Wolverine is the best there is at what he does - fighting in mutant-mixed-martial-arts tournaments, handing out relationship advice and eating hot dogs! Spider-Man issues the ultimate challenge to one of his deadliest enemies - an invitation to the prom! The Mighty Thor forges a powerful new alliance - with a cleverly disguised farm animal! Fear not, Friends of Old Marvel - you haven't fallen prey to the illusions of Loki. You've simply discovered Strange Tales II! A band of the best and brightest talents in independent, alternative and online comics joins forces with the Earth's Mightiest Heroes for a sequel to the acclaimed Strange Tales anthology, one that critics are calling "better than any of the previous run" (Douglas Wolk, Time.com's Techland). Hilarious, haunting and horrifying (sometimes all at once), it's Marvel gone strange!

After the groundbreaking debut of Fantastic Four, readers couldn't get enough of Marvel's innovative new heroes - especially the Human Torch! So Stan Lee and Jack Kirby gave the fi ery teen sensation his own series in the pages of Strange Tales. After a hot streak of solo stories, the Torch was joined by the Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Thing, and the two teammates tackled some of the wildest ne'er-do-wells of the Silver Age: the Wizard, the Sandman, the Rabble Rouser, Plantman and the one and only Paste-Pot Pete! Also featuring Marvel's first fi re and ice battle between the Torch and the X-Men's Iceman and guest stars Spider-Man, Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman and a Famous Foursome named John, Paul, George and Ringo. Collecting: STRANGE TALES (1951) #101-134 & ANNUAL (1962) #2

Prepare to be spooked by these chilling Japanese short stories! Strange Tales from Japan presents 99 spine-tingling tales of ghosts, yokai, demons, shapeshifters and trickster animals who inhabit remote reaches of the Japanese countryside. 32 pages of traditional full-color images of these creatures, who have inhabited the Japanese imagination for centuries, bring the stories to life. The captivating tales in this volume include: The Vengeance of Oiwa--The terrifying spirit of a woman murdered by her husband who seeks retribution from beyond the grave The Curse of Okiku--A servant girl is murdered by her master and curses his family, with gruesome results The Snow Woman--A man is saved by a mysterious woman who swears him to secrecy Tales of the Kappa--Strange human-like sprites with green, scaly skin who live in water and are known to pull children and animals to their deaths And many, many more! Renowned translator William Scott Wilson explains the role these stories play in local Japanese culture and folklore, and their importance to understanding the Japanese psyche. Readers will learn which particular region, city, mountain or temple the stories originate from--in case you're brave enough to visit these haunts yourself!

Marvel is proud to present this hotly-anticipated anthology schowcasing its greatest characters re-imagined by the best, most exciting cartoonists working in independent comics today. Featuring the long-awaited Peter Bagge "Incorrigible Hulk." COLLECTING: Strange Tales #1-3, The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man, All Select Comics 70th Anniversary Special

Perhaps it is the abundance of decaying mansions that harbor dark and sinister secrets, or perhaps it is Tennessee's tragic heritage of war and defeat, or it may just be the love of a good story that accounts for the fact that Tennessee is steeped in strange tales.

Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book, was also a master of the short story in which he was able to combine the strange and unnerving in order to draw the reader into the world of his own dark imaginings.This collection presents the best of these strange tales in which ghosts, monsters and inexplicable happenings abound.

Celebrating S.H.I.E.L.D.'s 50th anniversary, Marvel proudly presents the very first S.H.I.E.L.D. adventures! Having revolutionized everything from super heroes to war and Westerns, in 1965 Stan Lee & Jack Kirby set their sights on the spy game. Cold War covert ops had been dominating headlines, so they created an international organization to protect the Marvel Universe. Headed by Nick Fury, S.H.I.E.L.D. featured amazing gadgets, world-dominating villains and the debut of the awesome Helicarrier! Collecting: Strange Tales (1951) #135-150, Fantastic Four (1961) #21, Tales of Suspense (1959) #78.

A vain man driven by greed and hubris, Dr. Stephen Strange was a world-renowned surgeon until the night a car accident crippled his hands. Broken and destitute, he journeyed to Tibet to seek a cure from a legendary healer. There he found not a man of medicine but the venerable Ancient One and the path to the mystic arts! From Doctor Strange's eerie Greenwich Village home, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created new dimensions and otherworldly terrors unlike anything seen before. These stories remain as infl uential today as they were on 1960s counter-culture. In the pages ahead, you'll experience the debut of iconic characters including Baron Mordo, Eternity, Dormammu, the Mindless Ones, as well as Wong and the mystic mistress Clea. COLLECTING: VOL. 1: STRANGE TALES (1951) 110-111, 114-146; AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL (1964) 2

"No event in our world is real, my friend. Everything that occurs in this universe is illusory... And in a world of appearances, in which no thing and no event has any permanence, any reality of its own—whoever is master of certain forces can do anything he wishes..." So speaks a character in Two Strange Tales, a pair of novellas in which Westerners are caught up in the uncanny realm of Eastern religion and magic. In "Nights at Serampore," three European scholars, traveling deep into the forests of Bengal, are inexplicably cast into another time and space where they witness the violent murder of a young Hindu wife. In "The Secret of Dr. Honingberger," a respectable Rumanian physician vanishes without a trace after experimenting with yogic techniques in his quest for the legendary invisible world called Shambhala. In Two Strange Tales, author Mircea Eliade combined yogic folklore with the literary genre of the supernatural suspense tale so as to reveal dimensions of experience that are inaccessible to other intellectual approaches. These well-crafted stories will appeal to both lovers of the supernatural and those fascinated by mysticism of the East.

Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio is a famous collection of about 500 short stories by Pu Songling (1640 - 1715), a writer of the Qing Dynasty. Fifty-one stories are selected for this English edition. These stories cover a wide range of subjects, such as werefoxes and fish spirits and ghosts and monsters that are personified. Like human beings, they have feelings of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, love and hatred as well as happiness and discontent. These mystical stories reflect the social life of the time in which they were written. Living under a feudal monarchy, the writer had to criticize the unfairness of the feudal system and express his indignation by writing of fox spirits and monsters. Although most of these stories are progressive and written with a critical slant, some of them still have ideas of feudal superstition and fatalism. The stories in Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio are written in simple and straightforward language, but they are highly structured with complicated plots that often employ the technique of combining illusion with reality. Some of these stories are based on popular folk legends and thus have a plain, folksy style. The ideological and artistic achievements of Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio have greatly influenced later novels and operas.