Sunday Al Williamson Day.
It seems I stopped my run of Al Williamson at Tinely/Atlas/Marvel at an appropriate time. The last story I shared was also the last one he did before the socalled Timely Implosion of 1957. Due to the failing of their new distributor, Martin Goodman had to shut down operation of the comics devision and was only able to rebuild after making a deal with the DC owned distributor National. Before that, Goodman had his editor in Chief produce about 70 comic titles every two months. Now they were forced down to 16. This had a lot of effect on the output, one of which was that Stan Lee now had to use a smaller pool of talent (and probably pay them even less) and write as much as he could himself (or pretty soon with the help of his brother Larry Lieber). All of this lead to the so-called Marvel Method, where Lee had the artists do the stories themselves from a short plot or even less.
But that was still some time in the future. Stan Lee also had a stack of left-over scripts and even completed stories. Simple math tells us that if he had one complete book in the waiting room for every title, he would have about 350 stories in some sort of finished state. That means he had enough material for his sixteen books to last close to five months. Scripts were made even before that, so there may have been 350 more scripts for new stories to be made, enough for antother 5 months. And in fact, you do see a lot of L, M and even P numbers among the stories used in the new titles that restarted after the implosion (some only after a couple of months resuming bussiness, some after a year).
Al Williamson was one of the artists asked to come back, but he was doing new stories almost from the start (I am not sure where the implosion break in Stange Tales occurs, as it was published in a three montly tempo from the summer of 1957). Any way, we pick up Al's work for Stan and Goodman with T-100, the T prefix of the job numbers being the post-implosion marker. In the meantime, Al had stepped up his work for the American Comics Group and Charlton. I am going to go back and do those stories first.
The first one is from Adventures Into the Unknown #91. One big difference, is that Williamson is no longer using Ralph Mayo as an inker. Instead he is working with his old pal Angelo Torres here. The story itself is probably by Richard Hughes, the editor of the ACG line who wrote most of the stories for their books. It differs from the work at Timely not only because of it's length, but also because it uses what I call a 'splash forward' a splash panel that shows us a remarkable moment from later in the story - the same way most of DC's stories did. I have always felt that was a storytelling cheat, a way to start more excitingly by taking away a surprise from the reader. Stan Lee (or maybe Goodman, but I thinkj it was Lee) hated that device and one of the major (and never credited) elements of his succesful storytelling style was the existance that every story start with an exciting image of moment at the beginning without giving away anything from the plot itself.
The art is nice (but a bit dull) and shows some of the slickness that would soon become Al Williamson's trademark.