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FORMATIONS (the maddening mystery of Magneto)
Tales of Suspense #78 (1966) unused cover layout
Presuming this is a genuine 1966 piece (Fury and the robot look like mid-’60s Kirby, but the Cap figure? To me, it looks like Kirby from a decade later—bulkier and less supple. But I’m probably wrong!), we have to assume Jack rejected it himself, since we know he didn’t submit cover layouts for approval. (He’d kept the piece and a collage was pasted right over the top.) So he was not happy with it himself. Good call! Though why did he decide to reverse the viewpoint rather than simply do a better Cap figure? Perhaps because showing the heroes front-on is easier from this angle. Although that Fury figure is perfect...
In 2018, I bumped into Irving Forbush in New York City’s Times Square. I recognized him from my beloved Not Brand Echh comics and we chatted for a while. He told me that after NBE folded, “Stan and
Jack, great team that they made, had created a few conundrums that I just couldn’t take anymore!” Irv tried several times to confront the creative pair about the ‘discrepancies’ (as he saw them) he’d read, only to be politely and professionally rebuffed at every turn. I quickly jotted down his words and… well, here, he finally gets his say!
Forbush Man: “Lee and Kirby did hundreds, maybe thousands of wonderfully told tales, but some things, I gotta tell you, just don’t add up. And those made me ask then and now...
(above) Marie Severin did this impressive portrait of ol’ Irv in ’73 in watercolor. Thanks to Rob Pistella of comicartfans.com.
Ideas that might’ve need a little more thought, as told by Forbush-Man to Jerry Boyd
“Hey Jack and Stan, if Doc Doom can create androids, take over a small country, challenge the FF, and come up with a time machine to boot, howcome he can’t figure out a way to get his face fixed up?!”
[Fantastic Four #5, left] (above) Not Brand Echh #1 in ’67 gave us some great times and the first appearance of Forbush Man—art by Kirby!
“Howcome four of the Inhumans debuted with masks? They never had secret identities to protect from their fellow Inhumans, right?”
[Fantastic Four #46, bottom left] [Strange Tales #141, right]
“Hey Stan, howzabout writing up a story where the mad but brilliant scientist retains the good sense to figure out an antidote before he experiments on himself, like the nut who turned himself into a Gorilla-Man (twice!)?”
[Tales to Astonish #30, below]
“Wait a New York minute, guys! If Col. Nick Fury was the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D, why’d he always take the toughest missions— solo? Weren’t there other agents he trusted to do the job?! Wasn’t he supposed to be like… an administrator? Sheesh!”
“Impressive, Jack! But how can even the great Rawhide Kid and terrific Two-Gun Kid squeeze-off so many shots that fast and that accurately from a six-shooter?!”
[Two-Gun Kid #61, bottom right]
Incidental Iconography
An ongoing analysis of Kirby’s visual shorthand, and how he inadvertently used it to develop his characters, by Sean Kleefeld
One of the more unusual pieces of comic storytelling that Jack Kirby worked on—one that I’ve rarely seen even mentioned— is a partial biography of Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald after he’d been charged with the assassination of President John Kennedy. The piece is unusual for a number of reasons. It ran in the May 1967 issue of Esquire magazine, meaning Jack had created this within a year of his finishing “The Galactus Trilogy” and “This Man, This Monster” in Fantastic Four. At the time, Esquire’s circulation was about three times that of any Marvel comic, so this would have been Jack’s largest audience in years. Despite being seen by a much wider audience at the time, though, it’s fallen pretty deep into obscurity by comics fans. “Partial biography” is probably overstating the piece’s breadth. It really only covers a two-day period between Ruby learning of Kennedy’s assassination and his murder of Oswald. Kirby is able to cover this period in three pages, although they are at a larger magazine size which afforded more room to work with than a typical comic page. The piece is also heavily footnoted, pulling much of its dialogue from the Warren Commission’s report, although sometimes missing the context that would indicate comments as jokes or having been said ironically. Both the heavy footnotes and the fairly high number of panels per page (even for the larger page size) almost certainly means Jack was working from a more formal script than he’d been using with Stan Lee at the time. Danny Fingeroth has done some digging into who the uncredited writer here was; Esquire’s associate editor at the time, John Berendt, could not recall who specifically he’d hired for that, and the names he did provide to Danny haven’t led to anything definitive so far. But let’s look at Jack’s art (as inked by Chic Stone)—that’s the point of this column after all! While Jack mostly drew fictional characters, this was hardly his first time incorporating a real person’s likeness into a story; he threw in almost a dozen recognizable actors in Fantastic Four #9 alone! So it should come as no surprise
