Kirby and Company's Alarming Tales

Jack Kirby's place in comics history is assured by other accomplishments; but in addition he came up with possibly the Platonic ideal of comic book story titles:

In this Alarming Tales list, note the scripters switched around (from what you might expect from the artwork) on the first two stories in #3.

There were two single-page text stories in each issue (#1's were Black Cat stories); I've entered here only the ones whose author I could tell; Jack Oleck's captions style (Almost, ___...; In the end, ___....) is so distinctive that it's carried through into prose, which is not at all always the case.

There seem to be a number of inkers on the different Kirby stories, or even on diferent pages. Some of the GCD's art attributions on other stories to people like Bob Brown (or, on "12,000 to 1," Jack Kirby) I can say are wrong, but I can't supply a better guess. Reed Crandall had nothing to do with "The Strange Power of Gary Ford," and here I can give the artist's name: Norman Nodel.

I would agree with the GCD indexers that the covers of #1-4 are mostly the work of editor Joe Simon, even if some Kirby material got used in them. When the title returned after a hiatus, like Simon's other Harvey titles at the time, John Severin did the covers to #5 and 6. And Simon did the intro pages to #1-4 (Bob Powell drew #5's and Bernard Baily #6's).

UPDATE: Robin Snyder sent along the Carl Wessler scripting credits, from Wessler's account books (kept like William Woolfolk's). I still see Bob Powell's writing style, as in The Man in Black and Henry Brewster, on "The Monster from 1977 A.D."; I suppose he massaged Wessler's script. The same thing happened with Wessler, Jack Oleck, and Otto Binder at EC for awhile, as Al Feldstein rewrote their scripts into his style at first.

Alarming Tales
Harvey Comics

Sep/57	1	The Cadmus Seed	w: Jack Kirby  p: Kirby
		Logan's Next Life	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		The Fourth Dimension Is a Many Splattered Thing	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		The Last Enemy	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		Donnegan's Daffy Chair	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
Nov/	2	Hole in the Wall	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		The Hero	w: Jack Oleck  a: ?
		The Big Hunt	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		The Fireballs	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		The Traitor [text]	w: Oleck
		I Want to Be a Man	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
Jan/58	3	This World Is Ours!	w: Oleck  p: Kirby
		They Walked on Water	w: Kirby  a: Doug Wildey
		Get Lost!	w: ?  a: Ernie Schroeder
		The Strange One	w: Oleck  a: Wildey
		Larsen's Lens [text]	w: Oleck
		The Man Who Never Lived	w: Oleck  a: Wildey
Mar/	4	Forbidden Journey	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		Secret Weapon	w: Oleck  a: Wildey
		The Monster from 1977 A.D.	w: Carl Wessler & Bob Powell
			a: Powell
		The End of a Sinister Man	w: Wessler  a: Wildey
		The Feast of the Rag Dolls	w: ?  a: Wildey [pg 1 by another artist]
Sept/	5	Half Man-Half What	w: Dick Wood  a: Matt Baker
		Defeat	w: ?  a: Paul Reinman
		My Robot Plants	w: ?  a: Fred Kida
		The Fountain of Age	w: Wood  a: Wildey
		12,000 to 1	w: ?  a: ?
Nov/	6	Ambassador from Venus	w: Wood  a: Bernard Baily
		Moon Descent	w: ?  a: Reinman
		Who Knows?	w: ?  a: ?
		The Emotion Maker	w: Wood  a: Kida
		King of the Ants	w: Wood  a: Al Williamson & Angelo Torres
		The Strange Power of Gary Ford	w: Wessler  a: Norman Nodel

Kirby Insanity

Simon & Kirby swept in and out of Charlton in 1955 with a handful of comics—some out of inventory from Prize, but some original. With From Here to Insanity Jack Kirby took over an established title for its final issue as a four-color comic.

 

On Black Magic, earlier, Bill Draut's art doesn't let much of Kirby's putative layouts show through, but on this story (above) it does—even more so on later pages.

"Dorothy and Digby" is left over from the previous issue's staff. Fred Ottenheimer did "Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch House" and "Cristofer Clumsiness" in #10 as well as stories in earlier issues. He initialed the splash page detailed below.

 

The Kirby-pencilled features in this issue where I don't see enough to identify the writer are the one-pagers. If they're not by Kirby, though, I'd be surprised. He drew the cover, too. Unindexed here: the inside front cover uses mostly found art; the text 2-pager is one whose writer I can't ID. Inkers on the Kirby pencils? I can't tell. The inker on "Rex Mortgage" tries to bring something of the comic strip's look to the faces; the inker on "Tweetie Piper" and "90-Pound Weakling" just about obliterates Kirby's pencils.

From Here to Insanity—the S&K issue

Aug/55	11	Old Love	w, layouts: Jack Kirby  a: Bill Draut
		Expressions...	w: ?  p: Kirby
		Line 'Em Up	w, p: Kirby
		The Psycho News	w: ?  p: Kirby
		Dorothy and Digby	w: ?  a: Fred Ottenheimer
		Rex Mortgage M.D.?	w, p: Kirby
		Walt Chisely's 20,000 Lugs under the Sea	w, p: Kirby
		Build It Yourself	w, p: Kirby
		Comet Feldmeyer, the Ace of Space	w, p: Kirby
		Foreign Intrigues	w, p: Kirby
		Tweetie Piper	w: ?  p: Kirby
		Be a Successful 90-Pound Weakling	w: ?  p: Kirby

Kirby Analyzes Your Dreams

 

The Strange World of Your Dreams is a short-lived companion to Black Magic from Prize; Simon & Kirby are doing romance and crime comics for the company at this time as well. Dream analysis is an esoteric subject indeed (and in my opinion, the longer pieces here that use it in story plots work better than the short analysis-only ones.)

Jack Kirby's distinctive writing style is a little subtler than it will be twenty years in the future, but there's no mistaking him on most of these stories. There are few quoted words, but there are some. He emphasizes words that other writers probably would not, but at this point in his career most notably he emphasize entire sentences—generally final ones in long captions.

In the tiers comparing "Send Us Your Dreams [Julie Pendleton]" (SWOYD 1) and "X-Pit" (Mister Miracle 2, May-June/71, DC), note the triples: It was strange! Unexpected! Humiliating!; Explosion! Shock! Flame! Those were what made me take these as examples, but then I noticed these commas after conjunctions: "And, I thought I liked her!"; Then, the panic of aftermath!

 

If other writers submitted scripts rewritten by Kirby, or coplotted, I don't see any way of telling. Jack Oleck had some scripts published without rewriting at Prize (easier to find in Black Magic); Kirby doesn't script all the S&K stories, just the great majority—other artists' as well as the ones he draws. I'll emphasize that I'm IDing only the final script as used in the comic book.

On the art side, it would take a better eye than mine to point out specifics of Joe Simon's work, if any, here. I'm not very sure of the inks on Kirby's pencils or on Mort Meskin's, but I wonder if George Roussos inks a number of stories.

“The Dreaming Tower” in #1 takes H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” (uncredited) and makes a rather different story out of it; Lovecraft’s shock ending becomes a throwaway plot point on the comic book story’s second-to-last page.

The Strange World of Your Dreams

Aug/52	#1	I Talked with My Dead Wife	w: Jack Kirby  p: Kirby
		You Sent Us This Dream [unnamed]	w: Kirby  p: Mort Meskin
		Don't Wake the Sleeper	w: Kirby  a: Bill Draut
		Send Us Your Dreams [Julie Pendleton]	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		The Dreaming Tower	w: Kirby  p: Meskin
S-O/	#2	The Girl in the Grave	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		You Sent Us This Dream [Betty L.]	w: Kirby  a: Bob McCarty
		You Sent Us This Dream [Ellen K.]	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		I Lived 200 Years Ago	w: Kirby  p: Meskin
		Send Us Your Dreams [Walter W.]	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		A Dream Saved His Life	w: Kirby  a: ?
N-D/	#3	The Woman in the Tower	w: Kirby  p: Kirby
		Send Us Your Dreams [Edith Beck]	w: Kirby  a: Draut
		Edge of Madness	w: Kirby  p: Meskin
		You Sent Us This Dream [Patricia S.]	w: Kirby  a: George Roussos
		You Sent Us This Dream [Thomas R.]	w: Kirby  p: Kirby  i: Roussos?
		You Sent Us This Dream [John W.]	w: Kirby  a: McCarty
J-F/53	#4	Show Us Your Face	w: Kirby  p: Meskin
		The Moon and You *	w: Jack Oleck?  a: McCarty
		Romance in the Stars *	w: ? a: McCarty
		Send Us Your Dreams [many readers]	w: Kirby  a: ?
		The Skeleton in Your Closet *	w: ? a: McCarty
		You Sent Us This Dream [Paul R.]	w: Kirby?  a: ?
		4L-523	w: Oleck?  a: ?
		* Special Horoscope Featurette