“The six- and eight-page tales, the populated interchangeable finger-wiggling titles like Journey Into Mystery, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish were pure Twilight Zone in their twist-ending moral lessons,” wrote Sean Howe in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
“(Jack) Kirby delivered large-scale visions of awe-inspiring alien technology and brutish monsters, while (Steve) Ditko depicted jittery, ambitious outcasts humbled by the consequences of their own hubris and imprisoned by their own psyches. In both of their work, men endured excruciating scientific transformations and traumatic gains of knowledge that permanently separated them from the civilizations to which they’d once belonged.”
So They Vanished Forever was a pretty typical Ditko story, except that it was by Dick Ayers. All Marvel artists got their turn at these little weirdies scripted by Stan Lee and/or his brother. Outside Kirby and Ditko, some of my favorites were Don Heck’s He Waits For Us in the Glacier! (Tales to Astonish 7, Jan. 1960) and this one by Ayers (Strange Tales 98, July 1962).
Greedy people rarely fare well in these stories, and Molly Browne’s crew is no exception. The ship is found adrift, with everyone gone but the radio operator Thomas Clark, who claims to remember nothing.
Later, under the naked bulb in his lonely room, Clark reflects that the authorities would have thought him insane if he’d told them what really happened — that the Molly Browne encountered a legendary ghost ship, the Flying Dutchman.
The Molly Browne’s crew found sacks of gold in the hold of the Flying Dutchman, and weren’t frightened away even when the Dutchman’s ghostly sailors stepped through the ship’s walls.
“They have no bodies — no solid forms!” reasoned the greediest of the crewmen. “They can’t even touch us! Now come on — let’s transfer this gold to our own ship!”
Clark tried to stop them, but couldn’t. And the sailors who grabbed the gold instantly became ghosts, finally turning into those wispy, blank-looking ghosts that children like to imagine — a touch I remember appreciating.
The Dutchman’s ghostly sailors, who’d only tried to warn the greedy crew, tell Clark that his wisdom has saved him from becoming a new crewman on the Flying Dutchman, and then vanish, freed from their 200 years of bondage at last.
The legend of the Flying Dutchman was based on 17th-century Dutch East India Company history, specifically a purported stormy 1641 voyage around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa during a fierce storm. A Captain Willem (or Hendrik) van der Decken was said to have refused his crew’s demands to turn back, and thrown the helmsman overboard. Many sightings of the phantom ship were subsequently reported, and considered to be omens of disaster.
The creators of They Vanished Forever would have been surprised to know that an entire 21st century blockbuster movie franchise could be based on the pirate ghost concept. Or that a new character whose ads were scribbled into the margins of this issue — the Incredible Hulk — would also have serious legs.
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