Mystery Tales #51
In "Inside the Mummy Case," a fugitive's desperate wish to stop time leads him to a eerily still town that feels frozen in place—until the sound of a passing plane shatters the silence. As he steps outside and spots a sign reading "atom city," he recalls a newspaper article about a mock town built to study atomic bomb effects, realizing the still figures he saw were only mannequins. The mystery deepens when he watches a small object detach from the plane’s bomb bay. Ross Andru’s art and Mike Esposito’s inks bring the eerie stillness to life, while Bill Everett’s cover captures the unsettling moment with striking precision.
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A thief hiding from his pursuers makes a wish that time would stand still. After he succeeds in evading his pursuers, he comes upon a town where the people appear to be frozen and he thinks this is due to his wish, until he hears a plane. He goes outside to look at the plane and notices a sign reading 'atom city' and recalls reading an article in the paper about a mock city constructed by scientists in order to gauge the devastation of the atom bomb and realizes that the people he saw must be dummies. He looks up at the plane, and sees a small object drop from the bombbay doors.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).