Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era - Tales to Astonish #2 (2008)

A vacationing family finds a monster in a swamp. The locals drive it back into the swamp with torches, but it was only a shipwrecked alien trying to get help.

A young boy meets a tiny space traveler from Skyville, a suburb of Mars, trapped in a balloon.

A man reactivates an illegal robot in order to gain recognition for stopping it. He destroys the robot, but realizes that robots are harmless, and instead of cashing in he confesses his plan, and advocates the legalization of robots.

A scientist builds a time machine to travel into the future. He believes that he has travelled to the past, demonstrating that the future does not yet exist, but in fact he saw a future in which Earth was abandoned.

An artist creates a mask based on the face of an ancient sorceror. He robs a mansion wearing this mask, but his face has transformed to matach it.

An expedition finds the missing link between apes and humans in Borneo. It is initially hostile, but defends its fellow primates from a dinosaur.

A man who has travelled the world and seen wonders performed by hermits in India returns home to find that his young nephew creates magic with only belief.

A man meets an extradimensional being in his nightmares. The being tells him that the world he comes from is a paradise, but boring, and offers to switch places. The man agrees, but the traveller wakes up to find that he entered the dreams of a prisoner.

A scientist makes himself able to walk on water in order to steal secret military plans from a ship. But when he returns to the shore he finds that he now sinks on land.

An astronaut is sent into orbit in a tiny sphere without communication. He sees a monster trying to claw its way in and panics, signalling ground control to bring him back. They think that it was a hallucination, but they find a broken claw on the spacecraft.

The monarch of planet X arrives on Earth in order to capture a town for experimental purposes back on his homeworld. The hero of our story defeats Groot with termites.

When a husband goes shopping he finds a new cleaning fluid that makes anything better than new, even him.

A thug ventures to the Himalayas with the intention of capturing the Abominable Snowman for profit but is frustrated in his attempts of getting the locals to refer him to the creature he has in a photograph. They all tell him to discard the photograph as it is cursed. He plods through the mountains for weeks unable to locate any trace, until his mind is addled, and he drops the photograph which is now a reasonable resemblance of what he has become.

A misogynist wood-carver falls in love with his sculpture and has himself transformed into wood, but his refusal to pay a gypsy mystic leads to her making the wooden figure human out of spite.

An ex-con investigates a professor's theories about a world inside television sets. He proves the theory when a gate opens accidentally, allowing the inhabitants to pull through an old enemy of his trying to get revenge.

A scientist's formula makes an ant giant and super-intelligent. The ant wants to conquer the world, but is killed by a giant ant-eater.

An old-fashioned shopkeeper unwittingly saves the life of a boy from Mechanica when her remedy oil lubricates the gears in his brain.

In a black magic book, a thief finds instructions for creating a time machine which runs on electricity, but after robbing people in the 18th century and attempting to return to the 20th, he realizes he is stuck in the past because there is no electricity in the 18th century.

A Martian is sent to Earth to kidnap a human scientist who has invented a weapon that Mars wants to use against Jupiter. The Martian is beaten by the scientist, who turns out to be a Jovian agent setting a trap to capture a live Martian.

A power drain and radar anomaly is traced to a creature made of electricity hiding in a cave. It claims to be a friendly visitor, but humans attack it and it flees into space.

A teenager working at an amusement park to help support his family is kind to a mysterious boy, and finds himself rewarded with a real trip to outer space.

A white game hunter finds the legendary elephant's graveyard, hoping to make a fortune in ivory. He discovers that elephants were introduced to Earth by Martians, who use the graveyard as a gathering point for the ivory, and won't let him leave.

A man threatens a witch unless she hands over two lenses which will make him invisible. She implores him not to try it, but relinquishes the lens. They can be reversed to make the invisible visible once again, but what the man did not expect is that when he becomes invisible to the outside world, the outside world in turn becomes invisible to him.

A criminal hides from the police in an old Egyptian tomb, ignoring the warning of a curse. He not only escapes the police, but has a run of luck that makes him rich and happy. Or so he thinks, as the gas in the tomb drove him mad and he is delusional in an Egyptian hospital.

When Professor Linus mistakenly wakes up Thorr the Unbelievable he has to stop him from waking up his fellow warriors and taking over the world.

A government agent retrieves a classified microfilm stolen to be given to enemy agents, and is helped by a magic bridge.

A teller plans to rob his bank to pay for his wife's surgery. The guard on duty doesn't carry a gun, but the thief experiences a terrifying vision where he is irradiated and made deadly to the touch while trying to escape. It turns out that the new guard is a "psychiatrist hypnotist" who gave him the vision.

A fighter who is cruel and likes to hurt his opponents finds out that there are some creatures stronger than him, and they like to hurt their opponents also.

A bedraggled man wanders through a misty night, unsure of his identity. He is finally forced to return to his prison in a painting, where he has been trapped since betraying a sorceror.

Vandoom, the owner of a Transylvanian wax museum, sets out to build a new monster in order to bring customers back to the museum. A lightning bolt brings the creature to life, but despite the fearful attacks of the villagers, it is not hostile and does not strike back. An invasion force of Martians lands and Vandoom convinces his creation to attack them. The wax figure defeats them, but the effort drains the life force out of it.

A young boy cleans out the attic of the old house his family moved into and meets a ghost from the Revolutionary War era.

A man kills to gain possession of a magic crystal that grants him four wishes, but even his carefully worded wishes backfire, stranding him on the Moon.

A scientist builds an ultimate bomb and plans to use it to hold the world hostage. He hides it in a room believed haunted, but when he goes to give his ultimatum to the UN he realizes that he is now a ghost.

Gorgilla stows away on a ship to America to contact the human race, but is met with fear and violence in New York. He stumbles across some communist spies and stops an assassination, but is killed by the military out of fear.

A painting of a Napoleonic victory parade is mysteriously linked to an eccentric inhabitant of modern Paris.

A creature hatches from an egg and imagines itself lord of all it surveys, but it is suddenly drowned, as it is only a microbe in a scientist's culture.

A robot stationed at a lighthouse rebels against his human master and the man manages to lock the robot outside where the food supply is stashed, but thanks to the salty sea air, it rusts completely within a mere matter of hours rendering it harmless to carry out its threats.

An escaped geologist convicted of armed robbery leads an alien invader to an active volcano in order to sacrifice himself to destroy the alien and protect the planet.

When a family moves to a house in the country their son finds a gnarled little tree on their land that grants wishes.

A gangster buys a pincushion doll that looks like his rival, and his reactions to pins stuck in it convince him that it works. He throws the doll out the window of a tall building, but his rival has altered the doll to look like him instead.

A hunter with contempt for the animals he captures is captured by giant aliens and placed in a maze from which he can see a rocketship he could use to pilot his way home if only he could figure out how to escape the maze.

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.