Some things just can't be explained by current science...
Is this a lost "Kirby Klassic" from the 1950s?
When Prize Comics' Monster of Frankenstein title was revived during the horror comic boom of the early 1950s, besides a wonderfully-gruesome version of Dick Briefer's previously-humorous Monster, it featured a number of two to four page "fillers".
Most of these tales appear to be, at the very least, laid-out by Jack Kirby.
This never-reprinted story from V3N3 (1954) is a prime example.
The Grand Comics Database lists the story's illustrator as Marvin Stein, who worked primarily for the Simon & Kirby studio, so this most likely was an S&K "inventory" story laid-out by Kirby and meant for insertion wherever editorial page count came up short.
Sadly, the writer of the story is, as in so many cases, unknown...
Just struck me... I wonder if the tell of a Kirby script during the Simon and Kirby years is that he didn’t exactly write a story but laid it out directly on the board and, at some point either he or someone else scripted it.
ReplyDeleteSo here, I could live with a Kirby plotting credit with scripting a question mark.
By that surmising, I wouldn't credit Kirby for that Ditko story you posted the same week as this story.
IIRC, Simon's credits and actual work with S&K don't fully correlate. I believe that given that he was the business guy, there was far less creative work by him than credits would have one think. I also believe that instead of creative work proper, he did a lot of editing.
That said, I could see him writing that Ditko story.
And to me there's a whole question mark re identifying Kirby scripting. Compare the scripts of S&K stories, his brief Yellow Claw run, his 1960s Marvel scripting and his seventies work and I dunno if they all seem written by the same person. Of course, styles change, scripts get edited... Still, a mystery to me.