{"id":582,"date":"2013-05-10T01:49:12","date_gmt":"2013-05-10T01:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/?p=582"},"modified":"2014-02-14T09:11:01","modified_gmt":"2014-02-14T14:11:01","slug":"discovery-at-snake-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/2013\/05\/10\/discovery-at-snake-river\/","title":{"rendered":"Discovery at Snake River!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In late September 2012, Luca Dolcini sent the Kirby Museum an e-mail\"00c\"<\/a>\u00a0query regarding a 25-page Kirby western story he found in an\u00a0Italian comicbook called \u201cLa Legge Del West.\u201d Luca and his fellows on the Blue-Area of the\u00a0Moon Marvel Continuity Resource<\/a> could not find an original American printing. Sending\u00a0along some snapshots of the pages, \u201cPartitia Finale\u00a0A Snake River!\u201d looked like Kirby\u2019s work, but the job\u00a0number O-253 in the first panel, while matching the style of Goodman\/Lee\/Atlas’ numbering, \u00a0was unknown to both Greg\u00a0Gatlin\u2019s AtlasTales.com<\/a> and the Grand Comics\u00a0Database\u2019s Comics.org<\/a>. GCD lists O-254 on a story with a publication date of August 1958<\/a>. Luca mentioned that the\u00a0main character was the \u201cSilver Kid\u201d, but none of the\u00a0Silver Kid comics on Comics.org provided any obvious\u00a0linkage to this story. Was it an unused \u201cBlack\u00a0Rider\u201d story?<\/p>\n

\"legge <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"legge <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"legge <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"legge <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n

Snapshots<\/p>\n

Responding to my query on the Timely-Atlas discussion\u00a0group<\/a>, Michael Vassallo identified George Klein as the inker since the\u00a0telltale Klein corona is evident in some backgrounds. Michael also\u00a0pointed out that according to its US publication history, the\u00a0Goodman\/Lee office did not publish any stories 25 pages long until\u00a01961\u2019s Fantastic Four #1 (which some index as two stories of 13 and 12\u00a0pages). It\u2019s interesting that Klein is attached to both of these stories.<\/p>\n

\"Showdown<\/a><\/p>\n

After a while, Luca found an Australian version of the non-Kirby\u00a0cover with the title \u201cShowdown At Snake River!\u201d in James Zanotto\u2019s\u00a0AusReprints.com<\/a> database. Kevin Patrick of the blog Comics Down\u00a0Under<\/a>, responded to a query that, as\u00a0luck would have it, the Rare \u00a0Books Collection at Monash University\u00a0Library in Melbourne, Australia, where he studies, had a copy of\u00a0Horwitz Publications\u2019 \u201cShowdown At Snake River!\u201d and sent scans.<\/p>\n

The story, a perfectly good one, doesn’t contain any splash pages.\u00a0The title is only in the top third tier of the first page, and there aren’t <\/span>any chapters. Could \u201cShowdown…\u201d have been produced for the foreign\u00a0market? Considering the relatively recent discovery\u00a0of Kirby\u2019s ghost work on the Davy Crockett,\u00a0Frontiersman daily strip<\/a> being printed in comic book\u00a0form in the UK and France, the story\u2019s lack of splashes\u00a0and\u2014other than the title tier\u2014all pages having\u00a0only six panels, could it be a re-worked comic strip?\u00a0Kirby Collector editor\/publisher (and Kirby Museum\u00a0Trustee) John Morrow pointed out that some of the\u00a0panel sizes are irregular\u2014which is not something\u00a0that Kirby would do in that era\u2014so perhaps some\u00a0cutting and pasting was done.<\/p>\n

\"p02\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"p09\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"p21\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"p26\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n

Australian pages<\/p>\n

In his last e-mail, Luca wrote that \u201cLa Legge Del\u00a0West\u201d was published in July 1959. He also found the\u00a0<\/span>story printed in strip form, with two panels per page,\u00a0published in 1962 in Collana della Prateria #6\u2014Pericolo!. There was a second \u201cLa Legge Del West\u201d comicbook with the same cover artwork, only this time\u00a0including the signature of John Severin, published in the early 1970s,\u00a0but it did not contain \u201cPartita…\u201d If anyone can date the Horwitz\u00a0\u201cShowdown…\u201d, or find the origin of the Severin cover art, or have any other\u00a0information to share regarding this fascinating discovery, please post here, or contact me\u00a0at the Kirby Museum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Pericolo_cover_crop\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Pericolo_page1_crop\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n
\"LaLeggeDelWest_150L\"<\/a>

Early 1970s “Le Legge Del West” does not contain “Partita Finale A Snake River!”<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In late September 2012, Luca Dolcini sent the Kirby Museum an e-mail\u00a0query regarding a 25-page Kirby western story he found in an\u00a0Italian comicbook called \u201cLa Legge Del West.\u201d Luca and his fellows on the Blue-Area of the\u00a0Moon Marvel Continuity Resource could not find an original American printing. Sending\u00a0along some snapshots of the pages, \u201cPartitia Finale\u00a0A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2275,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions\/2275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirbymuseum.org\/blogs\/effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}