Prophecies from the Spirit World (King Kirby 087)

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 got to California too late (King Kirby 028)

We spoke of Jack Kirby's collages last time. Let's take a look at an experiment done in Spirit World magazine. (You want a number? Fine. #1. But #2 was never printed, so generally it's implied. Okay?) Spirit World was one of a pair of magazines that came out during The King's 1970s period at DC, the other being In The Days Of The Mob. While both were advertised in the comics that came to our local stand back in those pre-comicshop days, the only way to get the actual magazines for us was to mail away for them. That made them very rare for us, and probably hurt sales tremendously since neither magazine continued past the pilot issue.
Jack and his assistants (Steve Sherman & Mark Evanier, names to note) edited the magazines and produced most of the material. Collages were used on several occasions, and in one instance they formed the graphics for the entire story. It's only 3 pages in length, so lets take a look. First, here's how it's described in the table of contents:

...and now, our feature presentation...

 For those of you who weren't there - Welcome to the 70s. (It was only 1971, but Jack was always a bit ahead of schedule)

Children Of The Flaming Wheel! by Jack Kirby from Spirit World #1(1971)