This is wonderful. I feel that Aragones's Galactus sticks his tongue out of of the side of his mouth when doing something difficult, like blasting Ego the Living Planet.

-- aaaaa --

-- aaaaaa --

-- aaaaa --

"I think I'll leave this unconscious guy here in the street" has been working for New Yorkers for over a century.

Give no yell!
Void and Null!
Give no cheer!
Toward the Skull!

You can tell how evil the Skull is by how he leaves Cap's costume on the floor instead of folding it into triangles and playing Taps and saluting it.

The EMDR of comic art acquisition stories.

Have you pulled an Al Williamson?

Look on the back to make sure the other side isn't folded over behind it  : )

Oh, man, I love this issue and this page. I remember getting my copy from Cherokee Comics on Hollywood Boulevard -  what a great storyline.

Can I get an amen for the Church of Colan/Leialoha? 

You know I'm in the congregation already. Steve's inks on Brunner, then Buscema, then Colan made the book look great. Janson is a very good inker, but Colan's pencils -- especially for 1970s printing -- needed a nimble line, and Steve is mercurial and fluid. Wasn't so shabby on Starlin beforehand, either.  Steve and Tom Palmer are the two best inkers for Gene - they have a lot of stylistic overlap, but for me, Leialoha has the razor-thin edge.

Hey, I've never seen this page before - great pick up and lotsa great detail I missed when it was published. One thing I love about Gerber is his use of house-style artists to subvert whatever the hell was going on in his storylines, and Gene was in that way utterly perfect as the Howard artist.  "Does Gene even know what's going on here?" Yup. He did.

Well, hey this is good news. I'm so happy for you! I never realized till now the story opens exactly as does the first pulp adventure of The Shadow, suicide off a bridge thwarted by a limo driver presenting the hero's calling card. This gives me courage to steal the same motif, so you getting this page is good news for me, too.

Aw, this is just how my girlfriend and I met!

I think I know who got it. He -- or some guy after  him -- offered it to me in 1994 for $1300.

Holy moley!  What great action - and that Jack drew this book over the weekend never ceases to amaze me

Terrific page - every panel is 5 stars (and you kinda sorta have the cover scene here). Are there no notes in the margins?

Great page - I know a Nazi or two who could stand to see it.

Also I love the composition of the top panel particularly.

This is gorgeous - and a great quest. Everett brought out the best in him.

Wonder what it would look like with Smith inking Everett.

This is so cool! I can't remember seeing another Sal prelim before.

Looking forward to it - also "grader" s/b "grander."

Jeepers.

Really powerful page. The thing I'm currently learning about Kirby Surfer art is how his poses on the board changed from 1966 to 1978.  They go from typical dude-in-a-pipeline images to something grader. This is great to see - thanks for sharing.

Always loved this late silver-age cover. Jack never phoned it in.The first Kirby cover I got was in 1993, and it was $700 (Sandman 3).

I also saw it credited to Esposito but Milgrom makes more sense.

This is wonderful cover -- always wondered where it was. I remember picking this up from my lcs at the time The Avengers was becoming my favorite book. Thank you for sharing it.

This is beautiful, Jim!

Wow! Do we know the story behind it? I mean, besides it being a send-up of Willie?

One of the great things about Kirby original art is how having an individual page to admire makes you see things Jack did that you might have missed the first 800 times you read the story (and by "you" I mean "me"). This page goes from abstract (Metron in an alien landscape/explosions/tech background) to concrete (a guy with a guy on another guy), rapidly grounding the story in conflict. How cool!

Memorable cover! The story inside was great, too - one of my favorite MT stories, along with SwanSong. 

I love this. One of my most treasured postcards is from Zelazny - I wrote him when I was 16 to ask him details of how the Tarot cards work, and he answered in this pinpoint tiny handwriting, at length. 

This is an amazing page, not only for the artwork and the content, but for knowing that in 2020, the story would end with two panels of her solving her problems on Tinder and Spotify. 

I love how Gene's brain worked.  This is great.

Only took me 15 years and a $%&ing pandemic to notice this.  How insanely cool and iconic!  Thanks for leading me here.

Fin Fangtastic! 

First Colan page I ever bought!   I love this issue - Leialoha inked every line with a brush.

This is SO GOOD, Rob - all the way down to the amazing lettering.  It has universal appeal, as aren't we all Arties in our way? 

This is a great page. Made me laugh the first time I read it and still makes me laugh now.

#Eisnerspritz!

Looks like it's still in the Masters of American Comics frame, no?

I love Davis's Rawhide Kid work and this story specifically - what a great splash! He worked smaller than usual, right?

Congratulations - I know this was a long-time goal of yours. Seeing the art at a better size I still can't tell who the inker is. Wanda's face is really precise, but most of it looks like Verpoorten to me (look at this cover for comparison, especially the costume folds and fabric: https://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=1535367).  It's a mystery.

Cool! We're Thor origin page recap buddies!

Massively underrated series and this is one of those crazy moments that only Kirby would think of slowing down in close up like this. Maybe the best meet-cute/meet-violent of Jack's career.

These pages are SO COOL! It's interesting to see Jack take on Western work again after the explosion of superhero stuff. You can see how incredibly different his stories look even after just a year or two away from the genre -- the camera has pulled in and the figures have gotten more dynamic. I have no opinion on the inks - I would have guessed Roussos too, but Evanier's call sounds pretty good.  There's just so little 1964 Kirby inking to compare it to. Wow, thanks for posting these. 

I totally saw this movie on the night it came out in a theater on Polk Street in San Francisco, and would have never thought about it again if it weren't for all those $*^&ing comic book ads. This is a great piece, down to what you just know was personal art direction by Dino De Laurentis, "Blood! make sure there's blood on the mouth!"

Sinnott is indeed a force to be reckoned with. As is Frank Giacoia, who inked this cover. I owned it for years. Got it (and the rest of the book, inked by Royer) from Roz. 

Always dug this since I saw the Thibodeaux lightboxing.  It's got a lot of energy and the angle is SO WEIRD it's one of those things where Jack just suddenly opened up a whole new way of looking at the Surfer, casually, like "yeah, no big deal, here's how perspective works now. I'm Jack Kirby.  Deal with it."  I pegged it as a 1981 piece (given HA's description and the thickness of the line) -- how did you land on 1974 as a date?  

Always loved this page down to Bruce Banner's looking away while Ross is yelling at him.  Every panel a gem.  Very curious -- what does the handwriting at the top say?  It doesn't look like either Stan's or Jack's lettering but it's hard to see so I might be wrong about that. 

Always dug this one -- one of the best 1970s Kirby Marvel covers, I think.  Also: super strong Red Skull in suit and hipster tie! 

The only time I met Panter was at the Masters show in LA.  He said he was a huge Kirby fan.  Definitely see that here.

As great as Kirby was during this period, whenever he did Cap I feel like he gave it 110%. I have no doubt he felt totally turned loose when drawing these stories, and you can tell he took total pleasure in setting up traps for Cap to get out of. This is one of the most magnificent images he did (of, you gotta admit, about a billion magificent Cap images) in that era.  If the 1940s Cap was kinda primitive (and a little bit problematic in places), and 1970s Cap sorta generic, the 1960s stuff was *alive*.  I love everything about this piece, from the jungle background to the skulking minions' positions to Cap's ridiculous pose in the fg.  Ron, just for my amusement, do me a favor and pose like Cap for us.  Try to get your family to pose behind you like the minions.  I'll wait here.

One down, 19 pages to go : )