Jack Kirby

Eternals #1 (July, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By April, 1976, the return of artist/writer Jack Kirby to Marvel Comics could no longer be considered news.  His first new cover for the publisher (an Avengers illustration fronting Marvel Treasury Edition #7) had appeared the previous July, and his first new full comic book, Captain America #193, three months after that.  Still, we hadn’t seen any brand-new series concepts from Kirby yet — and, given that he had been the House of Ideas’ preeminent idea man for roughly the first decade of “the Marvel Age of Comics” (i.e., 1961-70), longtime Marvelites were eager to see what would next emerge from the protean imagination of “King” Kirby — as, of course, were virtually all the creator’s many fans, regardless of their preference for one comics publisher or another.  Read More

Avengers #148 (June, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last month we took a look at Avengers #147, the cover of which we noted found its penciller, Rich Buckler, operating in “full Kirby mode”.  By contrast, the cover of today’s fifty-year-old comic happens to have been pencilled by Jack Kirby himself… and may I just say, ain’t nothin’ like the real King, baby.  (For the record, Mike Esposito inked this piece.)  Read More

Captain America #197 (May, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last October, at the end of our post concerning Captain America #193 (Jan., 1976) — a comic which, you’ll remember, featured the return of artist/writer/editor Jack “King” Kirby to the star-spangled hero he’d co-created with Joe Simon back in 1940 — your humble blogger invited you all to return in May, 2026 to see how the eight-issue, Bicentennial-themed storyline that had kicked off therein would turn out.  Four months later, however, I’ve come to the realization that trying to cover seven chapters’ worth of Kirby’s epic in a single go would likely result in a post of such length as to try the patience of even the most indulgent followers of this blog — and so, I’ve decided to break up the remainder of our “Madbomb” coverage into two posts, the first of which is presented here.  (Of course, given that this piece is still aiming to hit the high points of four individual comics, it’s still likely to be a pretty long read… though not quite as much of an imposition on your time as our originally planned Captain America #200 mega-post would have been, so at least there’s that.)  Read More

1st Issue Special #13 (April, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In late January, 1975, DC Comics premiered a new ongoing title called 1st Issue Special with an initial installment starring “Atlas”, the latest creation of writer/artist Jack Kirby.  Almost exactly one year later, DC released the thirteenth — and as it turned out, the last — issue of that same title.  This time, the cover feature was “Return of the New Gods”, featuring some of the earliest creations Kirby had produced for the publisher upon his arrival there in 1970.

There was one major difference this time, however; Jack Kirby himself wasn’t involved, having left DC to return to its greatest rival, Marvel Comics, some months earlier (although his final contracted work for the former company had only appeared a few weeks before this, in Kamandi #40).  But if anyone at Kirby’s former employer found this fact to be at all ironic, they kept it to themselves.  Not only was the “King of Comics” not creatively or editorially included as part of this stab at reviving his “Fourth World” characters and concepts — his name didn’t even appear anywhere within its pages.  Read More

Marvel Super Action #1 (January, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As was discussed in detail in our post about Marvel Preview #4 several weeks ago, by 1975 all four of the black-and-white comics magazines with which Marvel Comics had made a big push into that market just two years before were winding down.  But Marvel was far from throwing in the towel on the B&W format itself.  Accepting that the early-’70s horror boom that had inspired the launches of Dracula Lives and its ilk was pretty much over, Marvel now looked to other genres for new titles that could replace those that had made up the “Marvel Monster Group”.  Read More

Captain America #193 (January, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In July, 1975, Marvel Comics readers who turned to the Bullpen Bulletins page running in that month’s books were greeted by the following banner headline:

Assuming you weren’t a Marvelite of especially recent vintage, “‘Nuff said!” was pretty much on the money, at least in regards to the identity of “The King”.  In the context of Marvel comics — and maybe of American comics, period — there was only one person that phrase could possibly be referring to.  Still, if any confirmation was needed, it was immediately forthcoming via the latest edition of publisher Stan Lee’s monthly column:  Read More

Avengers #142 (December, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last month we took a look at Avengers #141, which, as regular readers of this blog will remember, ended with three time-travelers — the founding Avenger named Thor, the would-be Avenger known as Moondragon, and their temporary ally, Immortus — touching down in the American West of 1873, just in time to be startled by someone coming up behind them… a someone, or someones, whom our travelers could see, but whose identities remained unknown to us readers…

…at least until the cover of the next issue — the subject of today’s post — where the illustration by Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia (with a likely assist from John Romita) rather gives the game away ahead of the book’s opening splash page…  Read More

Captain Marvel #41 (November, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in April we looked at Captain Marvel #39, featuring “The Trial of the Watcher”.  As you may recall, that issue’s trial of “our” Watcher, Uatu, had been held on the home planet of his people, and ended with him getting off the charge of breaking the Watchers’ vow of non-intervention by promising he’d be a good boy and never doing it again.  That might have seemed like an exceedingly small slap on the wrist, given that Uatu had conspired with the group of renegade Kree known as the Lunatic Legion to not only capture but to outright kill our hero, Captain Marvel, before coming to his senses, but whattya gonna do?  The story ended with Mar-Vell literally shrugging off the whole episode, and implicitly inviting us readers to do the same.  Read More

Thor #240 (October, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before on this blog, Thor was my favorite Marvel superhero back in the 1970s.  (Just for the record, he still is.)  That didn’t mean that Thor was my favorite Marvel superhero comic book for most of that decade, however — at least, not so far as the new issues coming out then were concerned.  The reason for that disparity stems from the fact that, while my enthusiasm for the Son of Odin might have originally been inspired by a general affinity for myth and legend (and for modern heroic fantasy fiction derived from them), it was based at least as much on my admiration for the work that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had done on the feature in the mid-to-late 1960s.  Thor/Journey into Mystery was the one major Marvel title I endeavored to acquire a complete run of back in my collecting heyday (I eventually made it back as far as JiM #96, if you’re curious).  So I had those Lee-Kirby classics — which I was picking up sporadically, just a few at a time — to compare the current issues to.  And despite regularly featuring a high quality of artwork (usually by John Buscema, working with a variety of mostly sympathetic inkers), the new stories (which for most of the first half of the 1970s were written by Gerry Conway) just didn’t measure up in my eyes… neither to those great old Thor/JiM comics, nor to the best of what Marvel was offering elsewhere in the superhero genre in those days.  Read More

Captain Marvel #39 (July, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When last the regular readers of this blog saw Captain Marvel, he’d just been defeated and taken prisoner by the Watcher — a formerly benign, self-declared non-interventionist, whose sudden heel turn after over a decade of Marvel Comics appearances seemed to come out of nowhere — who had then proceeded to hand him over to the mysterious, heretofore unseen enemies who’d been giving our hero trouble ever since the end of auteur Jim Starlin’s run on the series — the Lunatic Legion.

Our first glimpse of those baddies (see right) made them look pretty loony, indeed.  But, considering that storytellers Steve Englehart (co-plotter/scripter), Al Milgrom (co-plotter/penciller) and Klaus Janson (inker) were giving us a Captain Marvel’s-eye view of the LL, here — and also considering that Mar-Vell was, at the time, tripping balls on LSD (euphemistically referred to in the story as “Vitamin C”, so as not to draw the unwelcome attention of the Comics Code Authority) — one might reasonably doubt whether the image we saw here was entirely representative of objective reality.  Read More