Monthly Archives: September 2004

A few random Kirby covers from various eras.

SPIDEY SUPER STORIES #20, 1976, inked by John Romita. Kirby got tapped for two issues of this surprisingly long running book that spun off from the Electric Company TV show’s Spidey segments. Both featured FF related characters (the other had the Surfer and Doom).

IN LOVE #5, 1955, published by Charlton. One of the titles taken over from Mainline and featuring left-over work from the Simon&Kirby days.

DAREDEVIL #43, 1968, inked by Joe Sinnott. I guess the Captain America guest appearance was the impetus for bringing Kirby back on DD covers for one issue several years in. Whatever the reason, that’s a great action pose for the two characters. You can see why Kirby was so often employed to do covers for books he didn’t draw interiors for.

WHERE MONSTERS DWELL was the longest running of several 1970s Marvel books which reprinted the Atlas fantasy/monster stories from the late 1950s and early 1960s. #36 includes a reprint of the Kirby/Ayers story from STRANGE TALES #97, “The Impossible Tunnel”.

The story is about a man who attempts to dig a tunnel underneath the Atlantic (with the odd notion that people would be able to drive from America to Europe. Guess you’d have to build several gas stations down there as well). On the was he and his crew encounter a giant octopus and a utopian civilization, with the usual twist ending results.

This gives Kirby and Ayers a chance to show a lot of the stuff they were so good at drawing, such as the fanciful digging equipment, the giant octopus and a few details of the undersea civilization.

Published July 1975

This generally isn’t going to be a commentin’ type blog (though feel free to comment and ask questions on anything and I’ll try to get to it), but now that I’ve been doing his for two weeks I’m kind of curious who, if anyone, is reading and what you’d like to see.

Three more war covers to fit the theme of the previous entry, all these from books with no other Kirby art.

FOXHOLE #4 – 1955. Man is that intense. I feel like I should make an Apokolips Now joke, though

BOY COMMANDOS #13 – 1945. Nothing like some patriotic propaganda. Of course, the boys would be coming home for stateside adventures soon.

SGT. FURY #25 – 1965. Last cover Kirby did for the book, though by this time he was drawing an older Nick over in STRANGE TALES

One of the most unusual books Kirby was assigned to both write and draw during his five year stint at DC in the 1970s was OUR FIGHTING FORCES, a long-running war comic which then featured The Losers, a team of four US soldiers from different branches in a sort of “special missions” group. The members were culled from previous series, Gunner and the Sarge, Johnny Cloud and Captain Storm.

Kirby did 12 issues of the book in the last year, and they’re surprisingly good. He did this by pretty much treating the characters as blank slates (I’m not sure if it’s ever even mentioned in Kirby’s dozen issues that Storm has a wooden leg) and just telling adventure filled WWII stories, coloured by his own personal experiences (although with a lot of fanciful stuff, since the Losers could be in any theatre of operations, from anywhere in Europe to the Pacific to the homefront).

#155 is kind of an interesting story because it focuses almost purely on Sarge, with just short cameos by the other Losers. This has the effect of making it read like it could be a story about Ben Grimm during the war just as easily as anything else (maybe Dan Turpin). Like the other classic Kirby tough guys, Sarge faces injury and impossible obstacles to accomplish his mission, as part of a story about a strange group of Yugoslavian resistance fighters. This is classic Kirby.

D. Bruce Berry inks the story, as well as the cover and two pages of images of various “big gun” artillery of WWII.

Published May 1975