Sidelining Martin Goodman

Continuing essay to counter the constant erroneous corporate propaganda regarding the early days of Marvel Comics.

Another thing that the Lee droolies like to do is to claim that Stan Lee was a marketing genius guiding the corporate ship known as Marvel Comics. This never happened. Martin Goodman, the publisher and owner, held Lee in such low esteem that his junior cousin-by-marriage had to clear everything through the owner (Goodman) for all but the most minor decisions. Contrary to the lies made popular by later faux-historians, you can see that Martin Goodman was a hands-on publisher who paid very close attention to all of his publishing ventures, especially to Marvel Comics. Once Kirby and Ditko had revitalized the comics publishing portion of his publishing outfit he did not want the Comics Code Authority, or muckraking journalists, to come down on him with complaints against the material he was printing.  He was enjoying his resurgent economic success, while also searching for a buyer to make him a rich man. He didn't need complications and kept a very close eye on Marvel.

I mention all of this because I was recently referred to an article which repeats the fallacy that Lee was some kind of marketing genius, giving him credit where none is due.

Lee never marketed anything. Just as he never created, plotted, or wrote anything.

Lee was a rudderless shill. He depended upon upper management for all direction. All of it. Martin Goodman was the man who built a publishing empire from essentially nothing. Goodman hired the talent, paid them, saw to the day to day running of the show and made sure the bills were paid. And he certainly knew how and where to advertise and to make the decisions concerning customer outreach.

This article claimed that it was Lee who saw a way to expand sales by noticing new customers who hadn't been targeted. However, Lee didn't see any untapped market. He never directed any kind of promotional campaign or fan outreach. Hell, he couldn't buy paperclips for the office without permission so how was he supposed to find and toss advertising money at this great invisible prospective customer base?

Reporters like the fellow who wrote that article make a common error. They had seen that lying blowhard on TV, radio, or in too many print interviews for them to formulate any honest conclusions remotely based on the truth.

Lee was never executive material who could be trusted with a responsibility as important as marketing. If no corporate powerhouse had ever wanted his one dimensional car salesman schtick, his own cousin wasn't going to trust him with something as serious as advertising Marvel Comics. Lee was a subnormal jackass, and he was far too stupid to create any complicated or nuanced business models. He couldn't even plot the comic strips so often credited to him!

However, Lee was a shill who had value to various Marvel owners (and Marvel owners ONLY!) due to his (and the corporations) unfounded claims over the intellectual property stolen from creators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

Giving that creep credit for the hard work of Martin Goodman is akin to saying that the actor who portrayed The Marlboro Man was the Chief Financial Officer of a multi-national tobacco corporation. Would you say that some nameless actor was the business mastermind of the vast Marlboro Cigarette Company? Only a snookered moron would make that claim. Like the Marlboro Man, Lee portrayed a garish, posed, false character trotted out to blinker the hoi polloi. They train people to do that. They direct them how to say it, and when to repeat their scripted lines. But the costumed actors don't run the company. Neither did a shill working for Martin Goodman, Cadence Industries, etc.

To paraphrase Steve Ditko: A shill is a shill.

A fiction.

Martin Goodman, the man who actually built and guided a publishing company.

Liar, Liar

 Presented as the alternative to decades of propaganda.

As I predicted long ago, with the death of the corporate shill known as Stan Lee, the truth about his career in comics is coming out at a more rapid pace than when he was still breathing. But while it's easier to get the word out concerning his moral crimes, it's no easier to deal with his fans when one is telling the truth about him.

I can only describe his fan base as religious fanatics. They have been fed a line about his divinity and if you challenge this line you are at risk of the same kind of attack you would expect from a crazed fundamentalist, or from a rabid animal. When you tell what really happened at Marvel after Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko transformed the publisher from a faltering outfit into a tremendous success the Liar's true believers will descend on you with knives out.

Here, then, are the basic truths:

What we know of today as the Marvel Universe was created mainly by Jack Kirby. To a lesser extent it was also given commercial success by Steve Ditko. There were additional contributors such as Bill Everett, Wally Wood, Dick Ayers, Don Heck, and others; but the mass of the modern fables emerged from the minds and talents of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

The big liar we call Stan Lee (Stanley Lieber) was the editor for the comics arm of a publishing company started by Martin Goodman. Lee was cousin-by-marriage to Goodman, so his installation into the company was an act of pure nepotism. No talent was involved, and no meritocracy was at work. A relative was shown the ropes and was provided with a steady paycheck at a very young age. Lee's lack of talent is obvious in that he never left the employ of his relative and stayed there over the years, never venturing forth to find gainful employment elsewhere, and never proving himself as anyone valuable enough for a head hunter to come calling. It's often said that Lee was a good salesman, but I always found him to be on a level with a scamming used car salesman. His personality was odious, at best.

But what service did he provide for Martin Goodman? After Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were allowed to create new titles to cash in on the superhero craze of the early 1960s, Goodman needed a salaried employee whose name could be attached to the intellectual property to cement the company's claim to that property. And, as the only salaried employee at the comics arm of Martin Goodman's corporation, Lee fit the bill.

So: the liar's name went on every book as writer. Later, Lee claimed to have created all of the titles and characters at the early Marvel Comics. He claimed to have created the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, the Uncanny X-Men, Daredevil, the Mighty Thor, Dr. Strange, the Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man, Giant Man, Ant Man, etc. In fact, though, there is zero evidence that Lee invented any of the characters which he claimed to be writing. Also, there are credible claims that he wasn't even writing the parade of successful books appearing from the likes of Kirby, Ditko, Ayers, Wood, Everett, Heck, Romita, and company. Keep in mind that before the explosion of creativity provided from Kirby and Ditko, Goodman's most profitable enterprise was publishing a line of men's adventure fiction magazines. There was a  constant parade of talented writers in and out of the  building who were only too happy to expand dialog already provided  by the artists who were actually not only creating the characters, but plotting and writing them. For a couple of hours work these ghost-writers could earn grocery money. No big deal that another man's name went on. For in those days comic scripting was held in lower esteem than even the pulp fiction they were producing for Martin Goodman. Who cared if a no-talent bum put his signature to it?

Over the following months and years as Marvel's fortunes expanded Goodman sought to sell the company. I can imagine what he was thinking. He'd already seen his comic book business go through a boom and bust cycle from the early 1940s and through the 1950s, and he could have figured he was riding another wave that might soon crest and fall. He wanted to get out while the company was a ripe crop ready to be harvested and sold. Therefore, more than ever he needed a corporate shill that enabled him to claim ownership of the intellectual property that rightly resided with the men who had sweated it out: mainly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. For that purpose alone, Lee's lying presence was invaluable.

Eventually, Goodman did sell Marvel. For enough cash so that he was able to retire to Florida as a wealthy man. What he never considered was that the value of Jack Kirby's creations was far more than he ever could have dreamed. The publisher never figured that his connivance with Liar Lee was a theft that would someday be measured in tens of billions of dollars. I cannot think of another theft of intellectual property that rivals what was stolen from Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. The monetary value of the likes of X-Men, Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Avengers, Dr. Strange, etc. staggers the imagination. And as that wealth has increased, so did the lies of the man whose professional existence was provided for that sole purpose. And also continued the willingness for the various corporate owners to go along--they still needed that lie to live on.

In fact, though, we all know who created the characters. Kirby, Ditko, Everett, and others did. Who wrote the books? The artists who illustrated it were expected to plot and also write them. The editor placed his name on the credits page as "writer" when there is zero evidence he ever wrote anything other than poorly rendered promotional blurbs and columns, and an occasional butchering of dialog and scripts in some issues. The corporations claimed ownership for everything because of the existence of a sole salaried employee.

Today, as I said, the truth is emerging. We now know who created the characters and wrote and illustrated the stories. It wasn't the lying editor.

But telling this simple truth can still be a tough row to hoe. One has to deal with the army of zealots who believe the fallacy that a slimy grifter created the characters they love. These fans equate the face of a gleaming, grinning slug with their beloved comics. And there are the professional sellouts working in the comics industry who still feel the urge to kiss corporate ass after the lying bastard they once worked for is dead and rotting. Hopefully, these prostitutes will come to their senses and find enough dignity to stop lying for a dead thief and the corporate master he served. Maybe that will happen. But I doubt it.

ACCORDING TO JACK KIRBY by Michael Hill. Highly recommended.

The Amazing Spider-Man. Created by, plotted by, written by, penciled by, inked by Steve Ditko.

Working Class Writer.

I'm getting closer to completing the second of the Working Class Hero superhero novels. I was well into the book when the previous publisher refused to promote the first one and wouldn't commit to the second book. I also, at the time, couldn't get him to relinquish the rights to the first book so I essentially stopped working on the sequel. Then, unexpectedly last year, the publisher returned to me the rights to all of my books and I could proceed.

My  Working Class Hero novel has been selling consistently well for several months. Learning how to advertise on my own has been a learning process, but I've gotten the hang of it.

When the publishing rights were returned to me, I reworked the second book and moved it in an altered direction from where it had been headed. I'm getting a kick out of creating new characters, and adding additional backstory to many of the heroes, villains, and assorted folk from the first novel. My idea all along for Billy B and his cohorts was to emulate the periodical comics of the Silver Age. I want to deliver continuing tales, sometimes with cliffhangers, sometimes wrapping the narrative neatly with a satisfying conclusion.

I've set myself a deadline for BILLY B VERSUS THE TROUBLE BOYS (WORKING CLASS HERO #2), and hope to announce a publication date in the near future. The third book (tentatively titled WORKING CLASS HERO: A BAKER'S DOZEN) is already plotted and outlined. I hope to get both books published in 2021.

 

WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of a Superhuman.

Ebook is Live!

Well, the ebook version of the updated version of WORKING CLASS HERO is live. You can pick that one up, now. Or you can wait a day or two and buy the paperback copy which should be ready for order within a day or two.

Here are a couple of bits of promotional material coming up for a multi-author campaign that will begin on June 15 and run for a few weeks.

James Robert Smith was surrounded by comics as a kid. His dad owned several bookstores that sold used and rare books. So, from the 1960s onward he had access to his father's warehouse of comics filled with over 250,000 back issue Silver Age and Golden Age comic books.

Influenced by the works of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and their creation, the Marvel Universe, WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of a Superhuman is the novel that Smith has been itching to write for decades.

Smith’s latest novels are THE EMISSARY and WORKING CLASS HERO. His short story collection A CONFEDERACY OF HORRORS appeared from Hippocampus Press in 2015. Among his other novels have been DEADLOCKED, THE COALITION, THE NEW ECOLOGY OF DEATH, FOUR FROM MANGROVE, and others. He has written comic scripts for publishers as diverse as Marvel Comics, Kitchen Sink, New Comics, Basement Comics, and others. His short fiction (well over 80 sales the last time he bothered to count) has appeared in dozens of markets from Fear Magazine, Weird Tales, Deathrealm, and others; to various anthologies in both hardback and paperback. He optioned his first novel, THE FLOCK, to Warner Brothers.

Mr. Smith recently retired from his day job as a laborer for the United States Postal Service and he lives with his wife in North Carolina. When he’s not at home writing he can generally be found hiking, backpacking, kayaking, or camping in various mountain areas in either the eastern Appalachians or the western Rocky Mountains. He’s an accomplished amateur photographer with landscapes and wildlife as his primary subjects.

His next novel will be BILLY B VERSUS THE TROUBLE BOYS, his second novel in the Working Class Hero series.

 

When people exhibit superhuman abilities after being afflicted with a new condition called Adult Onset Hyper-Development Disorder (AOHD), Uncle Sam steps in to take control of them. You either become a Fed, or an enemy of the state. Upon contracting the disorder, Mike Evans finds himself given the code name of Billy B, and tagged with the label of a Level Seven superhuman. They don't get much tougher or more powerful in the world of "Odds", as the public begins to refer to them.

With such power, Mike is given leadership of a team of other Odds and they are based in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina to act as defenders of their part of the east coast against all threats super-powered. He and his teammates Gila, Shylock Holmes, Amber Ember, and Constrictor do well at their jobs until exactly twelve people claiming to be the gods of Olympus appear. Can they handle this dozen come back to claim Earth after 2,000 years? Or have they met their match?

Find out in WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of a Superhuman. First in a series!

WORKING CLASS HERO, the Paperback Cover!

The publisher sent me the image for the paperback version of the cover for WORKING CLASS HERO.

Just so everyone understands, I haven't had so much fun writing a novel since I penned THE FLOCK which ended up being optioned for film by Warner Brothers. The whole experience was so much fun I had to pry myself from the keyboard to do things like eat and bathe and exercise.

Working on the sequel now and should have it completed soon.

From the dedication:

"This book is dedicated to Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, two men who created a Universe."

WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of Billy B., A Hyper Human is my latest novel. Combining my working class background with my life-long love of comic book superheroes, I have crafted a work of affection for the loudly-colored characters of my childhood.

MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1

Normally I don't buy extra copies of books that I already have in my collection. However, sometimes I will if two qualities present themselves: a very low price and nicer condition than what I already own. These two things came together this week when I happened upon a copy of MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1 from Charlton Comics.

I got this book for obvious reasons. It features stories created by, written by, illustrated by, and inked by Steve Ditko. Here we see The Question, one of his creations that has been almost as long-lived as either Spider-Man or Dr. Strange. He created The Question after he walked away from Marvel Comics and was making his living away from the thieving influence of Stan Lee and Martin Goodman.

I'm not sure who did the dialog in this book, but it's credited to "D.C. Glanzman" who was, apparently, a real person, but it has also been said that Ditko would sometimes use the name when doing his own dialog. As with most of Ditko's work, the dogma is laid on pretty thick. So I suspect that the words in those balloons are at least 50% Ditko...perhaps 100%. It's certainly a lot different from the silly dialog that was present in Spider-Man, so my suspicion is that someone was following Ditko's notes closely--if it wasn't Ditko himself. When I was younger I thought that Lee had rewritten Ditko's dialog on Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. But these days I suspect that the dialog was mainly written by many of the pulp writers who were in the building working on Goodman's various pulp titles.

At any rate, I picked up a better-than-fine copy of the book. It may go permanently into my collection, or perhaps I'll sell it later and keep the lesser condition book.

A nicer condition copy of MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1, featuring THE QUESTION, created by Steve Ditko, plotted by Steve Ditko, penciled and inked by Steve Ditko. (But, alas, copyright by DC Comics.)

STRANGE TALES #103

My latest pick up for my comic collection. This one's great for several reasons. It fills a gap in my run of Strange Tales, it's a Jack Kirby book, and it also has a Steve Ditko story! So I'll go through this one and pretend I'm an eight-year-old kid again, discovering the world of comics created by Kirby and Ditko! This copy is nice. It has some classic 'Marvel chipping', but is otherwise in decent shape. Marvel books during this period were notorious for having low-quality cover stock that is susceptible to chipping along the leading edges. I can live with it.

My copy of STRANGE TALES #103.

FANTASTIC FOUR #13

I haven't added a significant book to my Fantastic Four collection in a while. Today I nabbed a copy of issue #13. This was a book I'd been searching for in the right grade at the right price for some time. I finally got lucky and got one from a back issue dealer here in North Carolina.

This book is a nice pickup for several reasons. It features the first appearance of one of Jack Kirby's major creations, The Watcher. And fortunately for me, and for some reason which I cannot fathom, the Watcher's first appearance has not unduly affected the book's price (as yet). If they ever put him in a film, the "value"of the book will insanely go through the roof. But for now I was safe and got it for a very reasonable price.

Another thing I quite like about this issue of the comic is that it was inked by Steve Ditko. Ditko did not ink very many of Kirby's stories, so it's always a treat to see the results when it did happen. I especially like his interpretation of Ben Grimm as the Thing, which is so different from that of most other artists who inked Kirby's pencils.

All in all, I was extremely happy with this addition to my collection!

My copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #13.

My Two Favorite Comic Stories

As a kid, I loved superhero comics. As an adult...not so much. Except, of course, in the realm of nostalgia. I still adore those comic stories that inspired and fascinated me as a kid and enjoy looking at them through the lens of decades of history.

My two favorite superhero comic book yarns were written and illustrated by (of course) my two favorite creators of that period of my life: Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. I won't get too much into the history of the pair of stories that so influenced me, except to reiterate that Steve Ditko created, wrote, and illustrated The Amazing Spider-Man; and Jack Kirby created, wrote, and illustrated the Fantastic Four. Neither man had a "co-creator"--just an editor.

I've also covered both of these stories in past essays here in my blog. So I'll just list the stories and the issues in which they appeared and leave my earlier words to stand; and perhaps add some depth to those essays on another day.

The first of these great stories was the Master Planner story arc that ran for several issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the finest super-hero story ever done. Ditko outdid not only himself with this adventure, but all other super-hero comic creators before or since. A few have come close to capturing the depth and breadth of what he was achieving, but no one has surpassed the sheer power of this tale.

When he was allowed, Ditko could create some of the finest covers being done in comics.

Yeah, the fans had never seen Spider-Man done like this.

Despair was never portrayed quite like this. Someday I need to do a study of the way Ditko utilized the imagery of water in his comics.

Years later, after Ditko had left his employment at Marvel Comics and abandoned his amazing creations there, his former colleague was winding down his own tenure at that company. Jack Kirby pretty much created not only most of the characters at Marvel, but the company itself. No one else was as important to that company as Jack Kirby. I have studied his run on his most popular title there, FANTASTIC FOUR, and always noticed that he seemed to let up on the gas after the "Him" storyline in issues 66 & 67. Further research led me to the conclusion that his editor there had wrecked his story, almost completely nullifying its effectiveness and mucking up the dialog pretty much beyond belief. Thereafter, the explosion of creativity that Kirby had lavished on the book to that point ceased. The stories were still excellent and the art was still the most dynamic around, but there were almost no new characters coming out of the book. Kirby was, I am convinced, fed up with seeing the sweat of his brow being capitalized by his employers with nothing for him beyond his page rate. Further, not only was his intellectual property being robbed from him, his stories were often being mangled by the ego-mad idiot editor under whom he worked. Thus, the flow of new properties to his bosses slowed to a trickle.

Then, in issue #90 of the title, a new story arc appeared. The Skrull/Slave arc. It could be argued that the plot was partially based on the germ of an idea from the TV series Star Trek. But beyond that it was all classic Kirby. Kirby had always been fascinated by mob characters and science fiction. And so he plunged his comic book alter-ego, Ben Grimm, into a long story steeped in mob culture and a pure science-fiction, planet-spanning adventure. It was, I now know, Kirby's fond farewell to his character of Ben Grimm as he planned his move away from Marvel and to fields greener for his creative energies.

Symbolism. One of Kirby's earliest creations for Marvel was the alien race, the Skrulls, who were shape-shifters. Here, he is tricked and kidnapped by a Skrull posing as his friend, Reed Richards. Fooled again, sucker!

Ben Grimm, in chains!

One of the most effective and dramatic covers I've seen in superhero comics.

The finale. Torgo was the major character (I can't say "villain" because he truly was not such) that Kirby created for this story arc. However, for all the emotional power of Torgo, Kirby chose to give him a kind of generic android appearance similar to the kind of thing he'd been handing off to his employers since issue #68 of the title. Let them create their OWN unique images to exploit!

The Comic Gods

The comic book gods were kind to me today because I received two books from two of the masters of comic book storytelling: Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

The Kirby book is a Golden Age comic; JUSTICE TRAPS THE GUILTY #22. This was published by the Hillman outfit who published until 1953. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby did a lot of work for them, mainly for their crime and police publications. This issue only features a Kirby cover, but it's pretty nifty. Inside is some art by Mort Meskin who sometimes illustrated so much like Kirby that when I was a kid I would get Meskin confused with Kirby.

Classic Kirby cover!

The other book that arrived on my doorstep is the new effort from Steve Ditko. Ditko is closing in on 90 years old but is still producing new comics! His right wing rants are the opposite of the way I interpret the world. Some of my friends ask me how I can enjoy his work when he obviously has nothing but contempt for those whose views are as far to the left as my own. All I can tell them is that I have always identified with his positions on responsibility and the similarity of the black and white world of good and evil. (Of course what I would see as "wrong", Ditko would see as "correct".) Still and all, I never tire of his work and enjoy it so much that I was one of the supporters who tossed in money for the Kickstarter campaign that resulted in the production of this nifty 32-page comic.

Steve Ditko's latest!

Comic Collection Additions.

I haven't had much time to devote to my comic collecting hobby lately. In fact, I've had quite a dry period for that because of my workload. I've been way too busy to work on the collection very much.

But I have picked up a couple of comics recently.

Adding to my early Marvel collection I grabbed a copy of STRANGE TALES #112. Jack Kirby cover. One of my pals has made the pitch that if the cover for these early superhero stories was by Kirby, then he likely did the plot also. He'd hand in the art for the cover along with the plot. Of course the plot would later be credited to a certain asshole editor who wrote nothing and created nothing and who slapped his name on everything to pad his paycheck and to ensure that the company retained copyright.

This issue has a story illustrated by Dick Ayers. When I was a kid I never liked any of the Human Torch stories that Ayers illustrated. There was something in those days that I found crude about his art style and I always found it an effort to read any story that he illustrated. Of course now I have a greater appreciation for him, but there's always that nagging memory of my childhood feelings coloring my opinion of his work.

The story dialog is credited to someone named "Joe Carter". I didn't know who this was, so I asked around on the Internet about him, and was informed that Mr. Carter was, in fact, Jerry Siegel, one half of the creative team who gave us Superman. In the early 60s he was still writing for the industry and he did the dialog on a number of these Human Torch yarns.

There's also a good Steve Ditko science-fiction story in the mix. All through the first few years of the superhero renaissance at Marvel there was a backlog of science-fiction and monster stories written and illustrated by the likes of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, Paul Reinman, and the rest of the Marvel bullpen in those days. So Marvel would pad the issues out with these unpublished stories that had already been commissioned and paid for. It's actually for these monster stories mainly by Kirby and Ditko that I started collecting comics again.

STRANGE TALES #112.

Another book that I picked up was an EC. I don't focus on collecting Golden Age comics, but I do enjoy buying EC books now and again. I've bought a number of them this year, and this one was a real find. It's in decent shape and is currently the oldest EC comic that I own, published in 1950. It's #16, but is in reality #2 of the title. It used the numbering from a previous title and after #17 the numbering started with #4. So there are actually two "#15 through #17", which can be confusing.

Owning this book, I'm reminded why EC is considered as having the highest quality stories and artwork of any mainstream comic book publisher in the history of the format. I hope to keep buying ECs over the next few years.

HAUNT OF FEAR #16 (actually #2) with a great Johnny Craig cover.

It Sold for HOW MUCH?!

Some years back, when I got out of the comic book retailing business, I swore off the industry. I didn't even want to write for the comic book industry anymore, abandoning my nascent career in selling comic scripts to various publishers. I was completely burned out on the literary/art form.

Years passed. For a long time I didn't so much as crack the covers of a comic book or enter the doors of a comic book shop. If I passed by a rack of comics in any kind of retail establishment I tended to ignore them.

But, somewhere along the way, nostalgia began gnawing at the old bones. So I picked up a few low-grade copies of The Amazing Spider-Man created/written/penciled/inked by Steve Ditko. I got a kick out of the books (I think they were issues #16 and #19), so I figured, 'What the heck? I could probably buy all of the Ditko issues in low to mid-grade without too much trouble'. So, I set about doing that.

Then I decided that I wouldn't mind owning a lot of the pre-hero Marvel comics that Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko created together, and I started collecting those, too. And then, I decided to take a crack at buying a complete set of Fantastic Four, but only the issues created/written/penciled by Jack Kirby.

I was, of course, hooked again on comics. And I've been at it for some time, carefully assembling a collection of the titles that I want the most and having no desire whatsoever to again enter the business of retailing at any level. But one of the things that amazes me is that I got back into it buying lower grade copies of the books I grew up loving. That way I could actually handle and read the books without having to worry about risking my "investment". And I do read my old comics, unlike so many who just pursue it as a kind of pure investment strategy, seeking to keep them in as high a grade as is possible

But something really weird has happened in the past couple of years. And it's that lower grade copies of the Silver Age books that I have been buying have exploded in value. Books that I thought would never be in high demand are just that. People are paying crazy prices for the kinds of books that I would once never have considered selling for anything more than pennies.

It's a crazy world.

My copy of Strange Tales 89, the first appearance of Jack Kirby creation, Fin Fang Foom. Kirby really liked alliteration.

My copy of Kirby creation Fantastic Four #8.

My copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #1, created by Steve Ditko.

My copy of Strange Tales #114. Captain America returns! (Or does he?!)

Golden Age Kirby

I landed another hard-to-find Golden Age Joe Simon/Jack Kirby comic for my collection. This one is WIN A PRIZE COMICS #1. Simon and Kirby were trying anything and everything in the years they were working to be largely independent creators. Buy the comic and send in your name and address for a chance to win a prize! I think this title was part of the material that Charlton Comics bought from Simon and Kirby when their own publishing scheme faded.

The title failed, but it's an interesting package. Contained are stories of war, science-fiction, mystery, humor, drama, classics. Included are the type of yarn that Kirby later did for Marvel that were claimed to have been written by his editor there. I'd laugh, but it's all too said.

I had initially purchased this comic with an eye toward re-selling it for a profit (I got a really good deal on it). However, it's such a neat book that I think I'll keep it as a permanent part of my Kirby collection.

The cover to my copy of WIN A PRIZE #1.

Simon and Kirby! I suspect Kirby inked this. Not sure.

What a wacky yarn! With typically wacky Kirby characters!

STRANGE TALES #120.

I picked up a copy of STRANGE TALES #120. This is another title that I've been actively pursuing for a few years. I haven't managed to build up a big collection of them, but I have been chipping away at it. I want all of the pre-hero issues that feature art by Kirby and Ditko, of course. But I also want the issues that feature Dr. Strange stories during Steve Ditko's run on the title. I don't want any of the issues featuring Dr. Strange written by anyone other than Steve Ditko.

A lot of the Human Torch stories in STRANGE TALES were written by Dick Ayers. He was not my favorite writer and some of his stories just weren't very well written. I had forgotten that this issue features a story written and illustrated by Jack Kirby. I think Kirby did this one because he wanted to do a cross-over tale with his new creation, the X-Men. In this story he does a team-up yarn with the Human Torch and Ice Man, which is a natural! The characters worked well together in the story. Another fine bit for me is that, while the rest of the team isn't in the issue very much, the rest of the Fantastic Four does make an appearance and there is some good interaction between Johnny Storm and his teammates.

My copy of STRANGE TALES #120. Great cover!

The establishing shot is right out of the pages of THE FANTASTIC FOUR!

The way Ditko opens this book you almost get the impression that he's written a story that merely has Dr. Strange as a narrating device. Very reminiscent of Ditko's weird stories for the title before the superheroes took over.

I love Ditko's comic pages! He did wonders within the otherwise pedestrian grids that he set up to tell his stories!