The ' Lost ' Tales Of The Zombie

Here's a treat for fans of Marvel's Bronze Age shambling zombie, Simon Garth.
In the 9th issue of TOTZ, you would be mistaken for thinking the adventures of our putrefying pal were over. Garth had been granted one day back on earth, and then returned to the peace of the grave, never to rise again. Or to put it another way: Unleashed from hell for 24 hours!!!

But no, there was at least one more story to be told, scripted by Gerry Conway, and with art by Rico Rival, ' The Partial Resurrection Of Simon Garth ' was due to appear in the very next issue.
But when issue 10 rolled around, no Zombie was to be seen, only an admittedly very good Brother Voodoo piece courtesy of Doug Moench & Tony DeZuniga. It turns out that Rival's artwork somehow got lost somewhere in between Honolulu & Guam, leading to all kinds of rush repairs being done to fill a whole issue without it's title character.
The ' next issue ' blurb for TOTZ # 11 promises faithfully that the strip will appear:

But neither it, nor the next issue, ever did.
BUT some of those pages have finally appeared on the net! Here, after 30 odd years, finally, is the first 15 pages of this legendarily lost strip: Enjoy, and if anyone has any more pages, you know what to do.

War Toy

Time for the story everybody remembers from Roy Thomas' brilliant but much-too short lived anthology book Unknown Worlds Of Science Fiction ie. War Toy!
This absolute classic started basically as a way for Roy Thomas to give Mike Kaluta some work at Marvel. Here's The Rascally One: "Michael walked into office one day and told me he'd like to do a robot painting for the cover of UWOSF....I'd had this idea floating around in the back of my head for a long while-a view of the Iwo Jima scene, only taking place on the moon instead of Earth, and with a robot in place of John Wayne. Couldn't shake the image-so I gave Mike the go-ahead. And having a cover scene now, we figured we might as well have a story to go with it."
The job, of course, went to Tony ( The Tiger ) Isabella who, by the magic of ripping off quotes from back issue's of, er, Back Issue, now gives his reminiscence of War Toy: "It all started with a Roy Thomas idea for a cover...and Roy's great line about not being able to pin a medal on a tank. I had three goals in mind for War Toy. I wanted to draw a parallel to the way societies often turn their backs on the men and women who fight for them. I wanted to do a homage of sorts to the war stories Robert Kanigher had written for Our Army At War during that DC title's heyday. And I wanted to kick off a series of 'robots at war' stories for UWOSF. Unfortunately, War Toy was the only story that made it out of my typewriter."
Still, this is an absolute masterpiece all by itself, with a great early job from George Perez, with beautifully sympathetic inking courtesy of Rico Rival. Plus very few characters ever get as great a death scene or final line as our metallic hero FM-1 gets here.
Trivia buffs take note, Betty Curtis, the ballsy reporter in the story is named after Maggie (Comics Buyer's Guide) Thompson's mum, and FM-1's "dad" General Arkay is Robert Kanigher.