Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era Tales to Astonish #2
In "I Found Monstrom! The Dweller in the Black Swamp!", a ruthless tycoon gambles everything on a desperate leap into the future, believing he can escape the world's ills by jumping ahead forty years—only to face a chilling truth about time, aging, and the cost of progress. This 2008 Marvel Masterworks collection spotlights a rare, early story by Steve Ditko, whose distinctive art and inks bring the tale’s eerie, forward-thinking dread to life, with a cover by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko that captures the story’s unsettling tone.
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A heartless tycoon spends great resources and eliminates jobs in order to build a machine that will transport him from the current moment to one forty years hence because his scientists have predicted an end to disease, war, and poverty in the year 2001, but he neglects to consider his body will age forty years in what seems to his mind merely an instant and, since the machine has only enough power to move forward the one time, he's lost most of the years of his life.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).