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November 1963 |
Matt Price, AKA "Brain Boy", is summoned by his boss. Chris Ambers runs the "Society of Active Anthropologists", which is, in fact, a special branch of the US Secret Service that employs agents with telepathic and telekinetic abilities, "the last line of counter intelligence". Matt is shocked at his new assignment: he has to go on vacation! Brain Boy has fought (in previous issues) a mad dictator, a T Rex, a millionaire's time machine, and an army of metal people. Matt can read minds, control other minds, and his own body - as he demonstrates by hovering. He's ordered to "fly out of here and get some rest." Matt flies gladly. "Yahoo!" Matt drives his huge Plymouth convertible to the Canadian backwoods, to Boondocks, population 432. He'll stay at Blue Lake Lodge. Yet when he asks directions, the blank-eyed locals can only mutter, "The lake is very beautiful... Swim in the lake... Very refreshing..." He gives a ride to a brunette doll named Louise and her little brother Eddie. They mumble about the lake too. Matt wonders, "Have I stumbled on a town of lunatics?" He takes a mental peek into their minds, "one quick look", but vows "to stay out of trouble, no matter what." Louise and Eddie's minds are blank! Like infants! Matt's car is sideswiped by an older gentleman equally blank. "No serious damage. Forget it. Cool off with a swim in the lake." Matt's car is blocked by a fallen tree. He'll walk to the lodge for help, but Louise and Eddie stop him. "It will be dangerous. You will not come back." |
Brain Boy pushes on - and finds an incredible sight. Blank-faced loggers carry a coffin through the forest. Two big loggers brace Brain Boy. "You should not have come here. We were going to lift the log after the stranger was buried. Now you too must be buried." Matt sends a mental command. "Freeze solid, both of you! You cannot move!" No good - no minds to command!  The loggers pull a knife. Brain Boy probes their empty minds and finds only a picture of the lake. He offers, "I was on my way to swim in the lake!" The loggers stop. "The lake? Go to your car. The tree will be removed." Matt mops his brow. "Another few seconds and I'd have been a goner!" Why is the lake so important? Who's the stranger to be buried? Matt is so wrung out, he doubts his own abilities. Maybe the locals are nature worshippers. Maybe he's just overworked. |
Matt drives Louise and Eddie to the lodge. They smile eeriely. "We're going swimming in the lake!" Matt wonders why BLUE Lake is green. The lodge is run down. Matt gets a room from the glassy proprietors, who insist he swim in the lake right away. He grabs his fishing tackle instead. He's cut off by a new guest, Carl Cherman, a jolly blowhard. "Hi, kid! Where're the girls, huh?" Carl changes to swim trunks. "King Kong was a sissy compared to Carl the Great!" He can sing like "Elvis and Como and Sinatra put together!" Yet Carl is oblivious to anyone but himself. Has he noticed the "dull faces and voices"? Nope. "Just hicks. Stick close to me and I'll toss you my rejects - girls who don't come up to my standards!" Carl spots Louise in a bathing suit. "That's what Carl the Great came to Hicksville to find! Baby, forget the skinny kid. Lead me to the lake and I'll show you how I won the Olympics." And off they go to the lake. Brain Boy wonders who's nuts. And borrows a boat to fish. |
Carl cannonballs into the lake - and immediately changes. Within seconds he's babbling, "The water is so wonderful... I want to rest here in the lake..." Carl tries to tip Matt into the lake! "You promised the lumberjacks you would swim in the lake." How, Matt wonders, can Carl know about that? Brain Boy tries a telepathic command for Carl to "sink like a stone" without effect. With a mighty swing, Brain Boy smacks Carl out of his boat. "We'll handle it this way, Heavyweight Boxing Champ!" Matt has failed to notice...  Dozens of people swim to pull him into the lake. Some in their street clothes! "If it wasn't so frightening, I'd laugh!" Matt takes off rowing. |
Gaining the shore, Matt flies up to his room window. "Levitating's a lot harder than walking, but I don't want to meet those crooks." Through his window, he sees locals and Carl Cherman wait in his room with knives! Matt bolts for his car. "I have to find a Mountie station!" His car engine is trashed, the wires ripped out. "I wasted precious time telling myself I misunderstood these people! Just because I wanted a vacation, I closed my eyes to one of the most frightening cases I ever ran into! But the vacation is over! I've got to find out the truth!" Except now he's surrounded. The entire town has been called by some silent telepathy Matt can't hear. Lumberjacks, old folks, women and kids carry clubs, knives, and guns. The locals warn Matt he must not resist like "the stranger who threatened to bring the Mounties and now sleeps in the woods forever." Matt pretends to give in. He strips his shorts and slowly backs into the lake. "This water tingles - like stepping into a tub of soda!" Finally he dives. A man pronounces, "He joins us. He becomes one with the lake." Oddly, Matt feels at peace in the lake. He LOVES the lake! He - "Wait a minute! No! Swim out of the lake!" Dragging himself out, Matt realizes, "Must... resist! Powerful intelligence drowning out my mind... trying to enslave me... wipe out my personality and use me!" Brain Boy is OK, still in his right super-mind. And the townspeople are satisfied. The leader, "Old P.M" proclaims, "Tonight our lake will travel. Be fed and rest for the job." Louise explains that Old P.M. was the first to "find the globe that brought the lake to us." Where's this globe? "Old P.M. chooses who visits the globe." Brain Boy is chosen, because soon "when the lake begins to moves, others will be served. All over Canada, then the world." Old P.M. leads the "servants of the lake" through the woods. Brain Boy is astonished. Four armed lumberjacks guard a huge globe seared black by incredible heat. (See the globe on the cover, without soot.) |
Brain Boy does a read. "There's something alive in there! Not a human mind, or even one mind! I... I feel as if a million... a billion minds were thinking and planning in there!" Following instructions, Matt climbs the ladder and dips his bucket. He senses the Eerown pulling at his mind!  "The Eerown are microscopic green beings that come from a watery planet. They rule there, living in the bodies of the creatures they enslave." The aliens enter slaves through drinking and bathing water. Their billion minds combine mentally into ONE brain! But their planet became overcrowded, so they Eerown had their slaves build a spaceship and fill it with water - and billions of Eerown. The spaceship crashed here, near the lake. Old P.M. discovered it and was enslaved. He carried Eerown water to the lake, and thus they enslaved the town. If the Eerown can get their local slaves to spread the water everywhere - the Earth is theirs! |
Ordered to rest, Brain Boy returns to his room. He has eight hours to stop the Eerown. How? Flying to the lake unseen, Matt fetches a pail of water. He raids the other guests' rooms poisons, liquids, and sprays. "Now to experiment." He'll try poisons locally available. Iodine. DDT. "It wouldn't do any good to find out sulphuric acid does the job! Where would I find enough by midnight? In fact, I might not be able to get enough of anything to kill a whole lake of Eerown!" Matt puts on some radio music to relax while he tests the lake water with poisons.  "Long, desperate hours later," nothing works. Not iodine, DDT, alcohol, insect sprays." Then,a lucky accident. Matt knocks the radio into the bucket - and the green color fades! Electricity kills the Eerown! |
Acting fast, Matt rushes through the lodge gathering electrical equipment: radios, fans, lights. He splices all the wires and plugs in the radio. Flying out the window, Brain Boy sails over the lake and drops the radio - praying the locals don't unplug it first. The radio hits the water - and Matt hits the ground. He's too tired to levitate farther. And here come the locals with weapons. Suddenly the crowd stops dead, as if awakening from a dream. Matt alone can hear "a billion whispering screams" as the Eerown in the lake are electrocuted. The townspeople wake from their nightmare. Refreshed by near victory, Matt flies to the globe spaceship. The Eerown, sensing a threat, erupt in a green spray to engulf him. But Matt dodges and the water splashes on the ground. The Eerown can't survive outside water or a human blood stream. By the time the locals find Matt, he's fast asleep against "an empty metal globe." He mutters in his sleep, "No more vacations for me... They're too dangerous..."  |
Comments Brain Boy is one of the many delightful surprises you can find buried in old stacks of Dell Comics. The story is a throwback to the Cold War with its invisible threats from brainwashing Russians and/or aliens. A peaceful suburban town is really a hotbed of alien invasion. Old ladies will kill you with an axe if you object to the status quo. Note that Brain Boy ("boy" is alliterative, rather than "Brain Man") has to work HARD to accomplish things. It's hard and exhausting to levitate. He works "long desperate hours" testing poisons on the water. He's ganged by loggers and in danger of losing his life. Yet he pushes on, and finally collapses to sleep at the end - a funny and innocent image. Dell Comics, and their spinoff Gold Key, were known as "good comics" because they eschewed objectionable content. Instead they relied on human characters who used their heads and hands to solve crises and make the world a better place. And that's a terrific example for any child - or adult. |
The backup stars "The Strange Mr. Ozymandias" who "spent time in a Tibetan Lamasery". He's a man of study and action, good with books and his fists.  In this five-page adventure, a crazed guru invokes ancient spells and animal slaughter to grow a jungle on barren land. Mr. Ozymandias thinks it's dangerous. Breaking into a library, he researches a spell. Sure enough, as the jungle grows, the air grows stifling. It could spread all over the globe! Mr. Ozymandias chants a spell and the jungle withers. Found in the chaff is the guru, a victim of a spell he never really understood. This character served as a trivia question when WATCHMEN was hot. "Who was the FIRST character named Ozymandias?" |