A Song Of Ice & Fire (King Kirby 062)

One of the early Marvel titles we haven't mentioned yet is Journey Into Mystery/The Mighty Thor. It was actually one of my favorites, right after Fantastic Four. I was a mythology buff, with a fondness for Norse & Egyptian ascendant over  the usual Greek/Roman tales. So it was pretty easy to hook me at the concept level, and then they started digging into the mythology, often in the back-up tales in Journey Into Mystery. Even when Jack Kirby wasn't drawing the lead tales in JIM, he was rocking through the old mythology in the back-up tales. Those tales let him cut loose from many typical restrictions in the other comics. Unbound by mortal architecture and mundane constraints, his imagination had more room to run free.

Now, let's blow the horn and play that song, eh? A song of Ice...

...and fire...

Later, after digging through the old myths, the series really took off when Thor turned to the cosmos and began to forge modern myths - one of which might look quite familiar to modern viewers:

Okay. Some of you may be feeling cheated at  this point. Here we've been talking about Thor, and there's been no sign of him. I can hear the grumbles from the acolytes. So, here - have a poster, a sketch, and a few covers -

Hopefully, that'll hold you until we return to the Thunderer.
(And return we will)

all art by Jack Kirby(& inkers), stories of Ice & Fire from Journey Into Mystery #s 98 & 99 (1963)

Still Rad, After All These Years (King Kirby 061)

Snell, over at Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep!, has a regular reminder that the Vision Is Radder Than You Think. And he's not wrong. In fact, i'll go one further and say that the Vision has been Radder than you think for Longer than you think. As evidence, i submit these Jack Kirby & (usually) Joe Simon splash pages from over 75 years ago for the courts' consideration:

If those don't convince you, how about when the Vision battled Satan himself?

Now that you are doubtlessly convinced in this matter, enjoy the radness of Simon & Kirby's Vision vs. Dinosaurs, depicted by Jack Kirby (inker unknown):

Boom. Boom. Out go the lights...

the vision by Jack Kirby & Joe Simon (mostly) from Marvel Mystery Comics 14-27 (1941)

Go Ahead - Take A Guess (King Kirby 060)

Quick question:
What do PT Barnum, Daniel Boone, George Washington Carver, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, and Robert E. Lee have in common? They are all Americans, but the answer we're looking for isn't quite that easy. I'll give you a bit to think about it.
Since they are all Americans, here's a nice Jack Kirby drawing of Captain America. Scroll down past Cap when you've got your answer, if you're playing along at home. (Or work. We're not telling anyone)

Welcome back.
If your answer was "They all had biographies drawn by Jack Kirby" -  Good Job!

Nor were they alone. Just take a gander at this list:

Quite a famous roster. Hmm...
I don't recognize one of the only four women in this collection. Who was Jane Addams?

Well, damn. A Nobel Peace Prize winner who seems to have actually earned the award. But she seems rather forgotten 70 years later.

And, wait...   who's this? James Cash Penney?

Now, how did J.C. Penney get on this list?

Oh...

...published by J.C. Penney Company, Inc. Clever boy...
Got Jack Kirby to draw it.
Very clever boy.

all art by Jack Kirby, mostly for 48 Famous Americans by J.C. Penney Co. (1947)

What'd He Say? (King Kirby 059)

We all know about the famous Marvel Method that led to the artists co-plotting/writing their books by default, right? But, even knowing this we don't know if we read what Jack Kirby was 'writing'.
Mike Gartland wrote a very interesting 4-part series for the Jack Kirby Collector, starting in #21, entitled A Failure To Communicate. In these articles Gartland covered some of the differences between Jack's margin notes explaining the story and the final story as printed. It's a nice series that covers some potential reasons leading to The King's exit from Marvel to DC and worth reading.
The example strip he used in the first part was the Origin Of The Inhumans back-up feature from The Mighty Thor #147. To allow you to more easily track the differences, i've eliminated the text from the lettered pencils and cleaned up Kirby's notes for easy reading. (Don't try to correlate descriptions to word balloons - it won't work) Read through this 5 page story with Kirby's notes to follow the story.
The published version appears below so you can compare, contrast, and critique at your leisure.

There you have Kirby's tale of failure of expectations and predictions for a dark future for the Inhumans.

Pretty much the exact opposite slant of what Jack had intended. One can only guess how annoying that might have been for him.

art from The Mighty Thor #147 by Jack Kirby, inks by Joe Sinnott (1967)

Proto-Kirby Tales (King Kirby 058)

I know we already mention Jack Curtiss as one of the names that Jacob Kurtzberg used for his artwork before settling on Jack Kirby. Have we mentioned Floyd Kelly? I'm not sure, but if not we're mentioning it now.
I gotta say... I'm glad he didn't decide to keep that one. While that Pretty Boy Floyd - Machine Gun Kelly mash-up would work real well for his crime comics work that we were looking at yesterday, it just doesn't match up with his artwork nearly as well as Jack Kirby, or Jack Curtiss, or even Lance Kirby.
(Again - all of these ramblings/ponderings upon names is coming from someone who goes by a number. Take that into consideration)
Anyway - Floyd Kelly did a little piece in Mystery Men Comics #10 starring Wing Turner. It's quite short - only 3 pages. This is from early 1940, just about the time Jack & Joe Simon were starting their first work for Timely/Marvel.

Wing may have returned in the next exciting issue, but Jack (Floyd) did not. He and Joe headed off to make history and fortunes for others. Within the year, Captain America was punching Hitler in the face and making superstars of Simon & Kirby.
But, since that was so short and we mentioned the Jack Curtiss alias a couple times above, here's the first episode of Solar Legion by Jack Curtis from Crash Comics #1:

There were two more 5 page Solar Legion stories in the following issues, and then Jack was gone. I have no clue if the series continued after his departure. This, too, was early 1940 as Jack & Joe were getting started at Timely.

Wing Turner and Solar Legion by Jack "Alias" Kirby for Mystery Men Comics #10 and Crash Comics #1 (1940)