[positronic1]

Wow, look at that great Norm Saunders cover. You'd almost think that the comic was inspired by the film THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, except for the fact that the film wasn't produced until 1957. Even the Richard Matheson novel the movie was based on wasn't published until 1956. Interestingly enough, the producer of Shrinking Man was Albert Zugsmith. The SAME Albert Zugsmith who had represented Jerry Siegel in his lawsuit against National Periodical Publications in the late 1940s, who had led Jerry to believe he had a chance to win it... and there are some hints that Zugsmith may have taken the lion's share of the money in the settlement made between Siegel and National at that time. In other words, Siegel's legal eagle might have been paid off by National to "take a dive". Siegel was awarded rights to Superboy, but ironically had to sell the character back to National to pay his legal costs to Zugsmith. "Zuggy" used his windfall profits from the case to underwrite his dream of becoming a Hollywood producer. While the scene with the cat attacking a miniature human in "The Evil Men Do" is eerily prescient of The Incredible Shrinking Man, EC's WEIRD SCIENCE #12 (actually the first issue) had ALSO featured a shrinking man (on the cover, too) in its first issue ("Lost in the Microcosm"), published in 1950 (so, about a year earlier). One wonders what Richard Matheson had been reading a few years before writing his 1956 novel.

Link to the book: Amazing Adventures 3

[crashryan]

Fascinating information about Zugsmith. This is new to me.

I figure all the subatomic world stories were originally inspired by Ray Cummings' 1922 pulp novelette, "The Girl in the Golden Atom." According to Wikipedia Cummings wrote for Timely in the 1940s and recycled his story as a Captain America 2-parter. Has anyone seen this?

[positronic1]

It sure sounded familiar, so I went to GCD to look it up. The story was retitled "Princess of the Atom" and was published as an almost-unheard-of 2-parter in CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS #25 (Part 1- 21 pages) and #26 (Part 2- 25 pages). I think I'd seen the story mentioned (along with a reprint of the splash title page) somewhere in ALTER EGO, and it just missed being reprinted in MARVEL MASTERWORKS: GOLDEN AGE CAPTAIN COMICS VOL. 7 -- if there'd been a Volume 7. Unfortunately, the whole GA Masterworks program ground to a halt after CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS Vol. 6... darn the luck! "The Girl in the Golden Atom" was published in 1922, but WEIRD SCIENCE #12's "Into the Microcosm" was specifically springboarded by Henry Hasse's 1936 AMAZING Stories novelette, "He Who Shrank". In either case, neither Cummings nor Hasse was the first to chronicle the exploits of a micronaut -- that would be Fitz-James O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens" from 1858, in which the scientist-narrator invents a powerful new microscope with which he's able to observe for the first time, a microverse within a drop of water (complete with beautiful princess, of course). And since this is a comics board, I guess I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention in passing Harlan Ellison's epic Hulk-Jarella romance in "The Brute That Shouted Love at the Heart of the Atom!" (and of course, "The Micro-World of Dr. Doom" would not have been complete without the beautiful Princess Pearla around). All of these microverse stories are missing the essential elements of both The Incredible Shrinking Man and Siegel's story "The Evil Men Do", however -- those stories don't focus on microworlds at all, but on the helplessness felt by a human being reduced to a tiny scale in OUR world, and hopelessly trapped by forces out of his control (and also, not incidentally, Stan Lee's "The Man in the Anthill" in TALES TO ASTONISH). But hey, giving credit where it's due, let's not forget the 1940 Ernest B. Schoedsack (of KING KONG fame) film, DR. CYCLOPS, produced by Merien C. Cooper for Paramount, either. This is not to take anything away from Matheson's novel, for he wisely focused his writing on the very real human aspects of frustration and panic of a man trapped in an incomprehensible situation.