Review: Kid Colt, Outlaw #106, September 1962

I was feeling nostalgic, so I bought all the issues available on Kindle of KID COLT, OUTLAW, one of my favorite Western comic books when I was a kid. The first one I read, eager to see if it held up, was #106, with a cover date of September 1962. The cover art is by Jack Kirby with inks by Dick Ayers, a combination I always loved.

As usual, the Kid Colt story in this issue was written by Stan Lee with art by Jack Keller. In “The Circus of Crime!”, our hero Kid Colt (an outlaw unjustly accused of a crime and forced to go on the run) is being chased by a posse when he throws in with a traveling circus in order to elude pursuit. The owner of the circus seems a little too eager to shelter a wanted outlaw, but we quickly discover there’s a reason for that: the circus performers are all outlaws, too, and use their travels to cover up their bank robbing spree! Well, the Kid’s not going to put up with this, of course, so we get some nice scenes of him clashing with the strongman, the knife thrower, the acrobats, the tightrope walker, etc. In the end, he brings the owlhoots to justice and rides off before the local law can corral him. Lee’s script moves along nicely, as they always did, and other than constantly misspelling Abilene as Abiline, it comes across as reasonably authentic for a Western yarn. I always liked Jack Keller’s art when I was a kid, but it seems a little inconsistent to me now with some excellent panels and some that are rather crude and sketchy. But I still found it enjoyable.

The lead story has 13 pages, and it’s followed by a couple of 5-page backup stories. “The Black Mask”, again written by Lee but with art by Dick Ayers this time, is a pretty traditional tale about a lawman trying to track down a masked bandit. Even though it’s only 5 pages, it has a couple of minor plot twists in it. Ayers’ art is really good, too, reminding me of Joe Kubert in places. I don’t know what sort of reputation Ayers has these days as an artist, but I loved his long run on SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS and consider him Kirby’s second-best inker from those days, behind Joe Sinnott.

The issue wraps up with a 5-page Kid Colt story, again by Lee and Keller, called “Fury at Fort Tioga”. The Kid is captured and winds up at a fort under attack by Apaches. He comes up with a novel way of ending the attack. This is kind of an oddball story and I’m not sure I buy the plot, but it’s the kind of ending you don’t see often in a Western comic book from those days.

Overall, I enjoyed this issue quite a bit. It’s nice to read a simple, well-told comic book story that has a beginning, middle, and end and no need to read the previous 400 issues to know what’s going on. If you’re hankerin’ to give the Kid a try, you can find the e-book edition on Amazon.

The Avengers: War Across Time - Paul Levitz and Alan Davis

One day in September 1964, I woke up too sick to go to school. I was in sixth grade, although that’s not really relevant to this post. But I started feeling better as the day went on, so by that afternoon when my mother announced that she was going to the drugstore, I asked if I could come along.

Well, of course, you know how she reacted. She glared at me and said, “If you were too sick to go to school, you’re too sick to go to the drugstore.” I explained that I was getting over whatever was bothering me and just wanted to get out for a little while. I didn’t mention what I actually wanted, which was to check the comic book and paperback spinner racks at Tompkins’ Pharmacy because I hadn’t been there in a while.

I talked her into it—I could be very persuasive where reading matter was concerned—and during our trip to the drugstore that afternoon I bought several comic books, one of which was THE AVENGERS #8 featuring the debut of a villain who would prove to be iconic, Kang the Conqueror. How do I know I picked up that particular comic on that particular day? I can’t explain it other than to say that I have a trick brain for some things, and knowing where and when I bought a certain book or comic book is one of those tricks.

Now, the point of all this reminiscing is that I recently read a collection of a new mini-series from Marvel Comics (the first thing I've read from Marvel in ages) called THE AVENGERS: WAR ACROSS TIME, which is set in the classic Marvel era (or as I call it, my childhood) and is a direct sequel to THE AVENGERS #11 and features Kang the Conqueror as the villain. It was written by Paul Levitz, his first script for Marvel after literal decades as a writer/editor for DC, and drawn by Alan Davis, one of the latter-day comics artists whose work I like quite a bit.

Levitz’s script hits all the right beats from that era: the Avengers battle their former member The Hulk, they encounter the menacing Lava Men (who first appeared in THE AVENGERS #5, bought by me off the spinner rack in Trammell’s Pak-a-Bag Grocery—there’s that trick brain again), and a king of the dwarves steals Thor’s hammer, which he can do because he helped forge it, causing Thor to turn back into Dr. Don Blake. Kang is behind all this, and in the course of their struggle against him, the Avengers see bizarre visions of their future, most of which will turn out to be true.

This is just great fun for an old comics codger like me. Thor spouts mock-Shakespearean dialogue. Captain America, who hasn’t been an Avenger for long after being thawed out from the ice, is brave and stalwart. The Wasp spends most of her time in flirtatious banter but is courageous and capable when she needs to be. Iron Man and Giant Man alternate between being science nerds and walloping bad guys. To be honest, Alan Davis’s artwork isn’t quite as good as I’ve seen it in the past, but it’s still worlds better than most of what you’ll find in modern comics, and he can draw a story so that you know what’s going on, again something that’s lacking in a lot of comics these days.

So, is THE AVENGERS: WAR ACROSS TIME as good as vintage Lee/Kirby? No, but I never expected it to be. For one thing, I’m not eleven years old anymore. The best modern comics can do is remind me of that time, not recreate it. But this one certainly does remind me of those days, and I had a fine time reading it. If you have good memories of that era, too, I give it a high recommendation. You can find it in trade paperback and digital forms on Amazon.

And hey, any excuse to wallow in nostalgia, right?

Kirby: King of Comics - Mark Evanier

Chances are I first saw Jack Kirby's artwork in some of the monster/science fiction comic books Marvel published in the late Fifties and early Sixties, but back then I wouldn't have been aware of who the artists were, even one whose style was so distinctive.  I really became aware of his work when I started reading FANTASTIC FOUR and the other Marvel superhero books in December of 1963 and January of 1964.  He quickly became my favorite artist, although I was awfully fond of Steve Ditko's Spider-Man work, of course.  And I was really bummed out when Kirby left Marvel six or seven years later.  It just didn't seem like the same company without him, although the Seventies saw some excellent work come out from Marvel.

Then there were the Fourth World books Kirby produced at DC, which I've written about before on this blog, most notably JIMMY OLSEN, surely one of the oddest but most entertaining runs in comics history.

KIRBY: KING OF COMICS is a big biography/retrospective/coffee table book about Kirby and his work by longtime associate Mark Evanier.  As you might expect, part of this book's appeal is the large amount of vintage Kirby art reproduced in its pages, but Evanier's well-written prose conveys a lot of information in an informal, very readable style.  It's clear that Evanier is a guy who really loves comics, especially comics produced by Jack Kirby.  He doesn't shy away from talking about Kirby's flaws, though, and he takes a very even-handed approach to the long-standing controversy involving Kirby and Stan Lee and how much each contributed to the creation of their iconic characters.

(For what it's worth, my feeling on that controversy is that Stan got too much credit at first, then when the pendulum swung the other way, for a long time he didn't get enough credit.  Rereading those classic stories now, I'd divide it pretty much right down the middle.  Yes, Kirby's art and the concepts he came up with are great, but I don't think the books would have been nearly as successful without Lee's dialogue that brought the characters to life and his work in the captions that tried to compensate for and explain away the plot holes and logical inconsistencies that Kirby built into the stories.)

To get back to the issue at hand, Evanier has produced a book with a lot of nostalgic value for readers like me and a great introduction for people who might not be as familiar with Kirby's work.  Kirby probably is my all-time favorite comic book artist, and if you're a fan as well, you really need to read KIRBY: KING OF COMICS.

Forgotten Books: Jack Kirby's Jimmy Olsen - Jack Kirby

(This post originally ran in slightly different form on July 23, 2005)


Back in the fall of 1971, I was a freshman at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, about thirty miles south of Austin. One Friday afternoon I started home after my classes but stopped at Stuckey's in Round Rock, which at that time was about ten or fifteen miles north of Austin (it's town all the way between them now). When I got back in my car to head on home, it wouldn't start. Nothing I could do would make it run. I called my brother-in-law and he agreed to come help me, but it would be about three hours before he could get there. There was a convenience store just up the service road, so I walked over there to wait for help to arrive. The old man who ran the place was very talkative and was glad for me to wait there. There was a stack of comic books on the counter, so I picked up one of them to read. It was SUPERMAN'S PAL, JIMMY OLSEN #139, and when I opened it to the first page, I immediately recognized the artwork of Jack Kirby.


I'd been a Marvel fan since 1963 and was very familiar with Kirby's work, of course. I knew he had left Marvel in 1970 and gone to work for DC, but I had never read any of his comics for them and didn't even know he was writing and drawing JIMMY OLSEN, a book I'd never read. Not surprisingly, I was hooked right away and had to hunt up the back issues that I had missed. I also started reading Kirby's other "Fourth World" series for DC: THE NEW GODS, THE FOREVER PEOPLE, and MISTER MIRACLE. The art was great, the scope of the stories was epic, and the dialogue, while a lot more awkward than what Stan Lee had provided for Kirby over at Marvel, had its own goofy charm.


Recently DC has reprinted Kirby's JIMMY OLSEN run in a couple of nice, full-color trade paperbacks. I've read the first one, and I enjoyed the stories just as much now as I did nearly 35 years ago, maybe even more. I have the second volume and plan to read it soon.


By the way, my brother-in-law did arrive and got me and my junker of a car back home safely. The whole experience prompted me to write a song about it several years later, called "Round Rock Breakdown", one of my very, very rare ventures into songwriting. Don't worry, the song is long gone and I couldn't recreate it. I wouldn't even try.

Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four, Volume 2

The second trade paperback volume in the MARVEL MASTERWORKS: FANTASTIC FOUR series reprints FF #11 – 20, along with the first FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL. It’s a mixed bag of stories, to be sure, opening with the introduction of the Impossible Man from FF #11. Stan comments in the introduction to the volume that this story is considered a failure, but I never felt like that. Yeah, it’s offbeat, but it’s pretty funny, too. Not much really happens in #12, which features the first meeting between the FF and the Incredible Hulk. (The next meeting in FF #25 and 26 is much better.) The story from #13 is notable because it features the first appearance of the Watcher, as well as the introduction of the Red Ghost and his Incredible Super-Apes. (Yes, super-apes. I thought this was pretty dumb even when I was a kid. The Watcher was cool, though.)

Some other characters pop up for the first time in these stories: the Mad Thinker in #15, the Super-Skrull in #18, and Rama-Tut, the Pharaoh from the Future (who I believe eventually turned out to be Dr. Doom, as did Kang the Conqueror) in #19. I don’t recall if the Yancy Street Gang had turned up prior to these issues, but they’re mentioned quite a bit and always welcome.

For me the highlights of this volume are the stories from FF #16 and #17, both of which feature Dr. Doom as the villain. In #16, the FF are shrunk down into a microverse (shades of Ray Cummings’ THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM, among numerous other SF novels and stories) and get some help from Ant-Man, and in #17 they battle a series of traps set for them by Doom. Now, these stories may not actually be any better than the others from this time period, but they’re special to me because they were the first issues of FANTASTIC FOUR I ever read, indeed the first Marvel superhero comics I read, on that Christmas Day, 1963, at my aunt’s house in Brownwood. (I’ve written about that day before.) Reading them again really took me back to those times.

Also, the story from FF ANNUAL #1, which features Sub-Mariner finally locating his lost kingdom of Atlantis and declaring war on the surface world, is pretty good, and at 37 pages was a real epic in those days.

Still, this is all prelude. Starting a few months after these stories were first published, with the brutal Thing/Hulk battle in FF #25, FANTASTIC FOUR would start a three-and-a-half year run that for my money is the best sustained sequence in the history of comics. (AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1 – 33 comes close but can’t quite top the FF, at least for me.) If Marvel continues to come out with these Masterworks trade paperbacks, I’ll continue reading them and reliving those days. Highly recommended.

Fantastic Four: Lost Adventures

This is an interesting collection of Fantastic Four stories ranging over a number of years. It starts off with a recreation of what would have been the final FF story drawn by Jack Kirby, which was shelved because of plot problems. An earlier story with Kirby art was substituted for it at the last minute. But several issues later, some of the rejected art was used after all, with a framing sequence by John Buscema. This collection gives us all the versions, including the uninked and unlettered panels of Kirby’s original art that survive. Taken any way you want to look at it, “The Menace of the Mega-Men” and “The Monstrous Mystery of the Nega-Man” (the alternate titles for what is basically the same story) are pretty minor pieces of comic book history, but as always, Kirby’s art is interesting to look at.

The collection is rounded out by a much more recent story, “World’s End”, which is also billed as “The Last Fantastic Four Story” (I don’t know about that; isn’t the FF still being published?), “Homecoming”, a reprint from the 25th anniversary issue of the comic book that I must have read when it was new but have no memory of; and “If This Be . . . Anniversary!”, a humorous yarn from the 45th anniversary issue. All these stories were written by Stan Lee (although “Homecoming” was plotted by Marvel’s then-editor in chief Jim Shooter), and as always Stan’s familiarity with the characters and great touch with dialogue makes them fun to read.

Other than the first story in the collection, I don’t see how these are actually “Lost Adventures”, but I enjoyed the book anyway. If you’ve never read the Fantastic Four, this isn’t the place to start, but if you’re a long-time fan like me, I think you’ll find it entertaining, although nothing in here even remotely approaches the top rank of FF yarns.

Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four, Volume 1

I was going to continue reading the Marvel Masterworks editions reprinting THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (I have Volumes 2 and 3 on hand), but I got sidetracked to another title, the original cornerstone of the Marvel Universe and a title I’ve long considered to be my favorite comic book of all time: FANTASTIC FOUR.

MARVEL MASTERWORKS: FANTASTIC FOUR, VOLUME 1 reprints the first ten adventures of the F.F. from 1961 and ’62. The first issues I ever read were #16 and #17, so I had to catch up on these later, but I’d read them all in various reprints and even owned a couple of those first ten issues at one time or another. No need to recap the origin – you probably already know it if you have any interest in this post at all – but I will make a few comments on some of the stories. The menace in the first issue, the Mole Man, seems like a refugee from one of the Lee/Kirby monster comics. I don’t care that much for Kirby’s art here (or in any of the first three issues, for that matter), and Ben Grimm’s personality is really the only one that stands out in the origin. Reed, Sue, and Johnny are pretty much stereotypes. The second issue, which introduces the Skrulls, is a little better because of the nice twist ending, but the third story regresses with a really lame villain, the illusionist known as the Miracle Man.

In the fourth issue, though, something happens that lifts the series to a higher level. The Submariner, the famous Golden Age character and nemesis to the original Human Torch, returns, albeit in a manner that relies ’way too heavily on coincidence. But there are some really effective scenes in this one.

With the fifth issue, the series begins to hit its stride with the introduction of the F.F.’s all-time greatest villain, Dr. Doom. The time travel plot is a little silly, but the art, with Joe Sinnott inking Kirby, is really good, and we get The Thing dressed as a pirate, so what more do you want? The sixth issue teams up Dr. Doom and Submariner against the F.F. and is also a good story with decent art as Dick Ayers takes over the inking chores. I always liked the Kirby/Ayers art, although I think Sinnott was the best inker ever for Kirby.

The seventh and eighth issues are pretty forgettable, although #8 introduces blind Alicia Masters, who becomes Ben Grimm’s long-time girlfriend. The Submariner returns yet again in #9, which has a silly but entertaining plot about the F.F. going to Hollywood to make a movie, then Dr. Doom shows up again in #10, which also features cameos by Lee and Kirby and introduces the concept that the members of the F.F. know there are comic books being produced about them (and it’s even implied that they share in the revenue from those comics).

Up until this point, the complaints I had about Kirby’s plotting in the early issues of THE AVENGERS haven’t really cropped up, but F.F. #10 really falls apart in terms of logic and continuity. Stan’s script basically ignores the fact that characters do things that make no sense and show up in places they couldn’t possibly be. But out of the first ten issues, two of the stories are excellent (#5 and #6), two are pretty good (#4 and #9), and the others are okay except for #10, the only real dog in the bunch. Unlike THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, which started out great, FANTASTIC FOUR had to grow into greatness, despite the cover proclamation about it being “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!”

Which it was, a couple of years later and for several years after that. But who knows when or if I’ll get around to reading the reprints of those stories?

One more comment: These early issues feature the tragic, surly Ben Grimm who’s always losing his temper with his teammates and threatening to quit. Gee, Reed, Sue, and Johnny, do you think he might have felt a little better about himself and been easier to get along with if you’d actually called him “Ben” every once in a while instead of always calling him “Thing”? No wonder he always felt like it was clobberin’ time! (Although that phrase doesn’t actually appear in any of these stories.)

Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers, Volume 1

I like Marvel’s Essentials series and DC’s Showcase volumes, those thick, black-and-white reprints of classic comic book stories. But I have to admit, when it comes to super-heroes, I miss color. War and horror comics work just fine in black-and-white, and so do most Westerns, but super-heroes are just so darn colorful. That’s why I picked up some of the full-color Marvel Masterworks trade paperbacks when I came across them recently: THE AVENGERS, VOLUME 1, and the first three volumes of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. I just finished reading THE AVENGERS, which reprints issues #1 – 10, so naturally I have some comments about it.

First of all, I remember where I bought most of the original issues, back in 1963 and ’64, and to a certain extent, the circumstances in which I bought them. For example, I was sick and stayed home from school, but my mother took me to the drugstore with her anyway the day I bought AVENGERS #8 off the spinner rack there. I won’t bore you with the rest of those reminiscences, but reading those stories again really took me back.

As for the stories themselves, I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. The dynamic art by Jack Kirby, the breathless, over-the-top prose of Stan Lee, the words and images that are still burned in my brain more than forty years later, all those things are still very entertaining. It's also interesting to see the introduction of storylines that would resonate through the Marvel Universe for years, and in some cases, decades afterwards. But (you knew there was a "but" coming, didn’t you) something struck me about those stories as I read them now, and to talk about it, I have to commit something like comic book heresy. You see, the conventional wisdom these days is that Jack Kirby created all the characters, plotted all the stories, and deserves all the credit for Marvel’s success, while Stan Lee just rode his coattails and screwed him over. Well, I wasn’t there, of course, so I can’t say for sure who did what, but I can tell you this: some of those stories that Kirby plotted and drew make almost no sense. You’re reading along, and suddenly you think, “Wait a minute. How did those characters get over there?” or “Wait a minute. Where’d all those characters go who were in the last panel?” or “Wait a minute. How could they possibly know that?” Numerous times in reading the first eight stories in this volume, I got the impression that Lee’s scripts were desperately trying to impose some sort of logic on art that looked great but didn’t come close to telling a coherent story. That changes to a certain extent in the final two stories, which were drawn by Don Heck. My memory is that comic book fans, even in that era, considered Heck a second-rate artist, but in reading the stories now, while Heck’s work lacks Kirby’s sense of drama and flair, the stories themselves flow a lot better.

I really don’t mean this to come across as Kirby-bashing. I love Kirby’s work. But I think Lee deserves a lot of credit, too, which he usually doesn’t get these days. Although he probably did hog too much credit back in the Sixties, so maybe it balances out. And I’m talking strictly about the creative end of the process, too. I know next to nothing about the business end of the comic book business, then or now.

All that said, what’s really important to me about books like this is that while I’m reading them, I feel like I’m eleven and twelve years old again. That’s worth a lot these days.

And I’ll have some comments on those Spider-Man volumes in the near future.