Tales to Astonish 1959 #20 - 3.0 - $55.00

• First app: X

A comic writer's monsters keep coming to life, until he creates one that can't be defeated. The monster is unstoppable physically, but he wills it out of existence.

The manager of an auto parts shop develops a sudden tolerance for "human variation" in parts, possibly linked to otherworldly strangers in the shop at night.

A heartless tycoon spends great resources and eliminates jobs in order to build a machine that will transport him from the current moment to one forty years hence because his scientists have predicted an end to disease, war, and poverty in the year 2001, but he neglects to consider his body will age forty years in what seems to his mind merely an instant and, since the machine has only enough power to move forward the one time, he's lost most of the years of his life.

Includes 10 pages of paid advertisements. On-sale date from 1961 Periodicals, Copyright Office, Library of Congress.

• I Was Hunted By "X" the Thing That Lived!! - Possible Kirby inks per Nick Caputo, August 2012. Nick examined Kirby's inking at his blog, as can be seen here: http://nick-caputo.blogspot.com/2011/09/kirby-inking-kirby.html Original indexer credited Dick Ayers.
• What Was "X" the Thing That Lived! [, Part 1] - Narrated in the first person. X next appears in Alpha Flight (Marvel, 1997 series) #17 (December 1998). The unnamed editor of Tales to Astonish appears in the story.
• Odd Skills - Text story with illustration.
• One-Way Journey! - Nick Caputo suspects Stan Lee may have written this story based on an examination at his blog: http://nick-caputo.blogspot.com/2011/11/who-authored-ditko.html