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Yet another Jack Kirby cover for Fantastic Four King-Size Annual/Special, in this instance #11 in the series. (Seeing as #9 came out in 1971 and #10 in 1973, it wasn't exactly an 'annual' occurrence, was it?) When I saw the thumbnail pic of the cover on eBay, at first glance I thought it was by Rich Buckler, but when the mag arrived I realised it was by 'King' Kirby himself. By this time, of course, his crown had slipped a bit and he was no longer the force he'd once been, but the cover does its job, and was probably based on a layout by Marie Severin or some other artist. Yes, believe it or not, on his mid-'70s return to Marvel, of all the covers Jack drew for comics on which he didn't create the contents, he was working from someone else's design.
Anyway, this comic was released in March 1976 for June, and while it wasn't the last time he drew an FF cover, it proved to be the final time he'd provide a new cover for the Annual. Any memories of this comic, Crivvies, from the scintillating '70s? Then let's read all about them in the comments section.
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On a completely unrelated note, at one time I used to render 'eBay' with a capital 'B'. Then I noticed that their logo had a lower case 'b', and systematically went through my previous posts changing it to match. I've now clocked that the automatic spell-check shows it to be wrong, so I'll once more go back through my previous posts (time allowing) and restore it to an upper case 'B'. I won't be able to do that in my replies to past comments, so I'm afraid you're stuck with it. (Not that I imagine it'll bother you as much as it does me.)
6 comments:
Strange that it came out in 1976 but uses the original FF logo.
I found that odd myself, CJ. Maybe a different editor was responsible for the Annual, or they wanted to distinguish it from the monthly mag for some reason? Dunno, to be honest.
I really liked that original human torch story. The backstory is Carl Burgos was going to apply to get the rights back in 1966. Martin Goodman found out about it and had Stan write a story reviving the original torch so Marvel could keep the rights.
Burgos daughter found him throwing out all his original Torch papers soon after this.
Marvel had already shown the original Human Torch (in flashback) in an issue of the Sub-Mariner, PS, back in the late '60s I think, though it turned out that the individual doing the reminiscing wasn't the Torch himself, but rather his sidekick Toro. You'd have thought that would have covered them.
The Sub-Mariner story came out in June '69, so I think the FF Annual was the first time a modern Marvel comic had even acknowledged the existence of the first Torch. Thomas scripted the Sub-Mariner story, and a few months later had the Avengers travel in time to contend with Timely's "big three."
Yes, after I typed my response to PS, I realised he was probably referring to the FF Annual #4, but I originally thought he was referring to the Torch's appearance in the issue (#11) shown in this post. He probably meant to leave his comment on the post with 12 Annual covers.
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