IN 1964, SOMETHING HAPPENED TO JACK KIRBY'S BRAIN. After drawing a long run of self-contained, villain-of-the-month adventures in Marvel's Fantastic Four comic, the dynamic changed. It's as if some lightbulb went off in Jack's head and he stopped restricting the storytelling to 21-page units and began to spread out a bit. Perhaps it was Stan not giving Jack specific instructions about what he wanted to see in the next issue of FF ... or perhaps Stan gave Jack specific instructions to go wild. But whatever the reason, the Fantastic Four comic began to feature widescreen adventures and each new issue introduced startling, innovative concepts that boggled this ten-year-old's mind. Fantastic Four 36 was my first issue of the comic. Though it used the age old trope of having a mirror image of the heroes as villains, it was a new idea to me in early 1965. Especially striking (and a little bit creepy) was the scary woman in the dominatrix mask with the snake-like living...
AS THE DAYS of Marty Goodman's Atlas Comics drew to a close in the late 1950s, the publisher was casting around for the Next Big Thing. Locked in to a draconian distribution contract with arch rivals DC Comics, Goodman was limited to a tight eight titles per month and if he needed to launch a new title, he was forced to cancel an existing one. So, feeling that mystery and science fiction was the coming trend Goodman decided to launch three new comics to complement the existing Journey into Mystery, World of Fantasy and Strange Tales titles. The new books were Strange Worlds , beginning in December 1958 and replacing the cancelled Navy Combat , and Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish , both debuting in January 1959, replacing the cancelled Homer the Happy Ghost and Miss America . Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales had been around since the twilight of the Golden Age and changed in content according to Martin Goodman's take on his customers' tastes. So they bega...