History
Mark Briton is a reporter on vacation. While driving down the street when he sees a peculiar billboard stating simply "The Ten Uous Are Coming!" with the picture of men dressed in strange uniforms holding guns. There is no indication to who put up the ad. As he drives, he sees many more of these billboards and notes that all of the men on the billboards have different faces. Curious, he drives to a nearby town and visits their newspaper company to ask what they know. All that the company is able to tell him is that they have been receiving reports of more of these billboards, but no one knows who put them up. He decides to go to Center City, where he lives. He asks the local TV studios about them, thinking it may be an advertisement for a new TV show, but they don't know much about them either. Curiosity again winning the day, he decides to take a flight to Hollywood to ask around and see if someone is advertising a new sci-fi movie. Again, nobody knows where the billboards came from.
Mark decides to go examine one of the billboards closely. He notes that it feels like the man's eyes on the ad seem to follow him. Going over the message on the billboard again, he realizes the true message is "The Tenuous Are Coming!". Mark calls the army and tells them to gather all of the billboards. The army is skeptical, but doesn't want to take chances so they round up all of the billboards and take them to a secure bunker.
Mark has also found his way there, and the army tells Mark if he is wrong they will become laughing stocks. Just then, the men on the billboards step out of the billboards with their hands raised, surrendering. Mark explains that the word tenuous means thin or slender. Mark says that what happened to the Tenuous and where they came from is a story for another day.[1]Notes
- History Text extracted from the Synopsis for "I Foiled An Enemy Invasion!" in Tales to Astonish Vol 1 1 edited by Shioxus