u/Madthinker1976

Captain America #109 — Kirby/Steranko-era Marvel energy, with the classic retelling of Cap’s origin.
Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #13 — Captain America and Bucky guest-star in the WWII setting, which makes it a great bridge between Golden Age Cap mythology and Silver Age Marvel.
Fantastic Four #51 — “This Man… This Monster!” One of the strongest standalone FF/Kirby stories, and one of the best Thing stories Marvel ever published.
Nice little stack: Cap’s origin, Cap/Bucky in WWII, and one of Kirby’s most human Fantastic Four issues. Not just keys these are actual story/history pieces.

First off these comics I’m showing are great. I like them. They’re historical. But this will be my most downvoted post I’m sure….

So….Every shop, every con, every feed. Giant-Size X-Men #1. ASM 300. Hulk 181. ASM 129. Secret Wars 8. Over and over. As I said these are great books, genuinely historical, I get why they matter. But somewhere along the way they stopped being comics and became something else same with all the other “hot keys” and “grails” people are obsessed with They’re collateral now. Wallpaper with a resale value. Don’t get me wrong I own FF 48 but I own it “raw” and because I love Kirby and the story I also own stuff he did that no one collects like Stuntman.

This isn’t a screed condemning anyone or what they like to do by all means do what you love - this is just my observation and opinion.

Here’s the mechanism I keep coming back to. There used to be two different reasons to want a comic. One was what it actually is, the art, the story, the moment it captured, the thing you hold and read. The other was what it’s worth, what you could trade it for. Those two things used to live in the same object without fighting. The grading regime pulled them apart and then killed one of them. Now the only value that registers is the one printed on the label. A number between 1 and 10 that tells you how little a human being ever touched it.

Think about how insane that is as a standard. We took a mass medium, a thing literally invented to be cheap and read and passed around and beaten up, and we decided the highest form of it is the copy no one ever engaged with. The pristine 9.9 is a comic that failed at being a comic. It never got read. It never did its job. And we crowned it. That’s not preservation, that’s taxidermy. We mounted the animal and called it the best specimen precisely because it never lived.
There’s an old idea about art and aura, the presence a thing carries from its own history, the fact that it was here and things happened to it. A read copy has aura. The crease is a fingerprint. Someone owned this, someone loved it, it sat on a floor in 1975 and a kid turned the pages. The slabbed mint copy has the opposite. It’s been scrubbed of every trace that a person was ever in the room. We didn’t preserve the history, we sealed it away from the one thing that made it historical.

And then there’s the part that really tells you what happened to the hobby. Look at what actually gets crowned. It’s never the artist doing something nobody had done before. It’s never the concept that rewired the whole medium, the formal swing, the page that changed what a comic could be. It’s first appearances of corporate IP. Full stop. The market is not rewarding art history, it’s rewarding trademark history. A book matters now in exact proportion to whether the character inside it later became a billion dollar film asset. We outsourced our sense of value to Disney’s licensing department and didn’t even notice.
So this is what collecting became. A closed loop where the object’s meaning is its scarcity, its scarcity is certified by a third party, and its importance is decided by a movie studio two states over. The craft doesn’t count. The ideas don’t count. The reason any of this got made doesn’t count. What counts is the number on the plastic and whether there’s a franchise attached.

I don’t think most people even chose this. It happened by drift, the way markets always eat the thing they’re supposed to serve. But the result is a hobby full of people who can quote you a census and a value guide and can’t tell you why the book in their hands mattered to anyone in the first place. We know the price of everything and the point of nothing.
They’re not comics anymore. They’re plastic artifacts of the fact that a comic once existed.

Everybody knows the obvious late-60s Kirby monuments: FF, Thor, Galactus, Silver Surfer, Black Panther, Inhumans, Ego, Him, etc. But right before Kirby leaves Marvel for DC, he’s still doing these odd short features buried in split books.

Astonishing Tales #1 has Kirby on Ka-Zar, with Kraven the Hunter turning up in the Savage Land. That alone is strange: Kirby drawing Ka-Zar, Zabu, and a Ditko Spider-Man villain in one of Marvel’s new anthology-style launch books. It feels like Marvel trying to keep Kirby energy plugged into whatever corners of the line still needed ignition.

Then Amazing Adventures #2–4 gives you Kirby back on the Inhumans after the FF run, but not in the usual “key issue” context. These are 10-page chunks with Black Bolt, Medusa, Triton, Gorgon, Karnak, the Mandarin, giant heads, energy rings, weird royal melodrama, and that late Marvel compression where every page feels like it is trying to explode out of the format.

And then, as a post-exit oddity, Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter #3 at DC. Completely different context, 1975, long after the Marvel break, but still fascinating because Kirby is dropped into a martial-arts/kung-fu book and immediately turns it into distorted faces, brutal impact, weird tension, and theatrical action. It is not “important” in the normal collector sense. That is the point. It is deep-cut Kirby operating in a genre corner most people do not associate with him.

That is what I like about these. They are not blue-chip collector trophies. They are not the standard wall books. They are transition fossils: Kirby still inside Marvel, still drawing the characters and concepts he helped define, but already pushing toward the bigger mythic machinery he would take to DC.

The Inhumans especially feel like a bridge. They already have the DNA of the Fourth World: hidden civilization, royal family, genetic destiny, cosmic isolation, authoritarian science, operatic faces, huge symbolic heads. You can see the move from Marvel superhero adventure into Kirby’s personal mythology happening in real time.

These are the kind of books most people skip because they are not clean “keys.” But for a Kirby collection, they matter. They show the end of one system and the beginning of another.

Issues shown:
Astonishing Tales #1 — Kirby Ka-Zar interior, with Kraven in the mix
Amazing Adventures #2 — Inhumans
Amazing Adventures #3 — Inhumans vs. Mandarin
Amazing Adventures #4 — Inhumans / Mandarin ring madness

Recent Kirby additions, mostly from the weird outer edges of the career rather than the usual blue-chip superhero lane.
The monster stack is the big one for me. These are the pre-hero Atlas/Marvel creature books where Kirby was basically running a monster laboratory before the superhero explosion: Journey into Mystery #62 with the pre-Banner “Living Hulk” later folded into Xemnu, Journey into Mystery #60 with Bombu, Tales of Suspense #18 with Kraa, Tales of Suspense #21 with Klagg, Strange Tales #82 with It, and Strange Tales #73 with Grottu.

The key piece here is probably Journey into Mystery #62. Before Bruce Banner’s Hulk, Kirby had already drawn this giant shaggy alien “Hulk” monster. You can see the visual logic forming: massive creature, tiny humans for scale, fear-based narration, and the monster as both spectacle and prototype. These books are not just goofy pre-superhero filler. They are where a lot of Kirby’s later Marvel grammar is getting worked out in public.

The capstone is Incredible Hulk Annual #5 from 1976. Kirby only did the cover, but it is a strange full-circle object: Hulk surrounded by Kirby’s old Atlas monster creations — Groot, Xemnu, Blip, Diablo, Croom, and Taboo. It feels like Marvel turning the monster lab into a house style, with Kirby brought back to draw the cover image that collects the old creatures one more time.

Also picked up the full Kirby run on The Losers in Our Fighting Forces #151–162. This is Kirby in war-comic mode during the DC period: blunt, aggressive, strange, and much more interesting than the title’s reputation suggests. It sits nicely beside the monster material because it shows the same creator shifting registers completely — monsters, war, superheroes, cosmic mythology, all from the same engine.
And then there are the late Marvel/pre-DC jump oddities: the Astonishing Tales Ka-Zar material, where Kirby gets to draw a little Kraven the Hunter material on the way out. That’s a deep-cut appeal for me: Kirby briefly touching a Ditko villain in one of those transitional 1970 Marvel books before the move to DC and the Fourth World.

Not the cleanest or highest-grade batch, but historically it’s exactly the kind of Kirby material I like: monsters, war, odd transitions, late-cycle covers, and the connective tissue between the famous stuff.

Finished putting together the full Jack Kirby monthly run of 2001: A Space Odyssey #1–10 plus the complete Kirby run of Machine Man #1–9.
This is one of the strangest and most interesting corners of Kirby’s 1970s Marvel return. Kirby first adapted Kubrick’s 2001 in the oversized Treasury edition, then Marvel let him expand the concept into a monthly series. Instead of just repeating the movie, Kirby used the Monolith as a recurring structure: different humans across different eras encounter it, mutate, evolve, or get pushed into some new stage of consciousness.

The monthly 2001 run:
2001: A Space Odyssey #1 — “Beast-Killer”
#2 — “Vira, the She-Demon”
#3 — “Marak”
#4 — “Wheels of Death”
#5 — “Norton of New York 2040 A.D.”
#6 — “Inter-Galactica”
#7 — “The New Seed”
#8 — “The Capture of X-51” — first appearance of Mister Machine / Machine Man
#9 — “Birth of a Super-Hero”
#10 — “Hotline to Hades”

The key issue is 2001 #8, where Kirby introduces X-51, originally called Mister Machine. He is the one robot in a government-built series who survives because scientist Abel Stack raises him as a son instead of treating him as a weapon. That idea becomes the bridge from 2001 into Machine Man.

The complete Kirby Machine Man run:
Machine Man #1 — “Machine Man”
#2 — “House of Nightmares”
#3 — “Ten-For, the Mean Machine”
#4 — “Battle on a Very Busy Street”
#5 — “Non-Hero”
#6 — “Quick Trick”
#7 — “With a Nation Against Him”
#8 — “Super Escape”
#9 — “In Final Battle”

What makes the pair interesting is that 2001 is Kirby doing cosmic evolution and consciousness expansion, while Machine Man brings the same question down to street level: if a machine can think, feel, learn, fear, and be loved, when does it stop being equipment and become a person?
This is late Kirby in full idea-density mode: ancient astronauts, cosmic transformation, AI personhood, government paranoia, machine ethics, post-human evolution, and huge blocky 1970s Marvel machinery everywhere. It also sits right next to Eternals, Black Panther, Captain America, and Devil Dinosaur in that late-Marvel period where Kirby was basically throwing out one massive concept after another.
The covers alone are worth it: pure Kirby machines, cosmic faces, giant tech, weird future cities, and X-51 slowly shifting from one-off 2001 concept into a Marvel character who outlived the license that created him.

Most of these arrived in the last week. I’ve been building out the Jack Kirby pre-hero monster section, and this batch is basically a wall of the Atlas/early Marvel “monster lab” — that 1959–62 zone where Kirby was cranking out giant creatures, swamp things, alien invaders, robot menaces, and city-smashing freaks right before Marvel fully becomes Marvel.

This is not minor Kirby. This is the laboratory where a lot of the later Marvel visual language gets worked out: huge figures dwarfing tiny humans, monsters treated like forces of nature, impossible bodies smashing through city space, cosmic panic, mad science, and those ridiculous perfect monster names that feel half creature, half sound effect.

Issues in the pile:
Journey Into Mystery #74 — “The Thing in the Black Box” / “Midnight in the Wax Museum.” Published right around the Fantastic Four #1 moment. Pure late monster-anthology atmosphere.

Tales of Suspense #17 — “Googam, Son of Goom.” A direct sequel monster. Great example of pre-superhero Marvel already playing with returning creature continuity.

Journey Into Mystery #65 — “I Am the Brute That Walks.” Big hulking Kirby menace. Exactly the kind of brute-force design that shows the bridge between monster comics and the coming superhero bodies.

Tales of Suspense #24 — “The Insect Man.” Late 1961, after the Marvel machine is starting to turn, but still running on the old anthology monster format.

Strange Tales #83 — “Grogg.” One of the best monster-lab dragon/kaiju covers. Big, weird, theatrical Kirby creature energy.

Tales to Astonish #29 — “When the Space Beasts Attack.” More invasion/panic than single-name monster, but still pure Atlas sci-fi disaster mode.

Strange Tales #85 — “The Return of Gargantus.” Important because these monsters were not always one-and-done; some actually come back.

Strange Tales #87 — “The Return of Grogg.” Another return issue. Grogg getting a second appearance makes him more than just background anthology noise.

Tales to Astonish #7 — Early Tales to Astonish monster/fantasy material. Kirby cover, with Kirby interior work on “We Met in the Swamp.” Nice early node before the named-monster run peaks.

Tales to Astonish #15 — “The Blip.” One of the stranger Kirby monster concepts — basically an abstract force turned into a visual threat.

Strange Tales #75 — “Taboo, Thing from the Murky Swamp.” Key swamp/slop monster lane. This is the pre-hero Marvel muck-monster vocabulary before later Marvel horror makes that kind of thing more explicit.

Tales of Suspense #15 — “Goom, The Thing from Planet X.” Major monster-lab book, and the parent issue to Googam.

Strange Tales #86 — “I Created Mechano.” Robot/industrial-monster Kirby. The machinery side of the lab.

Tales of Suspense #9 — “Diablo, Demon from the 5th Dimension.” Early 1960 fantasy/monster issue before the line fully settles into the big named-creature rhythm.

Journey Into Mystery #72 — “The Glob.” Another swamp/mud/mass creature. Very much in the “matter itself becomes hostile” category.

Strange Tales #90 — “Orrgo, the Unconquerable.” One of the bigger monster names from the period. Total Kirby title energy.

Tales to Astonish #34 — “A Monster at My Window.” Late pre-hero / early-superhero overlap. The monster format is still alive even after Fantastic Four has launched.

Amazing Adventures #5 — “The Escape of Monsteroso.” One of the great late monster-cover blasts from the line, right at the edge of the superhero takeover.

Tales to Astonish #17 — “Vandoom! He Who Made a Creature!” Major one. Frankenstein/golem/mad-science Kirby, and one of the strongest full monster-era examples.

Strange Tales #95 — “The Two-Headed Thing.” April 1962. Very late pre-superhero Strange Tales, just before the title shifts toward Human Torch features.

Strange Tales #99 — “Mister Morgan’s Monster.” Final pre-superhero monster issue of Strange Tales before the title fully becomes a superhero vehicle.

What I like about this batch is that it shows the monster era as a system, not just isolated goofy covers. You can see Kirby testing visual problems he later uses at larger scale: how to make a creature feel massive, how to stage panic, how to put ordinary people against impossible bodies, how to make machinery and biology feel mythic, how to turn a city street into a disaster stage.

The famous Marvel Age does not come out of nowhere. Before Galactus, before the Hulk becomes the Hulk, before Thor’s cosmic mythology, before the FF’s world expands, Kirby is already building the grammar here — just disguised as Goom, Grogg, Taboo, Orrgo, Vandoom, Monsteroso, and the rest of the monster pile.

[removed]

The last few came in today and the run is closed. All six. Boys’ Ranch, Harvey Comics, October 1950 through August 1951.

If you don’t know it: this is Joe Simon and Jack Kirby taking the kid-gang formula they’d built at DC in the early ‘40s (Newsboy Legion, Boy Commandos) and dropping it into the Old West. Three orphan kids run a ranch left to them, under the loose supervision of frontier scout Clay Duncan, who in the book’s own backstory was raised alongside Geronimo. The kids: Dandy, the blond leader; Wabash, the hill-country one; and Angel, a baby-faced kid who is also the most casually lethal gunhand in the cast. Supporting players include Palomino Sue, Wee Willie Weehawken, and the residents of a town called Four Massacres, which tells you the register S&K were working in.

It ran six issues and died. Western glut, shifting market, the studio winding down. But it gets called a high-water mark of the Simon & Kirby partnership for a reason, and the reason is mostly the art.

Highlights for anyone considering chasing the run:

The double-page spreads. Kirby would drop in two-page splashes that aren’t even part of the story; they exist purely as spectacle. “Social Night in Town” is the saloon brawl (that’s the one I’m posting below). There’s a Pony Express spread and a “Remember the Alamo” one as well. Bodies flying through frame, no dead space, the whole page choreographed.

Angel. The long-haired blond kid reads like a dry run for Kamandi twenty years early. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

“Mother Delilah” (in #3). A saloon woman spurned by Clay works her revenge through Angel; betrayal and redemption with actual psychological weight. Kirby reportedly named it a personal favorite, and it’s startling for a 1951 kids’ western.

The covers. Simon & Kirby cover work at full power, every one a battle in progress.

Posting the “Social Night in Town” centerfold from #3 so you can see what a Kirby brawl looks like uncropped. Choose your partner, friend or foe.

Four more for the Archive.

Kid Colt Outlaw #95 (Dec 1960) — “Kid Colt Goes on the Rampage!” Classic Kirby western chaos. The Last Chance Saloon framing, the diagonal energy of the composition — nobody staged a gunfight like Jack.

Kid Colt Outlaw #93 (Oct 1960) — “The Ghost of Midnight Mountain.” Love the supernatural-western crossover covers Kirby was doing in this period. The ghost looming over Kid Colt with that “you are DOOMED” balloon — pure pre-hero Marvel tension.

Amazing Adventures #5 (Oct 1961) — Monsteroso. One of the great Atlas monster splashes. The scale work here is textbook Kirby — the tiny figures at the base selling the enormity of the creature, the United Nations building as the target. This is the visual grammar that feeds directly into Galactus five years later.

Tales to Astonish #34 (Aug 1962) — “Monster at My Window.” This one’s a standout. That cover composition is legitimately unsettling — the creature pressed against the glass, the civilian recoiling, the claustrophobia of the framing. One of the better monster covers in the entire TTA run, and the run is stacked. The grey-green palette does serious work here.

The Archive keeps growing. 🔥

On my way to pick up tales to astonish Jack drew I decided to veer off and find his house where he lived in Thousand Oaks. Crazy to think at this unassuming suburban spot way up on a hill this was the birthplace of so much cosmic shenanigans- this house was the birthplace of the new gods, Darkseid, Kamandi , the demon, machine man, arnim zola , the source , mother boxes and much more.

Ryan North’s Fantastic Four isn’t misunderstood. It isn’t a brave modern reinvention. It isn’t “actually clever if you think about it.” It’s 33 issues of a guy mistaking the Fantastic Four for a science fair project.

That’s the problem. North writes the FF like their powers are the main event. They aren’t. The powers are supposed to be wounds. They’re metaphors. They’re traps. Reed stretches because his mind and his sense of responsibility stretch way past normal human limits. Sue disappears because she begins as the unseen woman and slowly becomes the invisible wall holding everyone else up. Johnny burns because he’s young, vain, fast, horny, reckless, funny, dangerous, all of it. Ben is the tragedy sitting in the middle of the book: a good, vulnerable man sealed inside a permanent monstrous consequence.

That is the architecture. Not “what else can these powers do?” North treats the powers like apps that need new features.

And once you see that, the whole run starts looking wrong. It keeps asking the wrong damn questions. What else can Sue’s force fields technically do? Can Reed stretch an organ in some weird way? Can Johnny’s flame combine with Sue’s light-bending? Can Ben’s body be treated as some sci-fi variable? What would SHIELD predict if they ran the numbers? What if the team practiced harder?

That is not Fantastic Four. That’s message-board shit. That’s the kind of thing people argue about when they think power scaling is imagination.

The Fantastic Four works because the limits matter. Ben can’t optimize being the Thing. That’s the tragedy. Reed can’t solve every problem. That’s the danger. Sue can’t just become a walking extinction-level force-field god without turning the book into nonsense. Johnny can’t just be a clever fire technician. The flame has to stay attached to ego, impulse, sex, anger, showing off, screwing up.

North keeps turning metaphors into mechanics. That kills the characters.

Reed is the obvious casualty. Reed Richards is not just “nice science genius wants to help world.” That’s the version you’d give to a child in a lunchbox blurb. Reed is obsessive, guilty, emotionally limited, and dangerous because his intelligence outruns his moral and domestic bandwidth. He loves his family, yes. But he also endangers them because the problem in front of him can become more real than the human beings standing next to him.

That’s the character. That’s the tension. North’s Reed is basically a TED Talk in unstable molecules. He smiles through these huge abstract decisions. He talks like a benevolent futurist. He has that clean, public-facing “we can solve tomorrow together” vibe. It’s all wrong. Reed should never feel that clean. He should feel like the man who could build a bridge to Heaven and accidentally let Hell through because the math was too beautiful to leave unfinished.

North writes the fantasy of Reed. Not the danger of Reed ..Sue gets flattened in the other direction. North makes her more powerful and treats that like depth. This is one of the laziest modern superhero moves. “Sue is secretly the most powerful member” was maybe interesting once. Now it’s the first thing every writer says when they want credit for noticing the obvious.

Byrne made Sue stronger because it came out of her life inside the family. Her force fields grew as her anger, authority, resentment, and status grew. Malice worked because it wasn’t just a power upgrade. It was the suppressed violence inside Sue’s role finally breaking through. Ugly, but true.

North gives her applications. Holograms. Constructs. Light tricks. Giant force-field feats. Mass-extinction-level classification. Fine, neat, whatever. But it’s all capability without enough cost. That’s not character development. That’s a patch note. Sue becomes more powerful and somehow less specific. More impressive, less human.

Ben gets damaged even worse. Ben Grimm is not just the lovable heart of the team. That’s the plush toy version. Ben is body horror, shame, rage, loyalty, humor as armor, working-class dignity, and resentment toward the man who turned him into a monster. He stays with the family that ruined his body because love and injury are welded together in him. That’s the whole painful point.

North sands him down into a nice husband made of orange rock. Warm, charming, stable, domesticated. The body is still there, but the man screaming inside it is mostly gone. That’s fatal. Ben should never feel like a sitcom guy with a skin condition. He should feel like tragedy held together by jokes and fists.

Johnny gets housebroken too. Johnny Storm is fire. Fire is not safe. Fire does not care what you meant to do. Johnny should be funny, but he should also make the room feel unstable. He should start dumb fights, chase bad impulses, burn too hot, embarrass himself, force the family to contain him. North turns him into a manageable little brother with occasional utility. The flame becomes cozy. Cozy Johnny is death.

Then there’s Doom. North can do some Doom surface. Third person, throne, cape, Latveria, wounded pride, contempt for idiots. But Doom is easy to fake at the surface because the costume does half the work. Mask. Throne. Science. Magic. “Doom does not beg.” You can get a lot of fake Doom out of that.

But the real Doom is not just an arrogant dictator. Doom is humiliation armored into sovereignty. He’s genius fused with injury. He’s class resentment, aristocratic fantasy, maternal trauma, occult desperation, and hatred of Reed Richards scaled up into a state. Doom does not simply want power. He wants reality to admit he was right.

North’s Doom too often becomes a premise. What if Doom had a plan? What if Doom could organize the world? What if Doom’s authoritarian order had some appeal? That’s thin. Doom is not interesting because he might be an efficient ruler. He’s interesting because every act of rule is compensation for the original wound. Remove the wound and you’re left with a dictator in good branding.

The run’s structure makes all of this worse. North likes episodic puzzles: time loops, alternate realities, anomalies, ethical thought experiments, power tricks, science riddles. Some of them are clever on paper. That’s not the issue. The issue is that they resolve, reset, and float away. Nothing really accumulates. Nothing scars the family. Nothing changes the temperature in the room.

That is not how the best Fantastic Four works. In Byrne’s run, consequences piled up. Sue changed. Ben changed. Reed’s moral position changed. The family structure changed. The team at the end was not exactly the team at the beginning. Events had weight because they altered trust, guilt, authority, resentment. They left residue.

North mostly gives us solved puzzles. And a solved puzzle has no afterlife. Once you understand the mechanism, it’s over. Character drama is the opposite. It gets worse after the event because now everyone has to live with what happened. North’s stories often end exactly where the real Fantastic Four story should start.

That’s why the Byrne comparison is so brutal. Byrne understood the FF as one integrated machine. Powers, flaws, family roles, villains, settings, cosmic threats — all of it came from the same emotional architecture. Ben’s body was his wound. Sue’s field was her authority. Johnny’s flame was his volatility. Reed’s genius was his danger. Doom was not just Reed’s enemy. Doom was Reed’s shadow: intellect without humility, pain converted into domination.

North has the pieces but not the engine. He knows the labels. Reed is smart. Sue is powerful. Ben is lovable. Johnny is impulsive. Doom is arrogant. The FF are a family. Science is weird. Okay. But those are database entries, not characterization.

The Fantastic Four is not “a smart family solves science problems.” It is a damaged family exposed again and again to the impossible, where every cosmic event pressures an existing emotional fracture.

North removes the fracture and keeps the science problem.

That’s why the run feels hollow. Not because there are no ideas. There are plenty of ideas. Too many, maybe. The problem is that the ideas are attached to the wrong engine. The run is tidy, verbal, clever, concept-first, too impressed with applications, and too afraid of the ugly emotional pressure that makes the Fantastic Four matter.

The FF should not feel safe. They should not feel like a nice science anthology. They should not feel like a polite seminar where everyone learns a new use for their powers. They should feel like love under cosmic stress. Resentment, guilt, awe, terror, loyalty, ego, shame, family damage, discovery — all locked in the same room.

North gives the reader homework. Kirby gave the reader myth. Byrne gave the reader family consequence. North gives the reader mechanics.

That’s the whole indictment. He does not deepen the Fantastic Four. He reduces them to their abilities, then congratulates the abilities for becoming more efficient. Thirty-three issues of power applications, clean dialogue, and reset-button sci-fi do not add up to a major run. They add up to a placeholder with good manners.

The Fantastic Four do not need a writer who can think of new things their powers might do. That is not the fucking job. They need a writer who understands why those powers are burdens. North doesn’t.

The headliner is The Strange World of Your Dreams #2 (Prize, Sept–Oct 1952). The whole title existed for four issues and then was gone, so any copy is a short-run book by definition. The splash credits it outright: “Produced by Simon & Kirby. Morton Meskin, Associate Editor” — the only S&K production where someone else gets the editor tag. The dream-comic premise was Meskin’s idea, and the book was a spin-off of Black Magic. This issue has the Kirby cover plus “The Girl in the Grave!” and the faceless-bridegroom sequence: a woman who keeps dreaming she’s marrying a man with no face, and Richard Temple decoding it — his face is blank because his personality means nothing to her.

Black Magic Vol. 1 #2 (Prize, Dec 1950–Jan 1951) came in alongside it, and the two belong together. It’s a 52-pager — “Big 52 pages! Don’t take less!” on the cover — with a Kirby cover and the cover story about a man who finds “a land of terror inside his own mind”: the whipping crowd chanting bring in the girl, the torch-lit Puritan figure roaring a biblical name, the forced confession. The detail I like: this issue also runs a dream-analysis story that previews Strange World of Your Dreams. So the seed of the four-issue book is sitting right inside the older one.

Strange Tales #90 (Marvel, Nov 1961) is the first appearance of Orrgo the Unconquerable — Kirby cover and Kirby interior pencils (Ayers inks). Pure pre-hero monster logic: a telepathic alien beams himself to a circus to announce Earth’s conquest, freezes Washington, and gets put down by an escaped gorilla. Cover-dated the same month as Fantastic Four #1.

Journey Into Mystery #95 (Marvel, Aug 1963), “The Demon Duplicators.” That cover line you have finally met the one enemy you can never defeat… a far more powerful duplicate of yourself! is Zaxton’s machine spitting out a duplicate Thor who can hold the hammer but can’t wield it. Credit-watchers, keep this straight: Kirby cover (Ayers inks), but the interior Thor art is Joe Sinnott, not Kirby.

Condition is honest across all four. The Prize books show their age edge chipping, spine stress, the wear you’d expect on 70-plus-year-old newsprint — but they’re complete

The headliner is The Strange World of Your Dreams #2 (Prize, Sept–Oct 1952). The whole title existed for four issues and then was gone, so any copy is a short-run book by definition. The splash credits it outright: “Produced by Simon & Kirby. Morton Meskin, Associate Editor” — the only S&K production where someone else gets the editor tag. The dream-comic premise was Meskin’s idea, and the book was a spin-off of Black Magic. This issue has the Kirby cover plus “The Girl in the Grave!” and the faceless-bridegroom sequence: a woman who keeps dreaming she’s marrying a man with no face, and Richard Temple decoding it — his face is blank because his personality means nothing to her.

Black Magic Vol. 1 #2 (Prize, Dec 1950–Jan 1951) came in alongside it, and the two belong together. It’s a 52-pager — “Big 52 pages! Don’t take less!” on the cover — with a Kirby cover and the cover story about a man who finds “a land of terror inside his own mind”: the whipping crowd chanting bring in the girl, the torch-lit Puritan figure roaring a biblical name, the forced confession. The detail I like: this issue also runs a dream-analysis story that previews Strange World of Your Dreams. So the seed of the four-issue book is sitting right inside the older one.

Strange Tales #90 (Marvel, Nov 1961) is the first appearance of Orrgo the Unconquerable — Kirby cover and Kirby interior pencils (Ayers inks). Pure pre-hero monster logic: a telepathic alien beams himself to a circus to announce Earth’s conquest, freezes Washington, and gets put down by an escaped gorilla. Cover-dated the same month as Fantastic Four #1.

Journey Into Mystery #95 (Marvel, Aug 1963), “The Demon Duplicators.” That cover line you have finally met the one enemy you can never defeat… a far more powerful duplicate of yourself! is Zaxton’s machine spitting out a duplicate Thor who can hold the hammer but can’t wield it. Credit-watchers, keep this straight: Kirby cover (Ayers inks), but the interior Thor art is Joe Sinnott, not Kirby.

Condition is honest across all four. The Prize books show their age edge chipping, spine stress, the wear you’d expect on 70-plus-year-old newsprint — but they’re complete

During the 1987 San Diego Comicon (the con ran later in the year back then), the industry threw Jack Kirby a surprise 70th. Roz was in on it and lured him down to a pitch-black basement room at the Hotel San Diego Mark Evanier remembers her stage-whispering “why is it so dark?” right before about 600 professionals jumped out. By every account Jack was completely overwhelmed; there’s a photo of him dancing with Roz that night.

Guests got this a small tribute booklet, words and pictures from the people who worked with him or grew up on him. Tiny print run; one auction house pegs it at maybe 100 copies.

A few pages from my copy:

•	Will Eisner — Kirby at the board, “from an old, old, old colleague”  
•	Mike Royer — Kirby as Mickey Mouse: “only one of us is Mickey Mouse… the other is King!”  
•	Sergio Aragonés — a 70-candle cake mob scene, “Feliz cumpleaños Jack!”  
•	Steve Rude, Dave Stevens, Chic Stone, John Romita, Don Heck — original birthday art  
•	Text tributes from Evanier, Len Wein (the dying-17-year-old beard story), Marv Wolfman, Julius Schwartz, George Roussos, Steve Gerber

The one entry that reads differently is Stan Lee’s. Where everyone else writes a letter or draws something personal, Stan turns in a four-line jingle set to “Jack be nimble” — and every compliment in it is about Jack’s drawing, signed off with his own catchphrase, “Excelsior.” Friendly enough, but even in a private card the praise never once touches writing or creation. Read it next to the WBAI radio interview from the same birthday and the pattern’s hard to unsee.

Was anyone here actually in that room in ’87?

A man in a finned helmet walks straight into a wall of energy. The caption tells you what you’re looking at: he strides through a cylinder mouth that is *alive with living, crackling energy.* Around him the border of that energy breaks into a lacy, ragged edge particles packed tight, irregular, jagged at the rim, swallowing the light behind a yellow disc.

The book is Blue Bolt #5, October 1940. My copy is coverless — a reading copy, the kind that got handled instead of bagged. Which is the right way to come at this panel, because the thing in it is the first Kirby Krackle in comics, and it would spend the next twenty-five years waiting to be recognized as anything at all.

What the effect does

Strip the cosmic mythology off it and the krackle is a trick of negative space. Mass small dark particles together, denser toward a center, thinning at the edges. Your eye doesn’t read the dots as the energy it reads the *gaps between them,* the glowing channels the clustering leaves behind. The dots build a crackly border and the brain fills the interior with force.

That’s why it works for the one thing a line can’t draw. A lightning bolt has a shape you can ink. *Enormous undirected energy* does not. The krackle gives it one a texture that means *charge* without committing to a form. It solved a problem no other comic artist had solved, and it solved it in 1940.

You’ll hear the objection, because Joe Simon inked Blue Bolt #5 and the krackle is laid down in black ink: spotting the blacks was the inker’s job, so maybe the effect is Simon’s. It isn’t, and the work itself says so.

The krackle is a design before it’s a spotting choice the decision to render energy as massed particles around a glowing core. That decision lives in the layout, and the layouts were Kirby’s; Simon spent the partnership saying as much about who drove the drawing. Then watch where the device goes. It resurfaces in *Captain 3-D* (1953) under a rotating cast of inkers. It turns up in 1957 in *Tales of the Unexpected* #18 a story Kirby penciled *and inked himself.* A technique that reappears wherever Kirby goes, across different hands and including his own, is Kirby’s technique. A flourish that belonged to Simon would have stayed with Simon.

What’s actually open is small: whose brush laid the specific blacks in that one 1940 panel, three months into a brand-new studio. That’s a question about the execution of a single panel. It doesn’t reach the authorship of the device. Kirby originated the krackle. Simon may have inked its first appearance. Those don’t compete.

Here’s what makes the panel a case file instead of a trophy: the effect didn’t catch on, and for a long time Kirby himself didn’t keep using it.

The particles in 1940 are angular — shredded, more lace than bubbles — not the round dots of the famous version. That’s not a disqualification. It’s the first state of a technique that took a quarter-century to reach its finished form. After *Blue Bolt* it goes dark for over a decade while Simon and Kirby work war, crime, romance, westerns — genres with no use for cosmic energy. It flickers back in *Captain 3-D* #1 (1953), around a gamma-ray weapon. Then quiet again until the DC alien-energy stories: *Tales of the Unexpected* #18 (1957) and *House of Mystery* #84 (1959). Every instance still angular, still a prototype.

Then it vanishes one more time — including across Kirby’s early-1960s Marvel superhero work, where plenty of stories could have used it and didn’t. The likeliest explanation is the least romantic: he forgot he had it. Kirby’s career ran long and his memory ran deep, and old solutions resurfaced in his hands years after he first reached for them. The krackle is the cleanest example of that pattern anywhere in his work — an idea he invented, set down, and rediscovered like found money.

The signature, twenty-five years late

The round-dot krackle — the one on every T-shirt — lands all at once in 1966: *Fantastic Four* #48 (“The Coming of Galactus”), #49 (“If This Be Doomsday”), #57 (“Enter, Dr. Doom”). Now the particles are clumped *and* rounded, and Kirby does something new with them: he fills outer space itself, treating the void not as empty distance but as a medium seething with energy. The galaxy stops being black paper with stars on it.

That’s the version that stuck twenty-five years after he first drew it into a dime comic that didn’t even keep its cover.

The effect outlives the author

A technique becomes grammar when artists who never met its inventor reach for it without thinking. The krackle crossed that line decades ago.

By 1989 — nineteen years after Kirby left Marvel — the company put Doctor Doom on the cover of *Fantastic Four* #330 mid-teleport, his body coming apart into krackle, drawn by a hand that wasn’t Kirby’s. The device had detached from its author completely. It no longer meant “a Kirby drawing.” It meant *energy,* available to anyone. And it never left: open a current comic and the dots are still there — a roaring figure dissolving into a black-on-yellow burst, an indie page using the exact negative-space trick to say *power* without drawing a single beam.

Kirby invented a piece of visual language so durable it outran him by half a century and is still in use by people who couldn’t tell you whose it was.

What the panel is

The Blue Bolt #5 panel is the origin point, and the interesting thing about it is the gap that follows: the distance between the moment Kirby first drew the krackle and the moment it became his signature. He didn’t invent it in a flash and ride it. He laid it down, lost it, found it, lost it again, and finally recognized what he’d been holding the whole time. The coverless copy is the right object for that story — the version that was read, not the version that was kept.

Everything here is the same hand: Jack Kirby, 1947 to 1968, Marvel up front and Prize/Hillman in the back. The Silver Age Thor stuff most of you know cold, so I’ll move fast there and spend the time on the two postwar books, which I think get skipped not because they’re minor but because nobody tells you what they are.

Journey Into Mystery #97 (Oct 1963). The cover blurb literally reads “Lee and Kirby combine talents” — Thor vs. the Lava Man, first appearance of Lava Man, plus a cameo of Surtur. But the reason to own it is the back: this is the first “Tales of Asgard” backup, the strip where the Asgard/Odin mythology actually got built out. Worth pulling out and looking at that first installment is told entirely in captions, no word balloons at all, Kirby openly aping Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. Kirby pencils, Roussos inks.

The Mighty Thor #156 and #157 (Sept–Oct 1968). The heart of the Mangog saga. Mangog debuts in #154 — the embodiment of the hatred of a billion billion beings Odin once wiped out, freed by the troll Ulik, marching on Asgard to draw the Odinsword and end the universe. #156 is Thor standing in front of him; #157 is “Behind Him… Ragnarok!” Peak late-period Kirby Thor, Colletta inks. If you only know the movies, this is the cosmic-scale stuff the movies were reaching for.

Now the part most people haven’t handled:
Justice Traps the Guilty #3 (March–April 1948, Prize/Headline). After the war, Simon and Kirby the Captain America guys came back and went to work for Prize. They turned Headline Comics into a crime hit and then launched this as a companion title. Context for why crime comics were even a thing: Lev Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay had kicked the genre off in 1942, and by the late ‘40s true-crime books were one of the best-selling things on the stands. JTTG ran 92 issues to 1958, but S&K only did the covers and a story or two for roughly the first dozen, so the early issues are the ones with their fingerprints on them.

The cover here is Kirby pencils, Simon inks signed “Simon Kirby” down in the corner. The interior I shot is the “Buried Treasure Fraud” story (the Valerie Trent / Walter Hilton splash, then the “you’re in this racket as deep as I am” panel and the DETECTIVE CASES brawl) also Kirby and Simon, signed in the splash. Note the indicia: it’s published under “American Boys’ Comics, Inc.,” which is one of the Prize-family imprints, not a name you’ll recognize off the cover. Side note on the whole genre: this is exactly the material Wertham went after in Seduction of the Innocent, and the 1954 Comics Code basically legislated it out of existence. So these late-’40s crime books are a snapshot of comics right before the censorship wall came down.

My Date Comics #3 (Nov 1947, Hillman). This is the one I’d point a Kirby fan at. Four issues total, July ‘47 to January ‘48, all Simon & Kirby, cover signed “Simon + Kirby.” You’ll see it described as “the first romance comic” it isn’t, quite. It’s teen humor, an Archie clone, what the trade later called “romance humor.” (The actual first romance comic is S&K’s own Young Romance #1, Prize, Sept 1947, two months before this issue.) The cover gag is a recurring character, House-Date Harry, the kid who won’t leave the furniture-store sofa.

Here’s the thing I actually wanted to flag: Kirby changed his style for this. For the humor content he deliberately drew in a rounder, more cartoony register — looser, bouncier, nothing like the crime book sitting right next to it in this same stack from the same months. What’s fun is that he couldn’t fully turn it off. Look at the cover and you can still catch the Kirby tells underneath the cartooning — the exaggerated perspective, the way bodies push and lean into the space. Same hand, dialed to a completely different setting, and you can watch him do it across two books published weeks apart.

That’s the whole point of the spread, really: one artist, 1947 to 1968, crime and teen humor and Norse gods, and it’s recognizably him the whole way through.
All raw reader copies, complete and presentable with honest wear these are books to read and handle, not to seal up.

Cosmic-era Thor run arriving/landed, with the FF Galactus return rounding it out. All raw, mostly mid-grade readers.

Context for anyone newer to the era: this is late-period Marvel Kirby, 1967–69 his last big creative stretch before leaving for DC in 1970. He was pushing the cosmic and mythological side of the universe hard here: the Inhumans’ Kree origin, Mangog, and the full Galactus origin all came out of this run. A lot of what he worked out in these issues , villains built as cosmic or moral abstractions, origins told as creation myths he carried straight into the Fourth World at DC a couple years later.

•	Fantastic Four #74 (1968) — “When Calls Galactus!” Galactus recalls the Surfer; Kirby/Sinnott.  
•	Thor #146 (1967) — “…If the Thunder Be Gone!” Circus of Crime up front; back-up starts the 7-part Inhumans origin (Kirby pencils, Sinnott on the back-up).  
•	Thor #147 (1967) — “The Wrath of Odin!” Thor vs. Loki; Inhumans back-up continues and ties them to the Kree.  
•	Thor #154 (1968) — first appearance of Mangog.  
•	Thor #155 (1968) — “Now Ends… the Universe!” Mangog saga part 2.  
•	Thor #160 (1969) — “And Now… Galactus!” Galactus vs. Ego the Living Planet.  
•	Thor #162 (1969) — “Galactus A’Borning!” origin of Galactus begins (Galan of Taa).  
•	Thor #168 (1969) — “Galactus Found!” origin part 2; first Thermal Man.  
•	Thor #169 (1969) — “The Monster and the Man-God!” conclusion of the Galactus origin.

With these landing, the late-’60s cosmic stretch is locked: the full Mangog saga (#154–157), the Galactus/Ego arc (#160–162), and the complete Galactus origin Kirby produced at Marvel (#162, #168, #169) plus the FF cosmic cluster and the Inhumans Kree-origin pair.

And what’s in it? Do you have 4 long boxes? 3 shortboxes? 53 shortboxes?

I’m curious what people’s collection size is and what they own. I know some people with huge collections are trimming down to what they really like and culling it.

I’ll start I have 5 short-boxes total - 4 of Jack Kirby work from 1939-1994 all his genre work , some silver age marvel , his entire DC 70s work, his marvel return work and his later independent stuff.

One short-box of entire marvel two in one run.

5 total. https://cloud.clz.com/orrgo/comics

The archive on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/jackkirbyarchive?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D&utm\_source=qr

EDIT; Reading comment I see I’m on the smaller curated end. Many of you have huge collections!

These are typical keys we all see constantly but yet they necessary for an Kirby collection

Three issues, March–May 1966. Kirby was 48.

#48 — Galactus and the Silver Surfer arrive. The Surfer wasn’t in Lee’s plot; Kirby drew him in because a planet-eating god needs a herald and Lee hadn’t given him one. Lee saw the finished pages and started talking about the Surfer’s “soul” — a claim he made for no other Kirby character.

#49 — The cover where Galactus dwarfs the Baxter Building. Inside: the Watcher breaks his oath of non-interference. Alicia reaches the Surfer through empathy. He turns on Galactus.

#50 — Ultimate Nullifier. Mutually assured destruction at cosmic scale, four years after Cuban Missile Crisis. Galactus retreats. Surfer gets exiled to earth.

What was new: a villain whose threat is biology, not malice. Galactus eats planets because he has to. Antagonist as ecology — runs forward into Phoenix and Beyonder at Marvel, and Kirby’s own Anti-Life at DC four years later.

Receipt on the authorship question: in 1968, while Kirby was still at Marvel, the Silver Surfer solo book launched with Buscema. The editor who claimed credit for the Surfer’s soul didn’t want the artist who created him drawing the character.

Trilogy complete in the archive, raw, three months apart.

JIM #109, #115, #116, #119, #121, #122 + Thor #133, #164.

The highlights: JIM #109 is Kirby drawing Magneto against Thor — one of the earliest cross-title villain appearances in Marvel. Thor #133 is the first Ego the Living Planet, one of Kirby’s wildest cosmic concepts (a face in a planet, years before anyone else would try something that unhinged). And #164 wraps the Pluto/Netherworld arc with Kirby pushing his collage technique hard.

The JIM run (#115–122) fills in a chunk of the Trial of the Gods / Destroyer / Absorbing Man era — peak Lee/Kirby Thor before the title changeover. All reader copies, all getting cracked and read.
Archive sits at ~430 objects across 15 publishers. Thor coverage now spans from JIM #109 (October ’64) through Thor #169