Monthly Archives: October 2009

Jack Kirby draws Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and Captain America

The one hundredth issue of The Comic Reader was a double issue with a color cover.

Jack Kirby was asked to contribute a cover, which was to include Captain America, Batman, Superman and Captain Marvel. Kirby drew a piece, which seems to have been rejected for the piece that was published. Without interviewing editor/publisher Paul Levitz or assistant editor Paul Kupperberg, the assumption is that the unused piece had characters from two companies together on the cover, which is traditionally considered unwelcome by their respective rights holders. The used piece has characters controlled at the time by National Periodical Publications, Inc (DC Comics) on the front.

The Comics Reader 100 was published by TCR Publications, New York, New York, USA. August-September 1973.

 

Color art by Carl GAFFORD.

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OMAC 2008 Redux: A chapter restored

National Periodical Publications reduced their editorial page count from twenty pages to eighteen pages after Kirby produced “The Body Bank!” (published in OMAC 6, July 1975), bringing about some work by DC production staff to cut two pages.

Their most obvious choice was to edit the first chapter, as it contained one of Kirby’s signature spreads. Their decision was to remove a full tier panel from the fourth page, and replace it with a reduced version of the spread. The four page chapter was now two pages.

2008’s Jack Kirby’s OMAC: One Man Army Corps from DC Comics restores chapter one to Kirby’s original. Unfortunately, the art on the initial splash page is still stretched, as mentioned in our previous post.