Marvel worked this trick any number of times in its short monster stories: the unreliable protagonist.
Confronted by mysterious manifestations that seem to be aliens or supernatural spirits, a seemingly normal character investigates. In the last panel, the reader discovers that the investigator is one of those uncanny beings, a double agent sent to throw humanity off track.
In a variation of the theme also used more than once, some alien menace will confront some seemingly hapless human, only to discover that person is ALSO an alien menace.
The fact that the stories didn’t surprise us hardly detracted at all from our enjoyment of them.
For example, in I Know the Secret of the Poltergeist! (Tales to Astonish 1, Jan. 1959) The narrator, seemingly a hard-headed rationalist, explains away weird phenomena in the reputedly haunted new home of a young couple.
The story succeeds because artist Steve Ditko packs a lot of punch into the last panel.
His visual problem was figuring out what mischievous ghosts no one had ever seen might look like, and his solution was a smart one. They’d resemble that wild force of chaos, the satyr-like figure of the Greek god Pan.
As the grinning narrator pulls off his mask to reveal himself as one of “We, Poltergeist!,” we readers could see how Ditko had teased us all along by hinting at the truth in the investigator’s angular, bearded features.
Ditko’s finesse supplies a frisson. The sight of those leering, dancing figures has stuck with me my entire life.
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