Was wondering if this is with getting CGC x JSA authenticated. From an estate sale in Southern California. Originally owned by a comic collector going back to the 50s. Has a stamp from Passport Book Shop, a store near where Kirby lived that held many signings in the 70s and 80s.
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.
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
I just got the fourth world box set, and I’m curious as to what the best order of these books would be. What would get it as close to feeling like a saga as intended
As said in the title
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.