Monthly Archives: December 2004

Captain America Collectors’ Preview #1 [1995] – The Case of the Hollow Men

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This 13 page Simon&Kirby story is reprinted from the 1941 debut issue of ALL-WINNERS COMICS, the only time the story has been reprinted (there’s also an S&K Cap story in #2 that has never been reprinted. It would be great to see a volume of all the Kirby golden age Marvel art not from CAPTAIN AMERICA. It would only be a bit over 200 pages).

In this story, the Lord of Death, on orders from Hitler, changes Bowery bums to Zombies (“Zombies Bucky! They’re Zombies!”) and sets them loose to sabotage ships bound for England on the Lease-Lend programs.

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Cap and Bucky go undercover to take care of it, and the story has Bucky giving Hitler a raspberry. No wonder Zemo was so determined to get the kid.

A fun sample of the early S&K work, with really sharp restored art. Great zombies on the rampage on several pages. As Greg Theakston mentions in his introduction, there are various hands involved on various pages, but several of the action oriented pages are pure S&K.

The other interesting piece of Kirby art in here is a re-design of Cap that, according to Theakston’s caption was found in Kirby’s home, with Kirby having no memory of when or why it was done.

Most of this book promotes various then-contemporary Cap related books, but also noteworthy in this issue are the features on Joe Simon, featuring several photos and samples of his paintings (some of which seem to be using Bill Clinton as a model for Cap), as well as the new cover by Simon, and a page by Fred Hembeck.

Published 1995

Strange Tales #145 [1966] – Lo! The Eggs Shall Hatch

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That’s a goofy title for a story…

There’s a great Kirby/Esposito cover on this issue, of a scene from the story where Fury and his SHIELD agents fight the Druid and his men.

For the actual story, Kirby just did layouts, with pencils by Don Heck and inks by Esposito. The amount of Kirby art that comes through on the layouts he did on the Fury stories varies depending on the artist, and even within stories. When it’s Heck it comes out fairly well, with a nice splash of SHIELD scientists installing a camera in a Fury life-model-decoy, with the top of its head sliced off. You can see a bit of Kirby in several of the panels of this page:

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The story is the usual super-spy fun, with villains sending out giant explosive eggs and attacking, and the SHIELD agents responding with a mix of high-tech weapons and physical force. And I did like the Druid’s men surrendering after he’s been defeated, wondering if they’ll be eligible for unemployment insurance.

Published 1966

Jack Kirby’s Heroes And Villains [1987]

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This book, published by Greg Theakston’s Pure Imagination in 1987, is a reproduction of a sketchbook that Jack Kirby did as a gift for his wife Roz in the 1970s. It features 129 full page images reproduced from Kirby’s pencils of characters he’d drawn (mostly created as well, although a few like Conan and the Yellow Claw are in there too) in his decades in the comic biz, from as early as Blue Bolt and going as late as his last few Marvel books like Devil Dinosaur and Machine Man. A few odd omissions (at least one of which, Odin, was included in the inked version, mentioned below, so maybe there were a few pages missing for some reason), but then Kirby could have filled two or three more such books given all his characters.

The drawings range from simple head-shots to full body portraits to complete scenes with detailed backgrounds.

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The reproduction is really good (and apparently there’s a deluxe signed edition that looks even better, but I’ve never even seen that one). It captures the look of penciled originals nicely, to the point that it almost looks at a quick glance like a sketchbook.

(Note I darkened up the scans to make them look a bit better on a low resolution scan on a computer monitor, and they aren’t anywhere near as good as the printed images)

The Loki is one of my favourites in the book, just a great brooding but supremely confident villain piece. The Yellow Claw has one of those great out-stretched Kirby hands, and that DeSaad is nicely sinister. The heroes in the book looked good, too,but the villains had many of the best pieces.

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A few of the other highlights are:

Ben Grimm, shown fishing with a stogie
Fandral of the Warriors Three ready to attack
The Guardian on the streets of Suicide Slum
Angel of Boys’ Ranch going for his guns on an old west street
Modok, just, y’know, being Modok
Barda, just, y’know, being Big

Also in this book, a two page introduction by Jim Steranko about his early experiences with the Kirbys, plus a 1984 photo of Kirby and endpapers of a Kirby-tech drawing that appeared in the 1970 Marvelmania portfolio.

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Theakston would later publish the “Black Magic” edition of the book, which had various artists take a swing at inking the drawings, with mixed results.

If you don’t have it already, I doubt it’ll be easy to find any edition of this other than the Black Magic one, but if you do it’s worth it.

Published 1987

Marvel Tales #123 [1981] – The Reason Why

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For reasons that elude me, the Inhumans were given a back-up feature in a handful of issues of THOR in 1967-68, and a few of them were reprinted behind Spider-Man reprints in 1981.

“The Reason Why” was reprinted from THOR #147, featuring part of the origin of the Inhumans. THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #21 featured copies of all the pencils for this story, with Kirby’s margin notes, to demonstrate one of the prime examples where the final product ended up completely divergent from Kirby’s original intent, and explaining a few odd points of the artwork.

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As published, the story features a Kree Sentry detecting some activity, finding the city of Attilan, where their leader has just become the first to get powers from the Terrigan Mist. The Sentry explains to the Inhumans the role of the Kree in their creation, and declares the experiment a success.

As Kirby wrote it, the Sentry and Attilan had been in contact all along, and the Sentry was warning them not to experiment with those powers, in defiance of the Kree, and declares the experiment a failure.

So the story we got isn’t the story we should have, and the original does make more sense in the larger context of the Inhumans story. Fortunately, the art wasn’t modified, and was wonderfully inked by Joe Sinnott, so that’s okay. I love that half-page panel of the Sentry among the animals, and the various views of Attilan.

Published 1981

Various 1960s covers

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X-MEN #21, 1966. Apparently just layouts by Kirby, with Werner Roth and Dick Ayers finishing it up. Looks nice, if a little busy, and a bit of a dull looking villain, but good poses on the heroes.

AVENGERS, THE #19, 1965. Kirby on the main drawing, with Don Heck doing the floating heads. Frank Giacoia inks. Good figure of the Swordsman, but what I relly like is all that machinery in the background.

TALES TO ASTONISH #67, 1965. Chic Stone inks on two of the Marvel heroes most likely to cause major property damage just by being around. That’s a great Hulk figure, I think.



Brave and the Bold Annual, No 1, 1969 Issue [2001] – The Invasion of America

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One of DC’s best reprint lines in recent years have been their 80 and 100-page Giant books, mixing in “replica” editions of actual giants from the 1960s and 1970s with “lost” editions, books designed to look like they could have been published back then. This book is designed to look like it could have been a 1969 BRAVE AND THE BOLD annual (although it contains a Captain Atom story from Charlton, which wouldn’t have been in there).

Among the contents is a 1943 Boy Commandos story by Simon&Kirby, reprinted from DETECTIVE COMICS #76. The logic of it being in a team-up title is that there are brief cameos by the other S&K stars of the time, Sandman and the Newsboy Legion (oddly, the cover of this issue bills it as a Newsboy Legion / Sandman crossover, not even mentioning the actual stars of the story) (also oddly, the credits have Kirby as writer and inker, with Simon as penciler, which doesn’t seem likely).

Anyway, the 12-page adventure has Rip Carter and the boys making a trip to New York for a goodwill tour, and finding themselves kidnapped by German spies. Along the way, the encounter their fan club, the Kid Commandos, led by Sally from Flatbush, who get around on a variety of go-carts, and in the end meet FDR. It’s a fast-moving adventure, a great example of the kid-gang genre and patriotic wartime comics. I did think the accents of the foreign characters (especially the Germans and the British Boy Commando Alfie) were a bit overdone and distracting, but other than that it was all fun.

Published 2001

–Link– 1977 Kirby con program art

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(for those who didn’t notice, on the previous post you can click on the picture to get a properly sorted image)

Meanwhile…

Over at the Comic Treadmill, some words about a 1977 convention in Philadelphia, featuring a page by Jack Kirby from the convention program.

http://www.comictreadmill.com/CTMBlogarchives/2004/2004_Individual/2004_12/000618.php

Our Love Story #12 [1971] – He Was Perfect – But I Lost Him

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This issue has a reprint of the 1960 Kirby story from MY OWN ROMANCE #74, a quick 5 pager. The story starts off nicely, with a good splash page featuring the female lead and the usual teaser lead-off, and the first page shown here works nicely to quickly get the story started. After that it’s a bit bland, with only three more pages the story is a bit straight-forward and a bit preachy, compared to the more complex, often byzantine plotting of the longer S&K romance stories.

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Worth taking a look at, as one of the handful of romance stories that Kirby did at Marvel to be reprinted.

Inks are by Colletta.

Published 1971

World’s Finest Comics #187 [1969] – The Green Arrow’s First Case

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This issue reprints the revamped origin of Green Arrow that Kirby did in ADVENTURE COMICS #256 (1959), during his brief 11-story run on the character. It’s a good functional origin about a man who gets washed up on an island, learns archery to survive, finds his rescue ship being hijacked and using his arrows to fight the hijackers. All of this in a framing sequence where he has to return to the island to protect his secret identity.

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I have to say, GA did become delightfully compulsive when it came to arrows on his stay on the island. “I quickly realized ingenious arrows could be used for almost any purpose”, he thinks, as he decides that would be the best way to get coconuts off a tree would be to use an arrow. Goes a long way to explaining why he’d eventually put a boxing glove on the end of an arrow. I was disappointed he didn’t come up with some sort of arrow-centric way to chisel his journal into the cave wall.

Kirby’s GA stories are pretty fun, although they leave you wondering what he would have done if he had a freer hand with them than DC was willing to allow.

This story was apparently inked by Kirby, with the help of his wife Roz, one of the last times he would do a substantial amount of inking of his own work.

Published 1969

Journey Into Mystery #19 [1975] – When the Mummy Walks

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This issue reprints the story from TALES TO ASTONISH #31 (1962), another Kirby/Ayers story. Surprisingly bland splash page, where the giant mummy looks nice, but the background is just blank. The rest of the story fares better, with some backgrounds of the museum curator’s office with various artifacts, and the inside of the tomb.

Journey Into Mystery #19 [1975]

The story is about a curator who theorizes that the pyramids are all copies of an original one, built as a prison rather than a tomb. He manages to find it (after a great looking dust storm), and in a scene I’m sure archaeologists would hate he actually blasts and opening in the pyramid with dynamite. Of course they find a giant mummy, who turns out to be an alien invader with a secret.

The particular twist ending for this one isn’t as satisfying as some, but there’s some good art along the way.

Published 1975