#Tales to Astonish!

[comic-covers]

(1960)

#Tales to Astonish! #comic book #1960 #Jack Kirby #Steve Ditko #cover art #Stan Goldberg #Artie Sime #Mummex #king of the mummies #Marvel comics #vintage #1960s #silver age #comic books

[atomic-chronoscaph]

The Things on Easter Island - art by Jack Kirby and Christopher Rule (1959)

#jack kirby #christopher rule #tales to astonish #the things on easter island #marvel comics #comic art #cover art #50s fantasy art #1950s #1959

[fayzart136]

(yes I know the Room is super obscure compared to the others. Idc, he's my favorite blorbo.)

S/O to @very-tired-child!! His posting about Places That Are Characters (and his excellent humanizations) are what inspired my own spin on the idea.

"Annotated" versions under the cut.

#artists on tumblr #digital #sfw #lineup #house of leaves #character design #HOL #the house on ash tree lane #anatomy #anatomy game #anatomy kitty horrorshow #kitty horrorshow #shaperaverse #astonishing tales of the highly improbable #i will make this post breach containment #and they will be confused about Room lmao #idc i like how his face turned out. #anyway the biggest thank you again to very-tired-child #also references. Use em. #maybe later ill show just how many references i used. Spoiler: a lot #art

[frdesignia]

Car designer by Fabio Ricardo // I.A. FR ART DESIGN

#BMW #carro de luxu #carros #automotive #car #cars #classic car #classic cars #electric cars #fast cars #aston martin #muscle car #supercars #luxury cars #exoticcars #autos #porsche #lamborghini #aston villa #tales to astonish

[bookshelf-in-progress]

Length of Years: A Rapunzel Retelling

The woman in the tower brushed her hair. It had long ago turned white, and had grown to cover most of the floor in her little stone room. She braided it with lightning speed, her gnarled fingers confidently completing the familiar task.

Her gaze wandered through the chamber filled with the works of a lifetime. Tapestries she'd woven. Books she'd read and written. Dresses she'd designed. Plants she'd carefully tended until flowering vines framed her one window to the outside world. Evidence of arts she'd mastered, skills she'd developed--once sources of pride and joy, and now simply the remains of an empty life.

Now that her mother was dead, what did she have to live for? She'd sacrificed her life out of loyalty to the woman who'd given her everything; she'd never dreamed that someday she'd be the one left alone. This tower room had been her world; now that world seemed pathetically small. A dismal showing for so many decades.

She sang to banish the thoughts--song was her only weapon in her war against the hostile silence. The song was a light ditty from her younger years, about a bird in a cage, flying free. She'd sang that song often, once upon a time, to an awestruck audience. The only visitor this tower had ever held.

Unbidden, he appeared before her mind's eye. Young. Strong. Dark-haired. Square-jawed. With scarred hands and a dimpled chin and laughing eyes. He'd come to see her, day after day, and filled her world with a joy she'd never before known.

He'd asked her to leave with him; she'd refused, for Mother's sake, again and again, until he'd spoken so abusively against Mother that she grew offended for her sake, and told him to leave and never return. He'd obeyed her wishes, as he always had, and now she had nothing left of him but memory and regret.

She sang all the stronger as the memory turned to sorrow. She'd had her chance and thrown it away. Time had devoured any hope she'd ever had. What was the use of wishing otherwise? She was, and would be, now and forever, alone.

Even the song couldn't change that, so she stopped singing.

And in the silence, she heard a voice.

"Rapunzel! Rapunzel!"

An illusion. A hallucination. A phantom voice conjured by an abundance of memory and solitude and a lack of anything else.

The voice persisted. "Let down your hair!"

The voice was weaker than the one she remembered. Graveled. Worn. Aged.

But beneath it all, a familiar tone that brought her mind back to a time when she was fair-skinned, golden-haired, slender, willowy and oh-so-young.

She raced to the window with a speed she hadn't been capable of in years. Her joints creaked as she leaned far out the window, clinging tightly to the ledge to maintain her delicate balance as she looked down.

At a man in well-worn travel clothes marked with the royal coat of arms.

"I heard your singing," he said.

His hair was shorter than she remembered, gray and frazzled but still remarkably thick. His square jaw had grown jowls, his face had grown lines, his eyes had grown dimmer. But his smile as he gazed upon her was as bright as the one she saw in her memories each night.

With a bow that was slower but no less elegant for the passing of years, he asked, "My lady, might I ascend?"

With a joy she hadn't known she could ever possess, Rapunzel gathered up her endless white lengths of braid and let down her hair.

**

The climb took longer than Rapunzel remembered, but at last her visitor reached the window, and Philip Peregrine Bertram, prince of Whitbay, entered her chambers once more.

He bent double as he caught his breath. "Has your window always been that high?"

"It hasn't moved," Rapunzel said.

And neither have I.

Philip heard the unsaid and more valuable words. His gaze, when he stood straight and looked at her, held the compassion she'd always admired. "I heard of your mother's passing."

"It was very sudden." Mother had collapsed in the middle of a conversation, just after a climb up the tower in the rain. Rapunzel had buried her body beneath the stones of the tower's lowest level.

"My sympathies," Philip said.

He was the first to offer them, in all these weeks. Despite the hatred Rapunzel knew he had for her mother, she knew his words were genuine.

That, more than anything, brought the tears to her eyes. "Thank you."

Philip offered a handkerchief, which she took without shame. "Do you have food? Supplies?" he asked.

Rapunzel nodded, glad for the switch to more practical matters. "There are garden boxes here in the tower, and a boy comes every week with supplies."

"And you've stayed?"

She shrugged. "I had nowhere else to go."

No one else to go to.

He heard these unspoken words, too, and his face, as he sighed, seemed to age another ten years. "Rapunzel," he breathed. "I am so very sorry."

His voice held such depth of regret that she knew he apologized for far more than her mother's passing.

Despite herself, Rapunzel's words of response sounded far younger than the girl he had known. Like a child's--small, delicate, broken, plaintive. "Why did you never come back?"

"You asked me not to," Philip said. "And I had my pride. I might have returned, when my temper cooled, but then there were the wars, the diplomatic missions, the voyages, the marriage treaty, the children..." He sat wearily on her window ledge. "By the time life slowed down, I assumed you'd long ago moved on, and it would have been disloyal to seek you out. I only came to the village by chance and heard the locals speaking of the woman in the tower. Then I came to the woods and heard your song..."

He trailed off as he gestured to the room around them.

"I see," Rapunzel said, though she could barely even imagine it. An entire life full of war and travel and conflict and change happening quickly enough to obscure the passage of time, while she'd stayed here in the same set of rooms as the long, slow seconds marched lazily by.

"Did no one else ever come to the tower?" Philip asked, sounding almost desperate to hear some hint of joy from her life.

"No one," Rapunzel said simply. "Mother made certain of that."

Philip's jaw clenched, and there was a spark of the old fire in his eye, but he did not speak ill of the dead.

"I never mentioned you to her," Rapunzel said, "but she must have been suspicious--I wept so often in the weeks after our argument. She set barriers and traps in the woods after that. Spread rumors that I was mad and violent. The only outsiders who ever came were the boys who delivered supplies, and Mother always hired slow-witted lads who didn't ask questions."

"And..." Philip swallowed back some emotion. "And she was your only company?"

"She was never unkind to me," Rapunzel said, for she hadn't been, whatever her other crimes. "She made certain I never lacked anything I wanted."

"Except for freedom."

Rapunzel shook her head softly. "For a long time, I wasn't sure I wanted that. If I left, how could you find me? And by the time I believed you'd never come, I knew enough of the world to know I was safer here."

"Friendship, then."

"I did want that," Rapunzel admitted. "You don't know how much." Her fists clenched and her words quavered. "Sometimes, I thought it would break me."

Philip rose to his feet and caught her hand between his. "But it didn't," he said, with soft reassurance.

"Not yet."

"It won't," he said, with the firm compassion of age. "Not while I live." He raised her hand between their faces and looked deep into her eyes. "We've lost so many years, Rapunzel. I can't begin to atone for what you've been denied, but I can make certain that you're denied it no more. Come with me. Leave this place."

Rapunzel felt as though the tower had crumbled beneath her, leaving her no firm place to stand. It was more than she had dared to hope for, not for years and years and years. "How can I?" she whispered. "Your wife and family..."

"My wife passed nearly ten years ago. My children won't deny me the comfort of your friendship."

She gazed out the window toward a distant world glowing with a purple sunrise. "It's been too long," she said. "Too much life wasted. So little time ahead."

Philip's eyes, when she looked back at him, were as bright as those of the boy she'd once known. "Then we'd best not lose another minute."

**

Her head felt impossibly light. Her hair felt strange where it brushed against her shoulders. She secured the long, long braid to the pulley outside her window, then let down her hair one last time.

Philip secured her in the braid like a harness, and slowly lowered her to the ground. When her feet were firmly on the grass--it was so much softer than she'd imagined!--he climbed down and landed beside her.

Philip took her hand in his. "Are you ready?" he asked.

She nodded, too full of joy to speak.

"We'd best be on our way, then."

With her face toward the sunrise and her hand wrapped in his, Rapunzel strode forward and left the tower behind.

#the bookshelf progresses #fairy tale retellings #rapunzel #a flash fiction image that came to me and demanded i write it #even with so little description you'd be astonished at how long this took to write #even the easy ones are never as easy as i hope #i could edit this more but also i just need to throw it out there because i don't want to spend more time on it

[wonderful-strange]

"Behold, dolts!" Art by Wally Wood. From Marvel comic book Astonishing Tales.

#wally wood #dr. doom #doctor doom #comic books #comic book art #superheroes #marvel comics #astonishing tales #1970s

[comicartarchive]

Astonishing Tales 6 pg1-4 by Barry Windsor-Smith

#original comic art #title splash page #splash page #bronze age comics #astonishing tales #ka zar #barry windsor smith #consecutive pages #jungle comics

[coolcomicbookcovers]

#tales to astonish #Antman #wasp

[chernobog13]

Heck, I'm that hairy every morning when I wake up, and I don't gott drink nothing!

The cover to Tales to Astonish (vol. 1) #28 (February, 1962). Art by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers; colors by Stan Goldberg; letters by Artie Simek.

#Tales to Astonish #I Am The Gorilla-Man! #Marvel Comics #Jack Kirby #Dick Ayers #Stan Goldberg #Artie Simek

[art-o-gant]

my best friend michael with a sadness in his eyes you only see in eastern european gay porn

#hi artie and leaf hii #shaperaverse #michael shaperaverse #HOW DO I TAG HIM #posthuman michael #???? #the posthuman war #michael's secret stories #the posthuman playhouse #astonishing tales

[smashedpages]

Today in 1963, the Wasp flew for the first time in Tales to Astonish #44 by Stan Lee, H.E. Huntley, Jack Kirby and Don Heck! Janet Van Dyne joined Hank Pym to form the shrinking superhero duo Ant-Man and the Wasp who went on to help form the Avengers.

#stan lee #jack kirby #don heck #h.e. huntley #art simek #wasp #ant-man #comics to remember #marvel #comics #comic books #tales to astonish #janet van dyne

[wwprice1]

Scenes from the 2022 Ant-Man series. Such a great read!

#marvel #ant-man #avengers #hank pym #scott lang #eric o'grady #zann asghar #al ewing #tom reilly #cory petit #tales to astonish #avengers assemble #jordie bellaire #earth’s mightiest heroes #Yellowjacket #giant man #Goliath

[browsethestacks]

Original Art - Tales To Astonish #023 Pg 29 (1961) by Steve Ditko

#Comics #Marvel Comics #Tales To Astonish #Steve Ditko #Science Fiction #Vintage #Art #Original Art #1961 #1960s #60s

[imperiuswrecked]

I love them so much 😭😭😭

#namor #lady dorma #tales to astonish #look at her cradling him

[lirhyapetitpain]

Born from this Tweet In Tales to Astonish everyone was like "mmmh... Bruce Banner always disappears when Hulk shows up and he's always here lying naked when Hulk is around... Bruce Banner must be Hulk" While Sam, the genius, was just "mmmh... They must be close friends" So have some shitpost

#marvel #incredible hulk #tales to astonish #samuel sterns #sam sterns #the leader #bruce banner #hulk #doodle #fanart #shitpost

[telekinesis-mind-control-comics]

#giantman #ant man #scott lang #giant man #tales to astonish #marvel comics #marvel #the avengers