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Showcase Presents
Showcase Presents: Tales of the Unexpected, Vol. 1
For the first time, DC Comics collects the series TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED, featuring tales of the weird and mysterious. Originally published in the late 1950s, these stories feature work by some of DC's top talents of the era, and include stories like:"The Secret of Cell Sixteen"
"The Gorilla Who Saved The World"
"The Man Nobody Could See"
"The House Where Dreams Come True"
"The Living Locks"
"The Pen that Never Lied"
"The Man Who Ate Fire"
"The Phantom Mariner"
"The Gorilla Who Saved The World"
"The Man Nobody Could See"
"The House Where Dreams Come True"
"The Living Locks"
"The Pen that Never Lied"
"The Man Who Ate Fire"
"The Phantom Mariner"
- GenresComicsGraphic Novels
512 pages, Paperback
Published September 4, 2012
About the author
Various
1,350 followersVarious is the correct author for any book with multiple unknown authors, and is acceptable for books with multiple known authors, especially if not all are known or the list is very long (over 50).
If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.
Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.
If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.
Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 22, 2014
I have had a love/hate relationship with this volume for over a year now. I'm up to page 326 of 500 and I guess I'm taking it off the currently reading shelf, taking it off my bedside table and putting it on my bookshelf. It's been a ...ride. I can always come back to it.
This volume is a collection of comics published in the late 1950s in the style of Twilight Zone episodes. I say style because these comics have to be read to be believed. They fall square in the box of o bad they are actually quite good and you'll get many an unintentional laugh from them. They often start off with in intriguing premise and then by the end of the story (only about 5 pages each story) you are left in a highly confused mess of 'what the fuck was that about?'
For example there is 'The Girl in the Bottle' where people in huge bottles are found floating in the sea by sailors. They mystery is uncovered to be a people-smuggling operation by a french man who shoots the people through molten glass to put them in a bottle and dumps them at sea. Where do you start trying to make sense of that?
I also can't forget about the child who got psychic powers by playing ball next to a nuclear power plant.
This volume is wonderfully bad. So terrible that it is quite entertaining in small doses.
This volume is a collection of comics published in the late 1950s in the style of Twilight Zone episodes. I say style because these comics have to be read to be believed. They fall square in the box of o bad they are actually quite good and you'll get many an unintentional laugh from them. They often start off with in intriguing premise and then by the end of the story (only about 5 pages each story) you are left in a highly confused mess of 'what the fuck was that about?'
For example there is 'The Girl in the Bottle' where people in huge bottles are found floating in the sea by sailors. They mystery is uncovered to be a people-smuggling operation by a french man who shoots the people through molten glass to put them in a bottle and dumps them at sea. Where do you start trying to make sense of that?
I also can't forget about the child who got psychic powers by playing ball next to a nuclear power plant.
This volume is wonderfully bad. So terrible that it is quite entertaining in small doses.
February 18, 2017
I love comic anthology tales such as the ones contained in this volume. This book contains issues 1-20 of the TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED Comic series published by DC in 1956-57. Its most science fiction based stores in the old Tales from the Crypt format. The stories are mostly campy 50s fun, as you aren't going to find hard sci fi here. If you can get past the silliness, the stories are tremendously entertaining. The art is solid as well.
If you don't mind a little campiness, check these out. Just a very fun read.
If you don't mind a little campiness, check these out. Just a very fun read.
March 6, 2026
I could always count on DC giving me a nice unusual story to entertain. Nice collection of the tales. Recommended
September 15, 2012
This collection comes from the 1950s mostly sorta sci-fi anthology series "Tales of the Unexpected". Each issue featured four six-page or so stories about something odd. Many seem to fall into the "Scooby Doo crime" category, though often told from the criminal's perspective, as something that looks odd or supernatural is many times revealed to be...something else. Rest assured, anyone shows signs of greed will probably be punished.
I do wonder where DC got these reprints. Cain and Abel of the Houses of Mystery and Secrets can both be spotted introducing a story each, but neither had been created when this series first ran. Their titles did do a lot of reprints from this and other books like it to make page count, but I would think DC could have found the original stories without them, or at least Photoshopped them out.
Of special note amongst the many various and imaginative stories is one drawn by Jack Kirby where a greedy prospector-turned-rainmaker finds Thor's hammer in the middle of the desert. Thor does show up to reclaim it, and he looks and comes across in black-and-white as some kind of Viking Santa (dispensing lightening instead of coal), but the hammer itself looks a good deal like the one Kirby would eventually drawn about a decade or so later when he and Stan Lee would introduce the Marvel version of Thor.
I do wonder where DC got these reprints. Cain and Abel of the Houses of Mystery and Secrets can both be spotted introducing a story each, but neither had been created when this series first ran. Their titles did do a lot of reprints from this and other books like it to make page count, but I would think DC could have found the original stories without them, or at least Photoshopped them out.
Of special note amongst the many various and imaginative stories is one drawn by Jack Kirby where a greedy prospector-turned-rainmaker finds Thor's hammer in the middle of the desert. Thor does show up to reclaim it, and he looks and comes across in black-and-white as some kind of Viking Santa (dispensing lightening instead of coal), but the hammer itself looks a good deal like the one Kirby would eventually drawn about a decade or so later when he and Stan Lee would introduce the Marvel version of Thor.
April 5, 2013
Uneven, but some juicy stuff in here, notably a Jack Kirby story which is a direct precursor in almost every respect to Thor's origin in Marvel years later (which indicates that he must have done the concept and plotting for that, rather than Stan Lee). Also interesting that many of these stories, in the wake of the Kefauver hearings and the Code, started out as supernatural and horror stories and then resolved themselves with the supposedly supernatural phenomena turning out to have been hoaxes so elaborate that they are sometimes less credible than the supernatural explanations.
August 13, 2016
I read straight through over 2 days cause it's pretty mindless fun. some of the plots are dull some are totally ridiculous in a funny and great way a few are decent. I laughed out loud quite a few times at the ridiculous twists or justifications, if that doesn't sound good to you then you'll probably just be annoyed reading these. a lot of them are moral tales about criminals never winning.
October 23, 2016
A fun read. But, many of the stories feel dated and do not hold up well. But, still a good way to while away some time and not use up too much brain power.
February 4, 2013
Fifties comics goodness, but too many alien menaces repelled by the quick thinking of a stalwart American male. I would've liked them to have repelled a wider variety of menaces.
October 4, 2023
Tales of the Unexpected is one of those Cold War-tinged, watered down for the Comics Code Authority Twilight Zone-esque light fare anthology series. Alien invasions, ghosts, magical objects (lamps), timestream slips (i.e. broadcasts from the future), living paintings, and other concepts used here were also used so many times in other stories that it is almost impossible to ascertain where they originated.
Issue 9's The Day Nobody Died is the closest thing to a Pre-Code macabre style story. George Roussos was an excellent artist in the 1950s, employing endless solids which are stunning in black and white. His work here is so close to Alex Toth that I had to do a double take and go back to the table of contents to be sure. Roussos would have a decades long career in the industry, although he has no defining run on any title for fans to remember him by. I call guys like him comic book journeyman, as they turned it solid work year after year but never made it “big”. Jim Mooney is another artist who did great work here and, like Roussos, was a journeyman. Mooney is better remembered, though, as he inked Spider-Man on and off over the years.
If you've read one of these '50s titles then you have read them all, although this one boasts a better than average roster of artists. Take a gander at that list above. A lot of Golden Age greats were still doing solid work, such as Sheldon Moldoff (creator of Hawkman), Bernard Baily (co-creator of The Spectre), and of course Jack Kirby (co-creator of every great 1960's Marvel hero except for Spider-Man and Doctor Strange).
Kirby's artwork is in a transition phase here between the rawness and energy of his 1940s work and the refinement of his Silver Age work. Of note is #16's The Magic Hammer, where Kirby tells the story of a man who finds the magic hammer of Thor and uses it for evil. This was five years before he created the character for Marvel's Journey Into Mystery #83. While it is hip and trendy to downplay Stan Lee's contributions to Kirby's co-creations, I have to side with the Kirby Kult about Thor. You can't dispute that Kirby had the idea cooked up. Lee may have added supporting casts to the series, but the rest of Thor is pure Kirby. Look at this panel from the story. It is the exact same pose that he would draw Thor in on the cover of his first appearance!
Leonard Starr is one of the all-time greatest comic book or strip artists. This was toward the end of his career as a comic book artist, as he was about to graduate to the big time with his nationally syndicated strip Mary Perkins On Stage. If you have never read that series you should check it out, as it is brilliant.
I enjoy reading stuff like this before I go to bed, when the house is quiet and the kids are sleeping. I would be all over a Volume 2 of this, although four years have passed and this line of books is pretty much dead in the water.
Issue 9's The Day Nobody Died is the closest thing to a Pre-Code macabre style story. George Roussos was an excellent artist in the 1950s, employing endless solids which are stunning in black and white. His work here is so close to Alex Toth that I had to do a double take and go back to the table of contents to be sure. Roussos would have a decades long career in the industry, although he has no defining run on any title for fans to remember him by. I call guys like him comic book journeyman, as they turned it solid work year after year but never made it “big”. Jim Mooney is another artist who did great work here and, like Roussos, was a journeyman. Mooney is better remembered, though, as he inked Spider-Man on and off over the years.
If you've read one of these '50s titles then you have read them all, although this one boasts a better than average roster of artists. Take a gander at that list above. A lot of Golden Age greats were still doing solid work, such as Sheldon Moldoff (creator of Hawkman), Bernard Baily (co-creator of The Spectre), and of course Jack Kirby (co-creator of every great 1960's Marvel hero except for Spider-Man and Doctor Strange).
Kirby's artwork is in a transition phase here between the rawness and energy of his 1940s work and the refinement of his Silver Age work. Of note is #16's The Magic Hammer, where Kirby tells the story of a man who finds the magic hammer of Thor and uses it for evil. This was five years before he created the character for Marvel's Journey Into Mystery #83. While it is hip and trendy to downplay Stan Lee's contributions to Kirby's co-creations, I have to side with the Kirby Kult about Thor. You can't dispute that Kirby had the idea cooked up. Lee may have added supporting casts to the series, but the rest of Thor is pure Kirby. Look at this panel from the story. It is the exact same pose that he would draw Thor in on the cover of his first appearance!
Leonard Starr is one of the all-time greatest comic book or strip artists. This was toward the end of his career as a comic book artist, as he was about to graduate to the big time with his nationally syndicated strip Mary Perkins On Stage. If you have never read that series you should check it out, as it is brilliant.
I enjoy reading stuff like this before I go to bed, when the house is quiet and the kids are sleeping. I would be all over a Volume 2 of this, although four years have passed and this line of books is pretty much dead in the water.
January 30, 2020
A book that shows what comics editors bring to the table.
Nobody's ever going to mistake DC's Silver Age Mystery in Space or Strange Adventures for NK Jemisin, but editor Julius Schwartz consistently turned out a readable book, issue after issue. Tales of the Unexpected, edited by Whitney Ellsworth? Not so much. The art is mostly bland and the stories are blander. Crook steals magic/SF device, discovers there's a catch and gets caught. Or crook suffers curse that turns out to be a scheme to make him confess. Or a twist-ending story that falls flat.
Maybe one in 10 stories has some charm to it.
Nobody's ever going to mistake DC's Silver Age Mystery in Space or Strange Adventures for NK Jemisin, but editor Julius Schwartz consistently turned out a readable book, issue after issue. Tales of the Unexpected, edited by Whitney Ellsworth? Not so much. The art is mostly bland and the stories are blander. Crook steals magic/SF device, discovers there's a catch and gets caught. Or crook suffers curse that turns out to be a scheme to make him confess. Or a twist-ending story that falls flat.
Maybe one in 10 stories has some charm to it.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews