I mean, what the hell was going on here? Are we sure Kirby was smoking just regular cigars?

As a kid, someone gave me the issue below and I just fucking hated the artwork. Didn't know who Jack Kirby was and didn't care at the time. I actually think this issue and a few other comics I was given along the way made me intentionally stay away from anything Kirby drew when I collected as a kid and teen.

I kind of get his stuff now and I know it is sacrilege to say you dislike Kirby, but damn...as a kid, I just hated almost all his stuff.

I thought it was just me. I've never been a big fan either, I appreciate his place in comics history, he obviously had a huge impact, but even as a kid I thought his art was kinda ugly and unappealing.

Back when I was getting those new, I also hated 'em. I loved (and still love!) Kirby's FF and Thor, but when he jumped to DC I went into full rebellious mode and scoffed at all of Kirby's new stuff. Eh, what did I know?

I remember coming across an issue of Kamandi somewhere and thought "What the hell is this??"

Oh, and what the hell was the deal with those Don Rickles covers?

I just picked up a mint copy of this issue.

They actually had an ongoing Bob Hope series back in the 60s.

Kind of weird, while it was the 70s, even back then Bob Hope and Don Rickles really seemed like old people's celebrities. I can't imagine many eight year-olds back then would have been terribly excited by a Don Rickles appearance.

I do remember learning about the Bob Hope series while browsing the Overstreet Price Guide when I was a teen. But I think this is honestly the first I've seen the Rickles covers and agree it was kind of weird for the era and the comics audience at the time.

Jerry Lewis and Jackie Gleason also had a DC comic in the 60s. I was often tempted to buy one from time to time, especially Bob Hope, because they quite often had the subject character encountering Frankenstein, The Mummy, Creature Black Lagoon on the cover.

I was the same with Kirby, but I think it makes some sense, I probably started reading comics in the early 80s (though my mom had a collection before that) and comparing someone like Neal Adams to Kirby was pretty stark by then. Of course every artist had been influenced by Kirby but as a kid you don't really care that much about it.

Kirby's shit was just blocky and weird looking. I have come to appreciate the crazy amount of detail he puts into his backgrounds, his off the charts imagination and his inventive and ground-breaking fight scenes. But his art still makes my eyes hurt a lot of the time. But I have never been an arty-farty kind of person. I know what I like and bullshit like Picasso and Pollack can suck my dick. I have had diarrhea that looks like a Pollack painting on porcelain and my kid drew me shit when he was 3 that looked just as good as many Picassos. So there.

Any-hoo...speaking of weird comics, let's see a few of those mentioned. I had some Jerry Lewis I was given as a kid and think I may have posted an issue or two here awhile back. Here are hopefully some different ones:

The Jerry Lewis stuff was as silly as he was. Silly and unfunny that is. I never enjoyed his "dummy dipshit" humor. Dean Martin gets a pass since he was likely always drunk when having to be with Lewis.







And looks like the jokes in the Bob Hope comics were as funny as he was...which means not at all.

Kirby really has to be taken in a historical context.

Objectively, he's kind of a limited artist. His figures are boxy, his poses are stiff, his facial expressions are kind of limited. He probably wouldn't be hireable in today's market.

And if you're like me and grew up in the 80s and 90s with polished artists like Adams (Neal and Art), Byrne, Perez, Jim Lee, McFarlane, Alan Davis, then Kirby's output is going to look really primitive.

But you have to remember, during the 1960s when Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko created the Marvel Universe, there wasn't anything like what they were doing there on the stands. And it was cheap, disposable entertainment for children they were creating, so there wasn't necessarily a lot of time or care put into the images and the primary concern was to get it out the door before the deadline hit. But, even then, they were still able to create stories and characters that have stood the test of time.

I can't believe that The Adventures of Bob Hope ran for 109 issues(!). Who the hell were buying enough of these for the series to last nearly 20 years?

And then they end it right when they got Neal Adams as the artist?

If you remember early Image time "Kirby" did Phantom Force. I disliked it so much, and in a time when I was all in on Image it was one of the few I couldn't bring myself to get.

30 years later I can appreciate his art for what it was, and how advanced it was in his heyday but in the 90's no way.

I grew up during the silver age and Kirby's work at Marvel from 1965-70 remains my favorite. The earlier stuff at Marvel does look primitive. I believe he was restrained by "house style" during the 60s. In the 70s he had complete control. He created, wrote and drew everything he did. This was 100% unrestrained Kirby. He had complete control. Compare his mid 70s Cap America run to the 60s run. Completely different. Yet, when he did an occasional cover for a different title in the 70s, his art conformed to the house style.
I think Kirby was a crappy writer, especially his dialog. That was the major defect with his 70s titles, more than the wild, unrestrained art. Reading the 70s stuff you can begin to recognize what his contributions to the Marvel silver age were. The fantastical stuff, Inhumans, Galactus, High Evolutionary, Ego, Colonizers of Rigel, the look of Asgard and Attila. His silver age Nick Fury of SHIELD is great stuff.

Yeah, 1950 to 1968.

I suppose we're looking at a very different time. In 1950 Bob Hope was a lot younger and there wasn't much of a youth culture at the time. Most kids would have known he was, moreso than our modern mindsets would believe possible. In his day, he was an A-list celebrity.

Though it does seem strange that his book would run until 1968. By the early 1960s, there was a vibrant youth culture (the Beatles!) among the young boomers, and Bob Hope probably would have seemed like a dinosaur to a child of that era who was watching the Beatles on tv. So I sort of wonder who the audience for that Bob Hope book was in the mid-60s.

It's not easy finding those Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope comics in nice condition. Far fewer copies circulate than say Batman or Superman. People have to remember the dynamics of the newsstand in the 1960s. I imagine they were picked up by men who remembered reading comics back during World War II and saw them on the newsstand next to the newspaper or whatever. I suspect that audience didn't really overlap much with the regular superhero buyers.

I was often tempted to buy the Bob Hope comic as a kid. It seems he was also bumping into Frankenstein and I'm a sucker for Frankenstein covers. Never did though. I didn't buy X-Men back then except once, when they met Frankenstein. There's a lesser known DC title called Tomahawk. A Daniel Boone type character fighting the British during revolutionary war with his Frontier Rangers. I discovered the title because Frankenstein was on the cover. Started to buy it every month because the were always running into monsters, dinosaurs, etc. It was similar to the WWII 2 G.I.s fighting dinosaurs in Star Spangled War Stories except it was late 1700s frontiier.
When I was 7-9 years old I would always get sucked in by the cover art. Gold Key painted covers like Turuk Son of Stone. I discovered some really good stuff just because I couldn't resist the cover. Spectre, Metamorpho, and Ultra The Multi-Alien in Mystery in Space.
I seem to remember Bob Hope comics that had hippies and rock and roll covers.
This was the time when Marvel was publishing Millie the Model, Two Gun Kid, Kid Colt Outlaw.

Jack Kirby was Marvel's "house style". Stan had Jack do layouts for a lot of titles and explicitly told artists to reference Kirby on titles he wasn't able to contribute layouts to.

There were certainly differences in Jack's 60s Marvel work as compared to his mid/late 70s stuff but a lot of that was in the inking. Earlier inkers softened his work up a lot and smoothed things out. Royer, who did a lot of the 70s stuff, inked what Jack put down on the page.

To say that Kirby was a crappy writer borders on ludicrous. He basically wrote all of those early Marvel comics that people love. He didn't sit behind a typewriter and churn out scripts, he wrote those stories visually with his pencil then handed them over to Stan Lee to insert dialogue and text. But, no doubt about it, he wrote those stories. I'm okay with saying you don't like Kirby's dialogue, plenty of people say that, You're spot on with Kirby's 60s contributions; If Marvel in the 60s was the "House of Ideas", 90% of those came from Jack. It was a period of unbridled creativity that we'll never see again.

rw2516 appears to be correct! I guess we now know what sold a Bob Hope comic. Can you say overkill? And I didn't even post them all.

Of the plethora of a variety of comics I acquired as a kid, I can't say I ever owned or read any Tomahawk comics or even came across any! Looks like a fun series. Would love to see some random omnibuses (omnibi?) of stuff like this.

Another thing DC did that grabbed my attention as a kid was gorilla covers. This new line of TPB collections they're releasing, DC's Finest, looks to be something like Showcase Presents only in color this time. One coming called Gorilla World appears to collect stories and covers featuring intelligent/talking gorillas. Mostly from Strange Adventures I think. Don't know if they're unrelated stories, related to the gorilla city, or what they are. Count me in.
I ain't holding my breath for Tomahawk reprints ever seeing the light of day. The monster stuff didn't start until several years into the run and then wasn't every single issue. Most of them though.