Uncanny Tales #8
"Escape... To What?" is a standout moment in Marvel's Uncanny Tales #8 (1975), a 25-cent gem written by Stan Lee and illustrated with eerie precision by Steve Ditko, whose inks lend a haunting clarity to the story’s unsettling premise. When a boy’s new Civil War toy soldier becomes the unlikely guardian of a real, otherworldly invader trapped in his model prison, the line between imagination and reality begins to blur in ways neither he nor his father can explain. The cover by Arvell Jones and Klaus Janson captures the story’s eerie stillness, hinting at something far stranger than a simple dream.
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A boy who enjoys toy soldiers buys a new civil war figure to place in his prisoner of war stockade. That evening, he and his father are attacked by an invader from the sixth dimension. Suddenly, the lights go out, and when they turn the lights back on, the invader has disappeared. They chalk it up to some sort of unusual shared dream, and go back to sleep. The following morning when the boy wakes up and peers into his model stockade, he sees the invader languishing in the cell guarded over by the toy soldier.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).