Number 1223: The reincarnated man

The Search For Bridey Murphy by Morey Bernstein was a popular best seller in the mid-1950s. A woman was put under hypnosis and told a tale of a past life. Her story turned out after investigation to be a fantasy and not reality. But it caught the public's imagination. As my father, Big Pappy, put it, after one lifetime why the hell would you want to do it all over again?

 My copy of the original printing of the book.

This story from Adventures Into the Unknown is a past-life fantasy taken to extremes for the purposes of storytelling. It's wacky in that special ACG way of wackiness, but it's also fun because of Ogden Whitney's artwork. It was written by ACG editor Richard E. Hughes.

Wouldn't it be great to have all of life's mysteries wrapped up in the end with irrefutable proof that they occurred? That's how “The Many Lives of Mark Martin” ends. Even as fiction it stretched its finish to absurd lengths. But it's a comic book, and unlike real life (or even a fantasy life), mysteries of the paranormal in comic books are easily resolved.

From Adventures Into the Unknown #67 (1955):

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I found this editorial page from the same issue interesting. Are the letters real? If they are then I suspect Herman Kornbluth, asking for ghost, vampire and werewolf stories, must've been living in some sort of bubble, having not heard about controversies over horror comics or the Comics Code. To answer my own question, neither of the letters by “Kornbluth” or “Conrad Haas,” sound real. They read more like editor Hughes composed them to make a point about the superiority of the new stories over the old. We found out years ago that Hughes used a variety of pen-names to fool readers into thinking there was more than one writer on staff. It's not impossible to believe he'd do the same thing with letters to the editor.

I don't know about Kornbluth or Haas, but I know I'm real. A few years later some letters I sent to ACG comics were published in various issues. So those letter pages were legitimate, at least.