King Of The West!

Jack"King" Kirby did more westerns than I thought when I first looked into it. While it's not a genre he's famous for, he seemed to have a good handle on the elements of showcasing the western landscapes and staging the action of gun play.  Up top is the very first western cover featuring the King's artwork that I could locate, an issue of Prize Western. Below we have covers for Boys' Ranch, Bulls Eye, Wyatt Earp, Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt, Two-Gun Kid and more. Enjoy some vintage Kirby!

Historical Accuracy Update: Thanks to loyal Dojo reader Britt Reid I learned of an earlier Jack Kirby cover than the Prize Western cover which leads off this gallery. Here it is in all its glory.

Here is Hillman's Western Fighters #1 from 1948 -- it's a good one too.

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The Heap - Volume Three!

In volume three of The Heap from PS Artbooks under a handsome cover from Stephen Bissette, we get some of the very best Heap stories from the hand of Ernie Schroeder who produced these for Airboy Comics from  Hillman Comics way back in the early 50's. After years of struggling for a premise and constant revisions of the approach to the strip, finally there's a focus and a formula which works wonderfully. The Heap's origins as long dead German flying ace Baron Von Emmelman is not forgotten but is relegated to the background and the Heap sprawls the globe finding interesting people and stories. Clunky mechanisms like gods and goddesses are dropped and The Heap is merely allowed to be, a ubiquitous force for good or at the very least a rough justice. In these final days, The Heap finally gets some  cover attention and  is the focus of several.

As can be readily seen The Heap contested with a broad array of monsters and creatures, some of the natural world others from the depths of a magical evil. He beats them all, his prodigious strength and indefatigable power winning the day.

The Heap served as an inspiration for many a swamp creature which rose up later at comic shops all over, but these Heap stories have an elegance and cohesion which often tops the best the later rivals. Man-Thing in particular owes much to The Heap. But The Heap itself would be revived in a many of speaking in later years and we'll take a look at that next week.

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The Heap - Volume Two!

Under a simply delightful Frank Brunner cover, the second volume of the complete The Heap gives the reader a real glimpse of the many varied ways in which the Heap saga unfolded in the pages of Airboy Comics. The Heap stories here are of a varied stripe, with the bizarre plant-human hybrid which evolved from the remains of the WWI German flying ace Baron Von Emmelman getting involved or not so much as the stories unroll. The stories of The Heap more and more reminded me of Will Eisner's The Spirit stories, in which the main character is a relatively minor part of the tale but does often show up to play a critical role at some juncture. Devoid of the ability to speak, The Heap is a hard character to write, but whomever the writers are here (they are almost never identified in the credits) they do a dandy job of creating little parables in which The Heap is a weird figure of judgment or personification of nature.

Eventually the single most important event occurs in this volume, about a third of the way through, when "The Good Heap Artist" makes his debut. That artist, long unknown to his many fans in the early 50's when these stories were arriving on the newsstands from Hillman Comics, is named Ernest C. Schroeder. Ernie Schroeder who passed a way over a decade ago now, took the world of The Heap, which had wandered around from genre to genre trying to find a fit for the mossy beast and created a delightful fusion of mystery and myth.

Things still shifted from time to time and Baron Von Emmelmann's long and ever-changing history would come into play, but increasingly the origins of The Heap were less important than his mere being and his presence was ubiquitous as he wandered the globe appearing in stories which often had their beginnings in events centuries before. The best of The Heap stories are modern fables, populated with good and bad people and weird monsters, The Heap no less among them.

Schroeder would continue on the series until its demise. More on those issues next week -- same Heap time, same Heap channel.

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The Heap - Volume One!

The original swamp monster of comics was named "The Heap". He appeared in the unlikeliest of places, the Hillman series Airboy Comics.  The series wasn't a series at first, but the Heap showed up first as a guest-star of sorts in the adventures of Sky-Wolf, a series by writer Harry Stein and artist Mort Leav. This genesis is detailed in a very thorough introduction by Roy Thomas, who gives us a brief history of swamp monsters in general and the Heap in particular. In this three-volume series we will have at our fingertips all the relevant Heap material from his earliest days. The first volume, detailed in this post, features a wonderfully lush Mike Ploog cover featuring The Heap and Airboy battling some sort of crab monster.

It is in a Sky Wolf story that we first meet the shambling monster who was once upon a time a World War I German flying ace named Baron Von Emmelman. His plane went down in the swamps around Warsaw after a ferocious dogfight and his will to live overcome the clutch of death and his essence merged with the mire to create something new and at first quite terrible.

The Heap proved quite popular and the shambling brute makes a come back. This time he is colored reddish (his hue will be subject to frequent changes in the early days) and in his early appearances he has two fangs which allow him to present as a predator of some sort. This aspect of the character as most other details will change and alter throughout the run.

The Heap will come back several times before being awarded his own ongoing series. When that happens it gets even stranger. We are introduced to a new character, a youngster named   Rickie Wood, a normal enough American lad with a fascination with airplanes. His model of a World War I fighter attracts the attention of the Heap and that lure proves to be a bit of a spellbinder as the Heap hangs around with Rickie for several stories, at times appearing to help the kid and others seeming to threaten him. Rickie for his part appears to be pretty scared of the Heap, though at other points he uses his great power when he begins to realize the power his model has.

Eventually this somewhat tiresome gimmick is dispensed with as is Rickie and the Heap becomes the pawn of the gods, quite literally. The goddess Ceres takes command of him plopping him around the globe to become embroiled with people and events. For a short time he follows a botanist named Drake and later still just sort of shows up when events call for him.

It's all too clear that the writers (all unknown for the most part) didn't really have a clue what to do wit the Heap. His image and essence were compelling but finding a mechanism to bring him into the story was proving to be tricky. You almost get the sense reading these early tales that different writers came up with different premises and each was given several issues to see what clicked.

Eventually the Heap would find his way, but that wouldn't happen until the second volume of his nifty PS Artbook series. More on that next week.

Same Heap time, same Heap channel.

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