We looked briefly at a collage story from Jack Kirby's newsstand magazine Spirit World - let's go back for another look. But first, here's a better look at the cover since we ran a small sized version last time:
Jack also opened the magazine with his collage work acting as a 3-page prologue to the cover story:
As you may recall, In The Days Of The Mob used the character of the Warden to act as a framing device linking together the stories of the book. Spirit World also used this classic storyteller/host tradition. Meet Dr. E. Leopold Maas...
The end of the magazine leaves us with this dire prediction:
Oddly enough, had one visited Paris in the middle of 1983, they might have arrived for the Orly Airport Attack in July.
Just precisely ambiguous enough for the end page of a piece on Nostradamus.
All pages from Spirit World (1971)
I've got the original mags of 'Spirit World' and 'In The Days Of The Mob', as well as the DC hardback reissues from a couple or so years back. Unfortunately, they deliberately omitted the line 'Prediction: The President Must Die!' from the cover of the SW book, which makes me wonder why it was seen as being okay back in the '70s, but not nowadays. Ironically, given who the President is at the moment... well, I don't need to finish that thought, do I?
ReplyDeleteThey did a hard cover reissue of the titles? Well, cool. I was so busy hunting for the old original material that i paid only scant attention, at best, to the recent commemorative releases and series. I do have The Kamandi Challenge piling up to read, but not much else as yet. I'm glad to hear these were among the retro titles released - they were completely unseen by a whole lot of people who wanted them back when they came out.
ReplyDeleteAs I recall, the Secret Service started actively investigating even non-threats like that cover blurb about a decade after the book was released. Using it now is inviting trouble from the Freds*.
*(Not a typo, it's a classic acronym - FRED = Fucking Ridiculous Economic Disaster)
Inside, the cover was as originally presented - it was just the exterior cover that omitted the line. The hardbacks are very nice, containing the 'never-published' 2nd issues. (Though some of the contents were later coloured and published in other mags.)
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