Showing posts with label Journey Into Mystery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journey Into Mystery. Show all posts

09 August 2018

Full Spectrum Gray - Short Tales

When i say Short Tales, i mean only 4 pages apiece - quite short indeed. So here are a half dozen of them illustrated by Gray Morrow from 1956 -







Silver Age Science - 1950s Style!

Hopefully, I'll have more words for you tomorrow. My brain is rather frazzled from hours of hunting & sorting data and prepping images for the Funny Animalphabet. Kind of lost track of time, but progress was made.

page art by Gray Morrow for  Journey Into Mystery #41, Journey Into Unknown Worlds #48, Marvel Tales #s 150 & 152, Uncanny Tales #46 (1956)

26 August 2017

Saturday Solutions 006 (King Kirby 090)


You didn't come here looking for the answers to yesterdays' King Kirby 100 Crossword Challenge, did you? I said i was going to give you extra time to work on that one.

So, let's try to pierce the Veil and turn to The King for some other solutions, shall we?


Mr. Kirby - um....
How does one see so far, as You did?


Okay. That's not quite what i meant.
Your vision seemed so wide ranging - how do we perceive the worlds around us with the clarity You demonstrated?


All right. Obviously, this isn't the right line of inquiry. Let's take this in a different direction -
How can one live beyond death, as You have done?


Well, that's more interesting. Now You've got me thinking about some of Your other creations. After hearing this tale, i wonder what Captain America would have been like if it was a western, like BullsEye...


Well, that's pretty cool - An American Icon x 2. Makes me wonder what he would have been like if Cap had been around earlier - at the formation of the USA?


Ha! The Red Skull makes it glorious!
I don't think the Veil will stay parted much longer... One last answer -
How did Thor earn the right to weild Mjolnir? How did he prove he was worthy? Did he just walk up and grab the hammer, or were there some sort of trials?


all page art by Jack Kirby & co. from Classics Illustrated Special #165a (1961), BullsEye #6 (1955), Marvel Treasury Special #1 (1976), and Journey Into Mystery #100 (1964)

16 August 2017

A Song Of Ice & Fire (King Kirby 062)


One of the early Marvel titles we haven't mentioned yet is Journey Into Mystery/The Mighty Thor. It was actually one of my favorites, right after Fantastic Four. I was a mythology buff, with a fondness for Norse & Egyptian ascendant over  the usual Greek/Roman tales. So it was pretty easy to hook me at the concept level, and then they started digging into the mythology, often in the back-up tales in Journey Into Mystery. Even when Jack Kirby wasn't drawing the lead tales in JIM, he was rocking through the old mythology in the back-up tales. Those tales let him cut loose from many typical restrictions in the other comics. Unbound by mortal architecture and mundane constraints, his imagination had more room to run free.

Now, let's blow the horn and play that song, eh? A song of Ice...


...and fire...


Later, after digging through the old myths, the series really took off when Thor turned to the cosmos and began to forge modern myths - one of which might look quite familiar to modern viewers:


Okay. Some of you may be feeling cheated at  this point. Here we've been talking about Thor, and there's been no sign of him. I can hear the grumbles from the acolytes. So, here - have a poster, a sketch, and a few covers -

Hopefully, that'll hold you until we return to the Thunderer.
(And return we will)

all art by Jack Kirby(& inkers), stories of Ice & Fire from Journey Into Mystery #s 98 & 99 (1963)