Two New Kirby Finds

I landed two nice Jack Kirby books for my collection. Both are books that I have never encountered, so I made sure to pick them up. Fortunately I was able to get them at a good price.

Kirby did this title in the days when Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie had become huge as TV and film characters. Every kid wanted to be like Davy Crockett (at least the Disney version as portrayed by Fess Parker). Also, this was in the days when Simon and Kirby were packaging and producing titles for a number of companies. WESTERN TALES was an effort for Harvey Comics.

I'm really pleased with this pick up.

WESTERN TALES #31. This copy is in excellent condition. I was lucky to have grabbed this one.

WESTERN TALES #33. This issue featured Jim Bowie instead of Crockett.

Black Magic

I just added this book to my collection. It's one of the Prize Comics titles for which the Simon and Kirby Studios produced so many stories, assembling contents for the publisher's titles. In my estimation, Jack Kirby had a real talent for expressing dread and horror in his tales of mystery and suspense. In this book there are two stories written and penciled by Kirby and both of them are powerful. The second is particularly creepy as it deals with what we would these days call a "zombie". In the story a corpse in the morgue wakes up and begins a mindless rampage of violence and murder. I wonder if George Romero read this issue?!

BLACK MAGIC #25, July 1953.

Another Golden Age Kirby Book

I added one more Golden Age Jack Kirby book to my collection. The Simon & Kirby Studio turned out a fair amount of romance comics for various publishers. One of their more successful titles was YOUNG ROMANCE and its spinoff YOUNG LOVE. This is a copy of YOUNG LOVE #1, from 1949. Apparently the titles had some weird numbering systems and re-starts along the way. This is the #1 issue that appeared in 1949.

The cover looks to have Jack Kirby layouts and is signed by "Simon & Kirby". The women and the male figure look like classic Kirby from the period,but the man's face looks to have either been redrawn by someone else, or just very heavily inked until it bears almost no resemblance to a Jack Kirby piece. (It's also possible that the cover was penciled by Simon and then heavily inked by Kirby.)

The interiors have two Kirby stories which I'll try to either photograph or scan later.

YOUNG LOVE #1 (1949).

A guy is running a series on YouTube pairing entire old Jack Kirby stories with music. You can experience rare Jack Kirby comics online--the entire comic with accompanying tunes. It's amazing and needs to be seen. The time and effort he's putting into these is impressive!