Tue 31 Jan 2006
FANTASTIC FOUR #200 - November 1978, inked by Joe Sinnott. The last time Kirby would draw the FF for Marvel (although he would draw story-boards for a cartoon after this, and some of those boards would be taken and turned into a comic a few years later). A simple enough cover, but effective. Shame it only has one of the four team members, though. Nice that we got one final Doom cover by Kirby, though.
February 1st, 2006 at 1:50 pm
Great art, shame about the clutter though. Banner after banner leading to the picture squeezing its way towards the bottom corner.
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:44 am
I remember this issue quite well because it’s on the FF DVD I purchased a few months ago. I do remember that John Buscema did do the actual interior art of the book though.
I can’t understand how there could be so many Kirby 70’s FF covers; yet the only 70’s Kirby Fantastic Four we got to see was “What If the Fantastic Four was the Marvel Bullpen”…with Stan Lee as Mr. Fantastic and Kirby as the Thing. Flo Steinberg was the Invisible Girl and Sol Brodsky was the Human Torch ….if I remember the issue correctly….
It was truly frustrating to see a Kirby cover on the Invaders, FF, Iron Man and many others and you would see a different artist actually drawing the story.
If only Marvel had given Kirby a little more editoral power on the books there might have been a few more creations that never have seen the light of day……
I have to wonder at the powers that be at Marvel and DC that didn’t trust him enough to let him edit his own books.
I would have never even looked twice at a lot of books in the 70’s had they not been drawn by Kirby. What other artist could make a book called “Devil Dinosaur” and turn it into a classic? It just boggles the mind that Kirby was stopped by the editors of DC and Marvel from completing his story lines.
February 2nd, 2006 at 12:05 pm
It would have been nice to have Kirby work on some special “fill-in” issues of books like the Invaders, the Hulk or the FF, but I don’t think he was interested in working over someone else’s plots and turned down such requests. I know the Roy Thomas offered the FF to Kiorby a number of times, but Kirby only wanted to work from a full script. Roy even wanted to list his name first as plotter/artist, but to no avail. Roy also sought him out to draw part of an Invaders Annnual as well.
Maybe if Roy gave Kirby a full script he would have done a Conan Annual. He liked the character and it would have been fun to see.
Nick Caputo