KIller Dwarfs From The Earth's Core

Strange Worlds was Avon Periodicals' sci-fi/fantasy anthology from the 1950s and starred a smorgasbord of talent. One such story from their third issue was Invasion From The Abyss that featured an enormous swell of artists including Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel, Al Williamson, and Wally Wood into a simple 7-page segment. The whole genre of Hollow Earth had been popularized thanks to pulp magazine creators like Richard Shaver, so tales of mole people and underground dinosaurs began to come out of the woodwork. Starting out a year after the actual comic was published, the story has a professor giving a speech in front of the U.N. about a new atomic power plant when a team of short assassins bomb the stage and kill the professor. Agent Steve Hanson later goes to the prof's hotel room seeking answers and gets ambushed by more small men with crimson skin and green helmets. Steve tails them in a literal underground railroad, gets ambushed by the deadly dwarfs, and is taken before their leaders who are common-sized people that happen to speak English. Their rulers imprison Steve, where he meets the famous physicist Dr. Pickering who gives an exposition dump about how the subterranean sneaks are usurpers to the throne of Atlantis whose descendants made their way beneath the planet's crust and created an army of red dwarfs to conquer the surface world. Steve pulls a MacGyver by burning the prison door down with his lighter and escapes with Pickering and Valen, the rightful heir of Atlantis. The Atlanteans begin their invasion while fighting the U.S. Army for weeks, but Pickering pimps out a jet with a rigged magnet that Steve flies over the underworld forces which creates a forcefield that takes away the dwarfs' unnatural strength just because they're on the surface. Steve plans on getting into bed with Queen Valen after she regains control of her kingdom, and then they'll create a super-race of half-human/half-red dwarfs. So, "Magnets, how do they work?"