OBSCURA
Barry Forshaw
A regular column focusing on Kirby’s least known work, by Barry Forshaw
Barry Forshaw is the author of Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide and American Noir (available from Amazon) and the editor of Crime Time (www.crimetime. co.uk); he lives in London.
as any illustrator will tell you, if you haven’t nailed something in the original drawing, all the colour in the world won’t make it work. However, when we saw the splash panel for “The Martian Who Stole My Body,” with its truly grotesque giant marauder (sporting red fins instead of ears and strange antennae that sprouted from its chalk-white pupils), there was no denying that it was the sudden splash of colour on these black-and-white shores that made the most remarkable impact. And that wasn’t all.
A MARTIAN DOUBLEWHAMMY
Ah—Jack Kirby splash panels! Don’t you love them? In fact, I’d go so far as to say that for most readers of this magazine, the aspect that probably instilled in us a love of The King’s work were those eye-filling, full-page panoramas, crammed full of the kinetic actions and impeccable design sense that was his alone. But as my task (as detailed in the job description given to me years ago by editor John Morrow) is not to talk about the more familiar things—such as the Fantastic Four tackling Galactus—but to peer into the nooks and crannies of Kirby’s work, let me talk about something that had a considerable impact on British comic aficionados decades ago (remember, this column is being written only a couple of miles away from the ever-flowing Thames). Up until 1959, the only exposure that comics fans in the U.K. had to American Marvel or DC books would have been in the black-and-white reprints which were the only way we could obtain such material (this was due to the ban on the import of American material). And, ironically, this meant that Jack Kirby sciencefiction and fantasy strips would only be seen as backup to characters who were reprinted here, such as Blackhawk or The Flash (although the three glorious issues of Race for the Moon were reprinted under that title). But in 1959, the embargo on American material came to an end, and suddenly—to the delight of British fans—the wonderful full-colour American books began to be imported (or were made available customised with a British price in place of the cents price). And one of the earliest to appear was Journey into Mystery #57 (March 1960), followed by the succeeding issue of that magazine in May of the same year. And the two stories that blew away readers were a double-whammy—in fact, it was one story carved into two separate entities, “The Martian Who Stole My Body” and “Return of the Martian” (both stories were inked in striking fashion by Dick Ayers with notably bold brushwork). British fans had been impressed by Kirby’s truly bizarre and imaginative creation of alien monsters even when seen in black-and-white—after all,
THE SEQUEL IS THE EQUAL
However, even better was to come with the sequel in the next issue of Journey into Mystery: “The Return of the Martian.” Once again, we had the destructive alien visitor dominating the splash panel, but this time it was the sense of design that impressed as much as the impactful imagery. The tanks which the Martian is ripping to pieces are virtually off the top of the panel, so that they become almost abstract elements in the design—aided by the fact that the title was placed dead centre of the creature’s body (unorthodox for the day). And—even more impressive—two pages into the story, we had the creature bursting out of a prison cell with the image shattering the frame (in a way that Kirby would not have been permitted to get away with in his DC days, where he was obliged to be more conventional). The destruction of a car on the following page was also more violent than was expected in 50
