Beware
Entry updated 24 March 2025. Tagged: Comics, Publication.
US Comic (1953-1955). Trojan Magazines Inc. Fourteen issues numbered #13-#16, then #5-#14. Artists include Myron Fass, Art Gates, Harry Harrison, Henry Kiefer and Leo Morey. Scriptwriters include Richard Kahn, Jack Miller, Paul S Newman and Martin Smith. 36 pages, with four long strips and a text story.
Beware was acquired from Youthful Magazines (see Fantastic [Comic]), with the initial numbering (#13-#16) continuing from that publisher's run, before resetting from the fifth issue – that being numbered #5 and continuing until #14. Another publisher, Merit Publications Inc, would subsequently publish a one-off comic of the same name in 1955, numbered #15 (so that, as with #13 and #14, two different issues share that number). Though primarily a Horror comic with plenty of ghosts and witches (though only one Vampire tale), nearly a fifth of Beware's strips might be considered sf, with a few more that share the genre's tropes with a Fantasy explanation. The sf tales are often good, as are some the horror ones.
The first issue (numbered #13) opens with "Rebirth" where meek Clarence Homes and his adulterous wife inherit a castle overlooking the sea, from which "slug-white" vaguely humanoid creatures announce they will come for him: in fact he goes to them, as the lover throws him into the ocean. He dies, but the Monsters revive and transform him in their laboratory using Technology, to become one of them. Now Immortal, Clarence says he has lost all negative emotions, with only the desire for peace, love and kindness remaining ... then kills the lover and drags his wife into the sea to join him forever. "Wish for the Dead" has a wastrel nephew deceitfully lamenting to his rich dying aunt that he had rather it was he who died not her: she gets him to state this as a wish, then dies. After a while he realizes an Identity Exchange has begun so goes to kill her half-alive body: there is a struggle and he shoots himself: thus both die. The second issue (#14) has "The Uninvited", where landscape painter Randolph Adams is abducted by Aliens, taken to their home planet and forced to engage in gladiatorial combat with assorted Monsters: he is victorious, but discovers the kidnappers wished to find out which species posed the greatest threat to them – he will live, but the rest of his species will be destroyed. Randolph escapes and steals a Spaceship, but on returning to Earth finds a thousand years have passed (presumably due to Time Distortion from Relativity): a nuclear War (Telepathically instigated by the aliens) has wiped out humanity and now Intelligent giant ants rule. He loses his sanity. The aliens look forward to peaceable relations with the non-violent ants. Other stories include a murdered man's decapitated hand pursuing and throttling its killer and a woman who turns into a Cat at night.
The third issue (#15) has "The Swamp Horror": men searching for missing Professor Crandall are attacked in a Louisiana swamp by a white tentacled creature: it kills one but then seems to hinder itself, giving the others time to burn it. They find Crandall's paperwork which explains he'd found a fungus-like organism which kills all bacteria: alien beings called Dinogs, dormant for aeons but now awoken with a taste for human flesh. Crandall was eventually eaten, but retains enough consciousness within the creature to control a tentacle – so buying time for his seekers (aside from issues of Identity, this also seems to border on a Hive Mind). In "The Stolen Soul" a ventriloquist steals the coffin from a rich man's grave, using the expensive wood to build a new puppet. It walks and talks, albeit morbidly ("the flesh slowly drops off the bones"), and the act becomes a success, but all goes awry. In the fourth issue (#16), "The Web of Doom" has a man shipwrecked on an island inhabited by giant red spiders. He escapes, returning to civilization, but one pursues and kills him; a nurse who sees the spider realizes it will now come for her. In "The Mummy's Bride" an archaeologist's daughter almost becomes the bride of an Ancient Egyptian mummified prince. "Kill No More" has a big game hunter hired to shoot a giant blue ape, "half beast, half human, reputed to be even more intelligent than man" (see Apes as Human), survivor of a species that otherwise died out millions of years ago (there is a suggestion that the extended lifespan might be because it is a Mutant). However, the man's employer is revealed to be the ape (see Shapeshifters) who collects hunters and puts them on display.
Issue 5 includes three transformation stories, involving a Werewolf; a woman who turns into a skeleton (though retaining her long red hair) riding a skeletal horse; and a man who can become a snake. In #6's "Almost Human" a late Scientist's assistant builds lifelike Androids, wholly artificial save for needing human tongues with which to speak. Recent murders at a nearby village (the victims tongueless) leads an investigator to discover the "assistant" was built by the scientist, who was killed by his creation; the latter now builds more androids and plans to rule humanity. #8 has "Terror In the Streets", where fugitives from the guillotine during the French Revolution took refuge in the Paris sewers and by the present day have mutated into ghouls who snatch people from the surface to devour. #10's "The Thing in the Fens" has two scientists working on a longevity serum to extend human life (see Rejuvenation): when they are attacked by a Zombie they throw the serum on it, whereupon it reverts to a live human, speedily growing younger until it becomes an embryo, then disappears.
"Cry Danger" in #11 has a scientist building a television set as part of his research into radar Communication: it picks up alien broadcasts, initially in a strange language, but shifting into English as the announcer reports their forces have reached the outer orbit of the third planet and Invasion is imminent. When warning the authorities fails – they are aliens in disguise – the scientist builds a Weapon that can defeat the invaders; it is destroyed by his wife, who is an alien too (see Paranoia). "His Own Funeral" has a mortician's assistant developing an embalming fluid that can make even the most decayed corpse appear unblemished: it's created by draining blood and spinal fluid from people he kidnaps, the process being fatal. However, the fluid does more than make corpses appear fresh, it actually revives them: the three bodies he's treated so far now appear and drain his blood and spinal fluid, using it to bring three more corpses to life. Though the men revived are zombie-like in appearance, they seem mentally and physically unaffected – at least one of the further revivals is a woman: "a perfect companion for a moonlit night". "Dwellers in Darkness" is the title of a supernatural novel whose author investigates why someone is buying up all the copies: the buyer turns out to be "the personification of the force of evil" (looking, not unsurprisingly, like the Devil), angry that the book happens to reveal how he can be destroyed.
#12's "Appetite For Death" has two botanists discovering a giant carnivorous plant in the Amazon, which they ship back to the USA: it grows even larger after the people (and a dog) who find themselves alone in its room disappear. The last two issues have no sf tales, though #13 has a jealous house (not mechanical so not an sf trope) and "The Bitter Joke", where a meek, unattractive man discovers he can change bodies (see Identity Exchange): he jumps into the bodies of two rivals and commits Suicide, departing at the last moment then sets up his own death, swapping with the third rival, whose body he intends to occupy permanently, unaware they have a weak heart (see Clichés). #14 has a Magic book that can raise the dead; a sorcerer who temporarily brings themself back from the dead to gain revenge on his murderer and, in "Daughter of Doom", the Devil's daughter as Comrade S, intelligence chief at a communist country's Embassy in the USA (see Cold War), her intention being to build her own empire on Earth.
#15 from Merit Publications Inc (see above) includes "The Crystal of Time", where a museum expert tries to decipher the language carved on a crystal discovered in an ocean trench. Cutting himself and bleeding on it whilst doing so, he is transported (see Time Travel) back to Cytheria, the capital of Atlantis. He duly fulfils an ancient prophecy when he frees a princess and her people from the tyrannical priests of the god Grakku (see Religion), before being returned unwillingly to the present. [SP]
further reading
Volume 2 was indeed issued before Volume 1, as below.
- Beware – Volume 2 (Hornsea, East Yorkshire: PS Publishing, 2017) [graph: collects issues #8-#14 of Trojan Comics Beware: in the publisher's PreCode Classics series: illus/various: hb/Sid Check and Frank Frazetta]
- Beware – Volume 1 (Hornsea, East Yorkshire: PS Publishing, 2018) [graph: collects issues #13-#16 and #1-#7 of Trojan Comics Beware: in the publisher's PreCode Classics series: illus/various: hb/uncredited]
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