 |
| Image copyright MARVEL COMICS |
DEVIL DINOSAUR was JACK KIRBY's final fling at MARVEL. None of the mags he worked on seemed to click with the readers enough to keep them going for long, and DD (and I don't mean DAREDEVIL) only managed nine issues before cancellation. Jack, with STAN LEE, had kick-started the Marvel Age, but it seemed that there was no longer a place in it for him. Jack's time had passed, alas.
19 comments:
I actually really like this cover and don't want to sound like I'm nitpicking, but every time I see it, I can't stop staring at Devil's muscly little arms and human hands (complete with opposable thumbs).
Other points of fascination for me are; Devil's saturnine eyebrows, and what appears to be the lead singer of the Flying Pickets standing at Devil's left elbow waving a flaming torch.
This is the only Kirby comic I didn't read. Even I thought whaaaa!?
What gets me, DD, is those plastic 'lucky bag' joke teeth - Kirby was getting a bit lazy when he couldn't even be bothered to suggest that they were separate from one another.
******
You never missed much, Phil - it was unmemorable, only something to read to pass the time.
Can't find much to love about this cover, I will say it conveys a precipitous feeling of movement but it looks like an enlarged panel. The colour job is off too, it needs to be lit from below, I think.
I don't think we can blame Jack for the colouring, but it's obvious he was just churning it out by this time, without the same degree of thought as he used to put into his art.
I remember seeing reprints in Valour, circa 1980. Kirby revisits Chariots of the Gods later, a la the Kree and the Celestials- who doesn't love that?
And I read this announcement the other day:http://www.ew.com/article/2015/08/12/moon-girl-devil-dinosaur-marvel-female-superhero
Took a look at the link, Dougie. I wonder if Devil Dinosaur will be a female this time, too?
I had a look to see if I could find any background to this cover, cos it just seems so basic. I have found a pencil layout embedded in an Alan Moore interview here. Haven't read the interview yet, but I thought you might be interested in the pic if you hadn't seen it before.
Took a look, DSE. Interesting that there's no sign of Moonboy, so obviously the concept evolved before publication. How can you add links in your comments? I don't think I can do that.
If you have a look at line below the comment input box, it tells you what html tags can use. The "a" one is the link tag, unfortuatly I can't type a direct example here because it whould just show as a link and the normal html escape sequences ie, < > just show up as text. So have a look here to see how to form a html link.
It's usefull if you hit the preview button before you hit "publish your comment" just in case there's an error in the html.
Thanks for that, DSE, I'll experiment with it later.
I'm not at all familiar with Devil Dinosaur, so I'm not sure who Moonboy is, I assume he's the 'monkey' riding the dinosaur?
Yup, that's him - so called because of his bare @rse, no doubt.
I tried reading the collected volume of this.
It was rubbish.
But hey,I am willing to allow the King a ton of leeway,he was getting old.
I recall reading somewhere that it was intended for animation at first,though I don't know if I just imagined it.
bare @rse-now that is funny.
I seem to recall reading that DC's Kamandi was being considered for an animated TV series, so Marvel wanted something similar for the same thing. In fact, I've just checked - I read it in the intro to that very collected volume (Omnibus edition) that you mention.
If Devil Dinosaur was created because Marvel wanted something similar to Kamandi, it's almost ironic. Wasn't Kamandi intended to be DC's answer to Planet of the Apes?
I bought Devil Dinosaur #1 and Machine Man #1 when they first came out. They were first issues of new series created by The King, so I figured they would someday be valuable and I could sell them at a huge profit and get filthy rich.
I'm still waiting.
When Jack returned to Marvel, I was overjoyed. Sadly, his output didn't live up to my expectations. Perhaps it's just as well he didn't resume work on FF, Thor, etc. (Apart from some covers, that is.) They'd probably have been major disappointments. Jack's art was just too 'cartoony'-looking by then.
I avoided Devil Dinosaur like the plague when I read it was coming out, and to date I still haven't read or seen an issue (bar issue 1) but now I fancy reading it. I wonder if Marvel (and /or Kirby) were aware that dinosaurs were big business (or soon to be)or if it was a case that covers with dinosaurs sold really well ( similar to when DC in the 1960s noticed all their books with gorilla's on the cover sold well) so they tried DD which was even for Kirby a bit out their.
If you get the Omnibus edition, McScotty, restrict yourself to one issue a day. If you try and read all 9 of them at the one time, you'll probably find them pretty boring. They're okay for whiling away an idle 20 minutes or so, but they're far from spectacular. I suspect that as Devil Dinosaur was intended as a potential development property for TV animation in direct response to whispers about Kamandi, the past was chosen as the setting because of the similarity to post-apocalyptic futures. And a big red dinosaur is quite striking. If Marvel thought that covers with dinosaurs would sell really well, there were soon disabused of the notion after only 9 issues.
Post a Comment