cheaper, it’s easy to say yes.”
“Not having an option is not good. But when you’ve got an importer saying GM is fine and that he’s not going to bring in [non GM] a farmer is not likely to go out and source his own.”
The lizard Droom grows to such an enormous size -- and somehow becomes bipedal -- that he is impervious to shelling from tanks and it can swat fighter-bomber jets out of the sky before they drop their nuclear payload.
To stave off the impending destruction of population centers the armed forces launch plan 'X.' Solar-powered rockets are attached to Droom, blasting him into deep space where he spends tens of millions of years twirling in suspended animation:
. . . Until he finally came to rest on a large, primitive, water-oxygen world, a world where he would be the first of a new species -- where he would rule the planet, until the day his breed died out! A world which millions of years later would be known as . . . Earth!
In "I Saw Droom the Living Lizard!"Stan Lee is telling us that if from the present you think yourself far enough into the future you actually arrive at the past, a past where dinosaurs are revealed to be a product of Western science. That's chutzpah!
