Thanks! I will try and check it out.

Funny how I remembered it as from another Marvel title. And I certainly read (and collected) FF back then, so it makes sense.

If you know anyone who has an interest in obtaining these issues, please contact me.

Fr. Dan

Sorry for a comment that has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this thread…but I have a question about a comic I once read as a kid and hope that your readership can help me identify its source.

I was born in ‘55 and read this story in, I believe, a Marvel comic (pre-Fantastic Four) that would have been published in the late ’50s or early ’60s. It was almost certainly a “10 center”. And I think it was in a title like “Amazing Stories” or “Incredible Stories” or something like that.

It was a Science Fiction tale about a planet that the top scientists of that planet discovered was about to blow up (no, not “Krypton”!). The civilization was advanced enough to have created spacecraft, which would enable them to escape the impending explosion and resettle on another planet…but the problem was that there was only one spaceship and they didn’t have enough time to build any more before the planet exploded.

However, one scientist did have a size-reducing machine that he had invented and it worked just fine. So the idea was to reduce every single person on the planet to the size of ants and then everyone would be able to fit in the one spacecraft and they could escape before the planet blew up.

Just one hitch: although the size-reducing machine worked just fine they didn’t yet perfect the return-back-to-normal-size machine! And the elders of the planet knew that if the people of the planet knew that they could never return to their original normal sizes, no one would go through with the procedure, no one would be reduced in size, and no one would be able to escape…and the entire population would be lost.

So what did they decide to do?

Why, they lied to the people! They told them that there WAS a machine capable of returning them to their original size. So the population believed the scientists, had themselves reduced in size, everyone on the planet fit on to the spaceship and were saved.

And the moral of the story was revealed in the final panels of the comic: the top scientists discussed amongst themselves, while en route in space to their new planet, why they justified lying to the populace: everything is relative and once we get to the new planet it’s going to be entirely new anyway and we may end up, even with our new tiny size, being giants on the new planet. Or, for all we know, smaller than the norm of the new planet. But our ideas of size are irrelevant because we’re going to an entirely new planet which shatters all relative standards we were used to from living on our old home planet…so in the final analysis it doesn’t really matter whether we can return to our “normal” size because that was only relative to the old planet.

Now, I’m paraphrasing a lot of this because I’m going on memory and I haven’t seen the comic book in question in almost 50 years, but there you have it.

Can anyone remember such a story? And, if so, what was the comic, the title of the story, and the issue #?

I’ve been obsessed with this story ever since I read it and like all good fables and myths has actually had an effect on my thinking and worldview, if you can believe that! I’d truly love to rediscover the actual comic and story.

I thank you in advance for your attention to my query…

203-298-0374; cell: 203-803-6512

ARLEN SCHUMER is one of the foremost historians of comic book art, named by Comic Book Artist magazine in 1998 as “one of the more articulate and enthusiastic advocates of comic book art in America.” He’s written articles appearing in Print magazine, including The New Graphics of Comic Book Art in 1988; presented multimedia “visuaLectures” at The New York Art Directors Club, 1992’s Superhero to Antihero: Comic Book Art in the 1960s, and ComiCulture in ‘95; and created exhibit designs for the Words and Pictures Museum in Northampton, Massachusetts, The Graphic History of Batman in 1997 and The Art History of Superman in ‘98. In the Fall of 2009 he presented a visuaLecture, Great Comic Book Typography, at The Type Directors Club in New York City.

In the Fall of ‘02 he presented a visuaLecture series, Superheroes in the ‘60s: Comics & Counterculture, at The CUNY Graduate Center in New York City; he reprised it for CUNY in the Fall of 2003, this time titled, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, to tie-in with his coffeetable art book of the same name, released in December 2003 from Collectors Press (www.amazon.com/Silver-Age-Comic-Book Art/dp/1888054867/ref=dp_return_2/102-3932749-3481757?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books), and winner of The Independent Book Publishers Award for Best Popular Culture Book of 2003. He continues to lecture on The Silver Age (www.wolfmanproductions.com/comics.htm) at colleges and universities.

Schumer’s first book, Visions From The Twilight Zone, published by Chronicle Books in 1991 (www.amazon.com/Visions-Twilight-Zone-Arlen-Schumer/dp/0877017255), was based on the classic TV series, treating its images like art photography and its words like poetry. He based a multimedia presentation on the book, which he still tours around the country, along with his other mini-marathon/visuaLecture, The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone. His latest presentation, The Twilight Zone Forever, commemorated the 50th Anniversary of the series, October 2, 2009 at The New York Times’ TimesCenter in New York City (www.paleycenter.org/the-twilight-zone-forever/).

Schumer is also one of comic book art’s most idiosyncratic practitioners, creating award-winning illustrations for the advertising and editorial markets the past two decades (www.arlenschumer.com). Other books and projects include:

The Flintstones: Anatomy of a Pop Culture Classic (Hanna-Barbera, 1994)
Neal Adams: The Sketch Book (Vanguard Productions, 1999)
Streetwise (TwoMorrows Publications, 2000)
The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino (Vanguard, 2000)
Curt Swan: A Life in Comics (Vanguard, 2002)