Adventures into Terror
Entry updated 20 July 2026. Tagged: Comics, Publication.
US Comic (1950-1954). Atlas Comics (see Marvel Comics). Edited by Stan Lee. 31 issues (first two issues numbered #43 and #44, with the third as #3 and the numbering then continuing from that). Artists include Carl Burgos, Gene Colan, Russ Heath and Joe Maneely. Script writers include Stan Lee and Paul S Newman. Gil Kane and Basil Wolverton also worked on a strip or two. 36 pages, usually with five strips and a short text story in each issue.
Adventures into Terror was primarily a Horror magazine, with sf elements common early on (typically involving Scientists), but then less so: the other stories would feature Vampires (probably the commonest theme, including vampire babies), Werewolves, ghosts, ghouls and witches (see Supernatural Creatures); there were also horror stories with no fantastic elements. Some tales with sf elements are discussed below. Most stories are forgettable, though some are engaging; the Wolverton, though not one of his best, is still enjoyable.
The first issue (#43) opens with "The Monster Awakes" where an American pilot crashes near the Great Wall of China during World War Two and accidentally awakens a giant (see Great and Small) sent centuries ago from the "bowels of the Earth" (see Underground) to judge whether the surface dwellers could be conquered, only for a magician to put him to sleep (see Suspended Animation). Now he wants to kill everyone save the pilot (to whom he feels indebted) but they manage to fool him into repeating the spell that put him to sleep; it works again. In "Ant World" a couple buy an old house and the wife is kidnapped by a giant ant; the husband follows but is forced to work in the mines, to learn his fellow slaves – now ants – were once human, the fate that awaits him (he has shrunk to ant-size). The nest is destroyed and he, now human-sized again, is dying in hospital. A doctor asks another why the man's head is swathed in bandages, to be told "He has the body of a man ... but the head of an ant!" In the second issue (#44) "The Stranger" concerns two Scientists, one of whom tests their Immortality formula on the other's wife and children, only for it to turn them into Monsters. "The Creeping Vine" involves a scientist receiving an Amazonian vine: it prospers in his greenhouse but grows a flower whose colour resembles that of his wife's disappeared Cat; another flower is spotted like their vanished Dog; then the wife finds a flesh-coloured one, and her husband is nowhere to be seen. "The Living Dead" has a 300-year-old man achieving Rejuvenation by "processing the blood and hormones of young women and injecting the solutions into his veins".
"The Brain" (#4) features an executed Nazi scientist who arranged for his head to be severed and his brain revived; now with mind-control powers (see Psi Powers), he forces a US soldier to make preparations to dominate the world, but when asked to shoot a friend the soldier rebels and shoots himself instead (this villain returns in #6). Another story has a creature from Atlantis, also evil and with mind-control abilities. "The Man Who Was Death!" (#5) sees invaders from Jupiter planting bombs in humans. "The Brain Returns" (#6), finds #4's Nazi head (which moves by bouncing) hypnotizing "America's most brilliant, young woman scientist"; this is foiled by her boyfriend. A scientist in "The Thing That Grew" (#7) creates life but finds the "protoform" will not stop growing and needs blood to live, killing a local. Fortunately the sea (apparently "its natural enemy") kills it. Basil Wolverton's "Where Monsters Dwell" has a scientist invent a Ray which "opens the door to a sort of hybrid sphere located between the third and fourth Dimensions" and turns it on a journalist who suggests it is just a movie projector. The place is real and once there his body begins to warp; there are other exiles plus monstrous, hostile inhabitants. By waiting until the beam is used again, he manages to return home and use it on the scientist, who is killed by the monsters. He turns the ray off before the creatures enter our world and is left pondering whether to use it again to rescue the warped exiles, which would risk the monsters coming through. With "The Ones Who Laugh" (#8), a man discovers Shapeshifting Aliens have eaten all humanity save him, and that he has just been injected with a replicating formula to provide them with food: he commits Suicide before this can happen. "The Parasite" (#9) comes from Mars and operates by having those it infected persuade another to kill them; it then infects the killer (see Parasitism and Symbiosis). Another tale has a lizard whose poison transforms humans into lizard form (a kind of were-lizard).
After #9 SF tales are fewer, but include "They're Driving Me Crazy" (#14), where a scientist grows a synthetic man from inorganic materials, only to find himself four years in the future with no one recognizing him – including his family, who assert the scientist bearing his name died in an explosion years ago. It turns out creatures in a parallel Dimension are controlling humanity, and when a person does something they disapprove of, they erase them from others' minds. #19, #20 and #21 each have a story about scientists having difficulty reanimating the dead, but eventually succeeding (though not altogether happily). "The Man With The Net" (#16) has giant butterflies that collect humans. "Look Out for Lakoonda" (#20) sees an explorer attempting to steal an ancient Mayan treasure and killing the guardian monster, only to be compelled to take its place, his appearance changing to resemble it. In "The Invisible World" (#23) a scientist sees and visits a miniature civilization on a microscope slide; unfortunately a colleague decides to clean it. In "The Man Who Ran Away" (#27) a misanthropic scientist angrily rejects the requests of his colleagues to use his genius to aid mankind, preferring to build a Time Machine to reach an era when people will be his mental equals: it takes him to 4024, though falls apart on arrival. The locals disbelieve his story, and when proving incapable of answering questions a child would know (such as the date of the first landing on Pluto – see Outer Planets) is deemed a "mental inferior" and taken to be euthanized (see Eugenics). "Pep Talk!" has the history of war and Technology, from the stone age to World War Three, with the latter restarting the cycle by returning humanity to the former. The scientist in "Half-Man" (#28) is building a person from body parts (see Androids). "The Faceless Ones" (#29) finds astronauts on the first space flight from Earth landing on an unknown planet, only to discover it is Hades. In "Crazy, Man!" (#31) a man released from an asylum after a nervous breakdown witnesses aliens possess VIPs in preparation for an Invasion of Earth (it took them a while to perfect this, and he now recalls it was a botched attempt to possess him that led to his nervous breakdown): he knows that given his psychiatric history, no one will believe him, and so relapses into insanity. [SP]
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