Strange Stories of Suspense
Entry updated 13 July 2026. Tagged: Comics, Publication.
US Comic (1955-1957). Atlas Comics (see Marvel Comics). Edited by Stan Lee. 12 issues (numbered #5-#16). Artists include Dick Ayers, Carl Burgos, John Forte, Gray Morrow, Mac L Pakula, Robert Q Sale and John Tartaglione. Script writers include Bill Everett and Carl Wessler. 36 pages, with 5-6 strips per issue, plus a 2 page text story (the later ones are reprints).
Strange Stories of Suspense was initially a mixture of Horror, fantasy and sf; after a few issues sf came to dominate, though the other genres reasserted themselves towards the end of its run. Stories were often slight, usually with a set-up leading to a twist ending (for example, #12's "They Can't Resist!" has the success of an Alien Invasion dependent on a human looking through a hole in a disc; but they hand the disc to a blind man). A few have more complex plots: "The Man Who Knew" (#9) and "The Missing Sun" (#16) are probably the most interesting, the latter helped by some good artwork.
Sf stories include: "Uncle Ed and the Men from Space" (#5, the first issue), in which young Jimmy is taken on a hunting trip by his boastful uncle; when Martians (see Mars) arrive and start ordering the hunters around, Jimmy is able to recognize they are bluffing. "Man of Mystery" has a Scientist build a tiny Robot to steal gems, but his creation is honest. "The Illusion" (#6) opens with an astronomer telling a psychiatrist that his warnings of a Comet hitting the Earth were ignored: he built a refuge and survived the End of the World, to become the Last Man on Earth – the psychiatrist rebuts this by pointing out he is sitting next to him; it turns out the "psychiatrist" is the last man (the astronomer), the other being an illusion to prevent his solitary condition driving him mad (see Psychology). "Closed In" (#7) takes place in an Overpopulated future Earth, which a man finds unbearable; he takes a mining job which is harder work but the conditions underground, though enclosed, are less crowded for him and his wife: the reveal is they are being tested for their suitability for the crew of a Spaceship to colonize the stars (see Colonization of Other Worlds)
In "Super-Salesman" (#8) "creatures from a Parallel World, in human form" manufacture a vanishing cream; humans who apply it "vanish into our world for study by our scientists". "Blind Alley" sees a pair of scientists running guinea pigs in mazes and being dismissive of their Intelligence; shortly after, aliens run them through their mazes and are similarly patronizing. "Breaking Through the Time Barrier" (#9) concerns a scientist who argues that Time is not sequential, but exists all at once, only to be mocked by his peers and retiring, a broken man, to an isolated house haunted by laughter, which does not disturb him as that of his fellow scientists still echoes in his head. Aliens arrive to tell him humanity is ready to join the "Galactic Empire", providing he can persuade them to accept his theory. This revitalizes him, and he laughs; and recognizes this as the laughter that haunts the house, so proving his theory is correct. "The Man Who Knew" has Martin Cabell believing humanity needs a world government run by a small group of "great intellects" (his surname perhaps punning on "cabal"): he uses a friend's newly built Time Machine to test this (the device takes the user "to a future that will reflect the ultimate of what you, in your era, can make the future"). He finds people healthy but dull "like dumb beasts"; the police arrest him as an "individualist" and take him before "the great judge and his jury", five men with atrophied bodies and giant heads wired up to computers. The judge tells him this is the world he created and plead within him to return to his time and prevent it from happening ("keep us human ... all of us!").
"The Weeds" (#10) has chemicals in the Sargasso Sea's seaweed prolonging life but also slowing down the awareness of time (see "Time Distortion"). In "The Long Sleep" a scientist worries how "the lower classes are having more children who are not educated! ... [thus] genetically the race is going downhill!"; he puts himself in Suspended Animation for a thousand years, intending to lift future humans out of their ignorance. It turns out they are now smarter than him; he is employed as a road sweeper, ending up happy with his lot. With "The Professor's Prisoner" (#11) a scientist discovers worlds within worlds (see Great and Small) using his electronic microscope and its beam to capture a scientist from a dust-speck sized civilization. The beam can break down items to their atoms, then reassemble them; by this means he sends a minuscule version of his microscope to his prisoner, hoping to thus gaze on even smaller worlds – but they use it in reverse to shrink and entrap his captor. "Someone is Listening" concerns a scientist who builds a device that reads thoughts, but repeatedly draws the wrong conclusions from what he hears, eventually realizing lack of context makes the device useless (see Communication). In "The Blank" (#12) a woman student of applied genetics theorizes the future man will be large headed, weak, unemotional and have everything done by machines (see Clichés), little knowing the handsome young man she is flirting with has come from the future to prevent her scientist uncle performing a disastrous experiment (see Time Police; Time Viewer); having done so, he takes her to the future. Although the story arguably has some Feminist touches, the lover remarks "You're much too lovely a girl to be so brilliant and absorbed in your work."
#13 is mainly horror, but features a sentient plant. In "Beware ... a Martian!" (#14) a town's hermit reveals himself to be a Martian; though he is accepted by most, a bigot tries to frame him for various crimes, only to be caught out by his intended victim's Shapeshifter abilities. In "The Liquid of Life" (#15) a deep sea diver finds an cavern Under the Sea where the passengers and crew of an old sunken Spanish galleon have survived: it also houses the fountain of youth (see Rejuvenation), which he believes it will make him rich until he drinks some and grows gills, so has to live in the sea. "The Missing Sun" (#16) has three scientists in diving suits surfacing from the ocean to discover the Earth covered in a green, paralysing fog that obscures the Sun: they have 12 hours of oxygen left and apparently succeed in dispelling the fog within this deadline. It turns out this is another worlds-within-worlds scenario: their world was threatened by – from their perspective – a giant insect, which Earth scientists had sprayed with an insecticide – the green fog – to kill it and so save the world on their microscope slide. [SP]
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