In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn how one of Jack Kirby’s final comic book stories was inadvertently also a team-up, of sorts, with another comic book superstar peer of Kirby’s, Alex Toth!
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and fifth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first part of this installment’s legends.
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COMIC LEGEND:
An unpublished Alex Toth story was worked into one of Jack Kirby’s final comic books.
STATUS:
True
As I detailed in an old Comic Book Legends Revealed, when Jack Kirby left Marvel for DC in the 1970s, it was less a case of DC offering him some great new deal so much as it was Kirby just not wanting to work for Marvel anymore, and so, the characters that Kirby created for DC at the time (like Darkseid, Orion, Mister Miracle, Demon, Kamandi) were all created under work-for-hire agreements, just like the characters that Kirby had created for Marvel, so Kirby did not receive any royalties in those characters.
However, later in the 1980s, C executives Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz came up with a clever way to essentially give Kirby royalties for those older stories. First off, they reprinted Kirby’s original New Gods stories in a prestige format and paid Kirby royalties for them. Plus, they hired him to do a brand-new New Gods graphic novel, called Hunger Dogs. But here’s the really clever bit – they had Kirby re-design his Fourth World characters for the DC Super Powers line of action figures. This way, Kirby would be paid out of the Kenner toy fund and as a result, Kirby made a whole lot more money re-designing his own characters for toy purposes that he did for making them in the first place!
Kirby was very grateful to DC for doing him this kindness, and as a result, he gladly then did two Super Powers tie-in miniseries for DC, which included the last time that Kirby would draw his New Gods characters as well as all of the major characters of the DC Universe. Since things were going so well with DC, Kirby also agreed to do some freelance work for DC here and there. These comic books would be some of the final comic books that Kirby would ever draw, as while he continued to do design work and covers and stuff beyond the mid-1980s, when that second Super Powers comic book finished at the end of 1985, Kirby was pretty much done with drawing full comic book stories (in a future Comic Book Legends Revealed, I’ll likely get into some of the fascinating ways that he still did some “new” comic book work in the early 1990s before he tragically passed away in 1994 at the age of 77).
But before we get to one of those freelance gigs, let’s first take a look at another comic book series that DC was doing in the 1980s. Adventure Comics was DC’s longest-lasting comic book series that was still being put out in the early 1980s (it began life in 1935 as New Comics, literally the second comic book that the company that eventually became DC ever put out), but it was just not selling well enough, despite trying all different sorts of lead characters and so it was finally canceled with Adventure Comics #490 at the end of 1981. However, Paul Levitz is a fine comic book historian and he just hated the idea of DC’s oldest comic book getting canceled and so he came up with the idea of turning it into a digest series, with one new story to kick off the issue and then a bunch of reprinted stories, basically the same exact format that Archie Comics had created and had so much success with.
Adventure Comics #491 began the digest era. In Adventure Comics #493, Bob Rozakis, George Tuska and Andy Mushynsky took over the lead feature in the series with a multi-part reworked origin of Jack Kirby’s creation (back in the 1950s, when he went to work for DC after the Joe Simon/Jack Kirby team went their separate ways), the Challengers of the Unknown…
Alex Toth took over art duties two issues later and the story wrapped up in Adventure Comics #497. The plan was for Rozakis and Toth to continue on with new Challengers of the Unknown stories, but instead, DC decided to go all-reprint from that point forward, and the final six issues of the series petered out with all-reprinted stories (how sad is it for the 500th issue of a historic series to be an all-reprint issue? I had a mean joke about the cover of Uncanny X-Men #500 that I won’t use here).
Well, a few years later, Rozakis wrote an issue of DC Comics Presents drawn by Jack Kirby (and inked by Greg Theakston) that teamed up Superman with…the Challengers of the Unknown!
The issue opens with the Challengers of the Unknown looking for Superman and getting Clark Kent instead…
This then leads to them telling him a story of an adventure they just had, which was, of course, a repurposing of the unpublished Rozakis/Toth story meant for Adventure Comics #498…
and then that led into the present, where it all ties to a Kryptonian villain who had been exiled into outer space by Jor-El before the Phantom Zone was established…
It was a heck of a yarn and a fine way to see one of Jack Kirby’s final comic book stories be a team-up with Kirby and another one of the greatest comic book artists of their generation, Alex Toth (by the way, I did an old Comic Book Legends Revealed about how Toth and Kirby worked on an issue of X-Men together that introduced the Juggernaut and Kirby had to tone Toth’s original design for the villain down by about 300%…).
CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest TV Legends Revealed – Find out which one of the Masters of the Universe action figures that the makers of the He-Man cartoon refused to use on the TV series!
PART THREE SOON!
Check back soon for part 3 of this installment’s legends!
Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com
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