Friday, October 26, 2007

What lurks within ... the Internet

This is a website with all kinds of scanned pages from Jack Kirby’s pre-Marvel monster comics.
http://monsterblog.oneroom.org/collectors_corner/kirby_monsters_never_reprinted.html.
The trick is – none of the stories were ever reprinted after they appeared from 1959-1962. What a find!
Mostly inked by Dick Ayers or Christopher Rule, the art isn’t really much like what Kirby did at the peak of his Marvel work a few years later. Still, it has a charm all its own, and I have always loved reading the old monster stories when I found them.
I have a bunch of the monster reprints Marvel issued in the 1970s, but to find there were some “lost episodes” made me very happy. The original issues would be really hard to find, and probably very expensive.
There is one story inked by Wally Wood that’s worth checking out.
They are short, sinple, campy monster stories reminiscent of the Twilight Zone TV show. They are not great literature, but they are great fun to read.
Who could not love titles like, “I Am the Menace from the Purple Planet,” or “I Created Mechano!” or “We Were Trapped in The Twilight World.” For that matter, “The Luna Lizards Had Me Trapped” sounds like a winner, too.
I assume Stan Lee wrote most of them, or maybe Larry Leiber, his brother. No credits were given on many of the original stories, though.
To read these, you have to be willing to suspend your disbelief, and some of the laws of common sense, but if you do, there’s almost nothing more fun than these old monster comics.

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