The One Man Army starts his battle against “The Ocean Stealers” in the 18-page story in this issue. Sent by the Global Peace Agency to investigate a lake which has suddenly lost its water, we open with some great images of Kirby’s vision of a lake bed full of exposed and crushed plant and animal life. Finding an odd cube in the middle of the lake, he finds it unnaturally heavy, and gets a power boost from Brother Eye to move it, but even that might not be enough.
Next we meet the evil scientist responsible for all this, Doctor Skuba, a water-obsessed madman who has found a way to compress water into small bars, including one giant one which will absorb the Atlantic Ocean. When OMAC tracks down his lair Skuba recognizes the atomic manipulation that created OMAC being similar to his own science, and is able to use that similarity to restore OMAC to his Buddy Blank form.
OMAC is a lot of goofy fun with wild ideas thrown out at every turn. This adventure was obviously intended to be longer than the two issues it lasted, and I wonder if the connection between Skuba’s science and the technology used to create OMAC would have been explored.
D. Bruce Berry inks the 18-page story and the Kirby cover, with mixed results. Several pages look really good, especially the 2-page spread, and any of the renderings of technology, but I don’t think he fully captures the right look on the faces all the time.
A change of pace visually in this issue of THOR as Bill Everett handles the inking on the interiors for a single issue, both the main story and the Tales of Asgard back-up (though a few pages seem to have some work by regular inker Vincent Colletta). Everett would come back for a longer run two years later.
A pair of Kirby stories, plus a cover, are among the things of note in this issue of the Simon&Kirby edited horror comic from Prize. The cover is for the story “The Cat People”, which opens up the book. In this 6-page story, George Gates goes to visit an old friend after a long time away in Europe, which ended in an extended hospital stay. He then freaks out when his friend’s kids are playing cat’s cradle, and tells the story of his recent time in Spain, when he got lost and was invited to stay the night in the remote cavern home of an old woman and her beautiful daughter. As you’d gather from the title, they turn out to be able to transform into cats, using a spell cast by the original version of the cat’s cradle game. He barely escapes with his life, and not untouched.
Kirby writes and draws the 17-page story in this issue, “Mad, Mad Dimension”, the middle of the “Night People” storyline. Cap’s search for the missing Falcon and Leila leads him to the boisterous Texas Jack Muldoon, who saw the Falcon disappear last issue. Muldoon’s been doing his own investigations, leading them to the missing “Zero Street” and the tale of a scientist who had a breakdown but continued his research into interdimensional travel from the asylum.
