From the pages of Strange Stories of Suspense #12 (December 1956), here’s a four-page story with a banal script that is partially redeemed by the vivacious Frazetta-influenced art of Angelo Torres:
The lowest point in the story has to be when Lee says to Dora, “Besides, you’re much too lovely a girl to be so brilliant and absorbed in your work!” That’s casual sexism offered up as a compliment, Holmes. Apparently, whether they’re from the past, the present, or the future, men will be men will be men, all mentally mired in the 1950s.
But wait! Did Lee just say future human civilization has “scanners, to look back into time and send men like me, trouble-shooters of the future, back to the past to take care of things like this”? Hm… now that’s interesting… I wonder who was the first to use the term scanners in SF in connection with time travel and surveillance… and I also wonder if Philip K. Dick ever read this story… LOL!
It is amazing how the art does have an eerie almost-Frazetta feel (sort of like the early work of Jones, Wrightson, Suydam, Scott Hampton, and a number of others. Since the ‘Fleagle gang’ liked photo-reference, I wouldn’t be surprised if Angelo Torres didn’t use actual pix of Frazetta, the older gent, and the young female as reference. These may have even come from the same batch of reference photos as those used by Frazetta on some of his own romance stories.
There’s a Torres story in the back of the oversized HORROR COMICS OF THE 1950S, published in the early ’70s, which was drawn in the ’50s for E.C., but previously unpublished. It also has a Frazetta look to it in some places, but some panels were clearly swiped from THUN’DA #1. In the above four pager I can’t cite any direct Frazetta swipes; he probably didn’t.
Interesting what a different direction Torres’ art took when he became a MAD magazine regular in the early ’70s, drawing film and TV show parodies in a similar vein to Mort Drucker.