A firm called Geekroom is running an online auction now of a copy of Strange Suspense Stories #53 signed on the cover by Stan Lee. What's the part of this I don't get? Well, for starters, how come Stan Lee signed a comic book he had nothing to do with?
This was a comic book published by Charlton Publications. Stan Lee never worked for Charlton in his life. It wouldn't surprise me if he'd never read a Charlton comic book in his life.
So the first thing I don't get is why Stan signed the thing. I mean, I know they probably paid him a nice piece o' change for his autographing services that day and he probably signed many, many items. But did he say to the people paying him to sign this, "Hey, you know I didn't do this one"? Or did he just not notice? Then the other thing I don't get involves the description in the auction listing…
Strange Suspense Stories was a comic book published in two volumes by Fawcett Comics and Charlton Comics in the 1950s and 1960s. Starting out as a horror/suspense title, the first volume gradually moved toward eerie fantasy and weird science fiction, before ending as a vehicle for the superhero Captain Atom. The title's second volume was more in the horror/suspense vein. Altogether, 72 issues of Strange Suspense Stories were published.
It contained science-fiction mystery/suspense stories written primarily by editor-in-chief Stan Lee and his brother, Larry Lieber, with artists including Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Don Heck.
The first paragraph is correct. The second is a somewhat-accurate description of the monster comics like Strange Tales that Marvel was publishing at the same time. Obviously, someone found this info online and put them together. Did they not understand that Strange Tales from one publisher was not the same comic as Strange Suspense Stories from another? Steve Ditko had work in both but not those other guys. Maybe that confused someone.
Or maybe this is a joke that someone at Geekroom decided to try to see if anyone would spot it…but if so, why? Just another piece of stuff that I don't get.