Back Before Jack

To end our King Kirby Weekend, let's go back to the beginning. Back before Jacob Kurtzberg became Jack Kirby. 

In the first three issues of Jumbo Comics from 1939, Jack drew three different strips under three different names. They were all serialized in four page chapters, spread across three different genres. We had they mystery adventure series, The Diary of Dr. Hayward, drawn under the name of Curt Davis...

Using the name Fred Sande, Kirby delivered one of his first Westerns - Wilton of the West ... 

Okay. I lied in the title. It wasn't entirely "before Jack" since Jack Curtis is the name he used on the Literary Adaptation of Dumas' classic novel, The Count of Monte Cristo...

You might have noticed that there were only 8 pages on the last strip. That's because Kirby only drew the first two issues on that one. Interestingly enough, all three strips were taken over by the same artist - Lou Fine. (Oddly, even bizarrely, this seems to be the first time we've mentioned Lou Fine. That'll have to change.)

I believe Jack left the strips because that was when he hooked up with that Joe Simon fellow and the two of them decided to show everyone else how comics were done. But that's just top of my head thinking without checking actual dates.

page art by Jack Kirby from Jumbo Comics #s 1-3 (1939)

Can Little Bobby Draw?

I ran into one of those old debates again - did Bob Kane draw Batman at all?

Kane fought so hard for so long to hide the work of great artists like Dick Sprang and Jerry Robinson, not to mention Batman's Co-Creator Bill Finger. As more and more came to realize that their favorite parts of Batman came from other creators, speculation arose that Bob Kane never actually did any of the work on Batman. With all those Ghosts in the closet, perhaps he never needed to do more than sign a name and collect the checks.

But, let us remember that Bob did do more than just Batman.

For example, Jumbo Comics was running his Peter Pupp back in 1938. Oddly enough, those were reprints. The strip first ran in the UK in Wags the previous year. So here we have international proof that Bob could draw comics. (No, i don't know what was in his closet. Shut up!)

If the pages seem just a bit "off" to you, it may be because they were printed as Colour Comics. Which is to say, they were printed on orange paper, which looks rather garish and diminishes ease of reading. So i leeched that out and 'upgraded' to black & white -

Um...
I don't have issue #4. I can't tell you what happens next.

But i'm fairly sure no bats were involved...

page art by Bob Kane from Jumbo Comics #s 1-3 (1938)

Flights Of Imagination

Sky Girl, as we've seen before, had dreams of flying and adventure. Sometimes, that was very literally the case, as with our two tales today -

Ginger Maguire was always prone to flights of fancy, so it seems only natural that they embraced that idea and run with it...

Of course, there's always the old standby - the conk on the noggin approach ...

pages by Matt Baker from Jumbo Comics #s 78 & 80 (1945)