Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era #1 (2009)

A woman hires a man to kill her paralyzed husband making it look like a car accident, but he gets his sleeve caught in the door and goes over the cliff with the car. He survives, but winds up in the same situation as the woman's former husband.

A practical joker torments a timid librarian until he transforms into a monster.

After an execution in the gas chamber, a sadistic warden faces a revolt by the inmates and attempts to flee downstairs. The inmates pursue him and, as the story ends, the warden realizes he has a choice between two dooms; the poisonous fumes still lingering in the execution chamber or being torn to shreds by the maddened inmates.

A communist agent mistakes his contact for the man he is supposed to kill.

A vampire sleeps for years after gorging on all the blood available to him in the atomic war of 1998. When he awakens and looks for another victim, he is astonished to find that humans died out long ago and only the human-like robots are left.

A lab assistant builds a rocket that will travel to the moon and volunteers to fly it, but his boss wants the credit, so he knocks him out and takes off. Unfortunately for him, the rocket is only one way.

A dancer who wants a part threatens the girl who got it with a gun to resign. Unfortunately for her, this girl is a witch, and she hexes the dancer to dance in place without ever stopping until she starves to death and even then her corpse dances on and on.

After losing his job, Jim Horton organizes a gang that wears black hoods to beat and rob anyone he considers "foreign," but his bigotry leads to his death.

A man goes into the forest in order to find proof of werewolves and is attacked. He shoots the beast and returns home to his shrew wife, but he has been bitten, so she screams as he begins to transform. She shoots him in the back with a shotgun but he tears out her throat before he dies.

A rodeo clown tries to get rid of his rival by pretending to trip and failing to distract the bull when the rival is thrown off the bull during the riding event. What the clown fails to realize is that the bull resents him more than the rider for all the times in the past he has distracted it by leaping into a protective barrel where the bull's horns can't get him. The bull sees its opportunity and gores the clown.

A gangster drinks a serum that will allow him to live forever and goes to hide out in the bayou where he falls into a pit of quicksand.

This story reveals that Stalin was a vampire.

A spy fails in his effort to steal an element required in the construction of a hydrogen bomb so he knows he faces death if caught by the police or the Communists. He reads of a rocket to the moon and thinks if he can get aboard that he will be safe, but he doesn't realize the test rocket is not large enough to hold a human passenger.

A super intellect grows tired among life on Earth as mere humans are like children to him when he receives a telepathic message from what appears to be a beautiful woman on Saturn imploring him to build a rocket to journey to her. He does so, but when he arrives she removes her mask to kiss him, revealing herself to be a hideous hag.

Nurse Jane Bryant arrives at the mysterious Hagstone Sanitarium for a job, but she is really there on a secret mission of her own.

A scientist invents a cobalt bomb that results in monstrous mutations in a few individuals present at the test site. He hunts them down and shoots them, but when he awakens from the night's work and looks in the bathroom mirror, he sees a monstrous visage glaring back at him. He thinks that he must have been affected as well and uses the gun on himself. The shot wakes his son and wife, but the mother tells her boy it was probably a car backfiring and to go back to sleep. The boy asks his mother how dad will take the joke he played taping a monster picture onto his bathroom mirror.

A man who enjoys hunting night crawlers at night strangles his wife when she threatens to leave him and he buries the body in the yard. He can't find any night crawlers in the usual places until he realizes they are all busy devouring his wife's corpse.

A hag that expertly applies makeup looks for a rich elderly man to support her. She finds one that still thinks she is beautiful even after she removes her disguise because any living thing is beautiful to a...robot.

This story is told from the point of view of ants plotting to conquer humanity.

An old homicidal maniac uses his disguise as a mute wheelchair bound cripple to throw suspicion off of himself as he cuts off people's heads and collects them as trophies.

A robot is given a command to kill the man in the room by someone who wishes to steal it after the robot has slain its creator. When the would-be thief enters the room, the robot slays him as well, then the robot goes out into the night looking for rooms to slay men in.

A space explorer takes a poison capsule after learning a hideous female alien has selected him for her mate upon reaching her maturity day. When she reaches this day, she changes her form to that of an attractive Earth woman just as the regretful man gasps out his last breath.

A bed-ridden old man hates those who will inherit his money so he establishes hypnotic control of his dimwitted caretaker and convinces him that he loves the woman and her husband is mean to her, so he must kill those who harm the one he loves. He knifes the man, but the woman screams, so he is given the hypnotic command to strangle her. This makes him hate the old man since he has made him kill the one he loves so he tears his throat out like a beast.

A man's conscience convinces him to steal money from a jewelry store for his girlfriend and then to commit suicide out of remorse for the act.

A woman trails after her husband for twenty years because, after they murdered a family, he skipped out on her with the loot. She kills Bill, but then the spirits appear and keep her prisoner in a filthy hovel, just like all those hermits she interviewed for twenty years while searching for her husband.