Just Plain Crazy Comics: The Half Men

Don't have too much time for this one, but here we go.

"The Half Men" is a story from Mysteries of Unknown Worlds #8.

It features a "crippled," sickly guy (it isn't clear exactly what was wrong with him, but he apparently was racked by constant pain), a blind man who lost his wife, and a man who lost his family in some sort of accident embarking on a journey in a fantastic submersible mole machine in an effort to find oil on the sea floor.

The reason they take the machine down on the dangerous voyage despite being its joint inventors is because each feels that he has absolutely nothing to lose.

They don't find oil, but eventually find their way to the center of the Earth (naturally). There, they are greeted by a crowd of mysterious people who claim to be mutant sorcerers (quite literally "a mutant race that men called sorcerers"), who seem to heal the cripple and the blind man and bring back their various lost loved ones.

Here's the main point of the story that makes me remember it and makes it creepy: The last of the men to be convinced to join the sorcerers, before being convinced, looks at the crippled man and the blind man and tells them that they're crazy, because they're clearly still affected by their conditions. Then the head sorcerer puts a hand on him, and he suddenly can see the differences, and can also see his lost loved ones.

That suggests to me that it's some kind of elaborate deception, either to keep them from returning to the surface, or simply to make them happy. Either way, it's rather creepy.

-Signing off.