FIRST ROMANCE MAGAZINE #42, 1956. One of the Harvey romance covers Kirby did in that era. An average Kirby cover, but I’m assuming the art doesn’t refer to story in the caption. Check out this juxtaposition:
If you can’t read it, it says
Should I Keep My Love a Secret? Or Compete With… “My Sister, My Rival”
Now, if that referred to this cover, by romance comic standards, it would be the bus driver in the background who’s speaking, meaning that’s his sister in the foreground, and she’s his rival for the affections of the coffee-counter guy. Now, I’ve got no problem with that, but I don’t think it would have gotten that code seal in the corner in 1956 with that plot.
Since I had it out to compare the pencils with the just released Milgrom inked version (and Milgrom did a great job with it), here’s the unused cover to JIMMY OLSEN #133, as published in THE SUPERMAN GALLERY #1 in 1993.
A fairly minor entry in the Kirby bibliography, even moreso now that the inked version has been published and so many pages of Kirby pencils have been published in fanzines in the past decade, but there’s some other good stuff in here, including images by Joe Shuster, Curt Swan, Wayne Boring, some decent modern images (some not quite so much, depending on your tastes).
Odd how after nothing for quite a while, several Kirby books, from different publishers, are coming out within weeks of one another…
DC has just published the concluding volume of Kirby’s issue’s of JIMMY OLSEN, with this collection of #142-148. In addition to the stories and covers from those issues (one of them mis-credited, #145 is Anderson inks on the cover, not Colletta. Oddly, Evanier gets it right in his introduction), they also have three pages of reproductions of Kirby’s pencil work, so you can see what his actual Superman head looks like, a Newsboy Legion short story from a post-Kirby issue for some reason, the aforementioned Evanier introduction and a cover inked by Al Milgrom over an alternate version of the cover to #133 (the pencils were previously published in THE SUPERMAN GALLERY back in 1993).
Figured I should mention that a lot of the information for these entries comes from THE JACK KIRBY CHECKLIST 1998 FINAL EDITION, published by TwoMorrows. An essential guide for the Kirby fan, this 100 page book is almost sure to lead you to some Kirby story you didn’t know about, or a source for a reprint of a story. Also contains sections on Kirby’s comic strip work, magazine articles about Kirby and unpublished work and more. Liberally illustrated with dozens of sketches of his many characters.
You’d also want to get the 2001 Update of the list which appears in THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #32. It lists a few corrections, new stuff published after the original list and newly discovered stuff.
RAWHIDE KID #41, 1964. Love that image of the Kid leading a revolt on a mining cart.
HOUSE OF MYSTERY #78, 1958. As well as a number of stories, Kirby did a handful of covers for the DC fantasy books of the late 1950s
FANTASTIC FOUR #181, 1977. A nice large action-pose of the Thing by Kirby/Sinnott is always a pleasure.
