Strange Tales #59

A wonderfully unsettling piece of 1957 Atlas suspense: the cover by Fred Kida drops us into a crowded movie theater where every smiling, laughing patron seems perfectly at ease — every one, that is, except the wide-eyed, terror-stricken man in the center whose silent scream sets him apart from the cheerful crowd around him. That chilling contrast of collective calm against one man's desperate panic captures exactly the kind of paranoid dread that made Strange Tales of Suspense such a compelling read, and this issue packs in three tales — "Help, Help!," "Death Mask!," and "When the World Went Mad!" — with interior art by Gene Colan. At a dime a copy, this is mid-century anthology horror firing on all cylinders.