Number 1564: Two Alarming Tales by Kirby

Two stories from Alarming Tales #2 (1958) make up my 40th posting for Jack Kirby. I could do a lot more, too...that guy made up the history of comic art for decades and examples are all over the place. I chose these today for sentimental reasons. I liked them when I bought this issue off the spinner rack in 1958, and was taken — as always — by the power of Kirby’s art. “The Fireballs” is credited to Kirby and George Roussos, and “I Want To Be a Man” has a tentative credit for Kirby inking his own pencils.

Both stories are credited to scripts by Kirby, but it seems to me someone else edited them or rewrote them to remove the exclamation points Kirby liked. He usually used two (!!) and if he had something special to emphasize, he used three (!!!) As an aside, I believe sentences are just fine ending in a period, and exclamation points should be used sparingly! Never use two!! or three!!!

“I Want To Be a Man” I took from the Heritage Auctions website, and once again, thanks to those fine folks for doing these great scans. In 2004 the story sold for a bargain price, $1,897.50, but was resold the next year for $4,600.00. I would guess it’s worth much more now. It’s not only very well drawn, but it has a poignant ending, which I sniffled over as an 11-year-old, and I find it still affecting all these years later.

(Note the name of the character, Ed Snowden. I kid you not.)

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Kirby stories from Alarming Tales #1 here. Just click on the thumbnail:

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Number 1225: Mom alarmed by Alarming Tales

In 1958, when bringing home a stack of comics from my weekly trip to the drugstore, anything that looked like a horror comic went to the bottom or middle of the stack so Mom couldn't see it. Even though 1958 comics weren't horror comics like the pre-Code horror, if it looked like horror to Mom it was banned. I slipped up, and she saw me reading this when she came into my room. She snatched it out of my hands and I didn't see another copy of Alarming Tales #3 for several decades.

The cover was drawn by Joe Simon in Jack Kirby's style. I read an opinion by a religious person once about this cover, which the writer thought mocked Jesus walking on water. I wonder if Harvey Comics got any nasty letters over this cover. We’ll probably never know.

I'm showing three stories today, the cover story, “They Walked On Water,” “The Strange One,” both drawn by Doug Wildey, and “Get Lost,” drawn by Ernie Schroeder. Schroeder we know from several Airboy stories posted on this blog. These stories are all Code-approved, but even without being horror they are  moody and have a lot of atmosphere. The first two stories are swamp gothic, and “The Strange One” is set mostly in the dark, with deep shadows and dark figures.

This is the fourth Harvey posting this month. It's a coincidence and I didn't notice it until now. You have to admit, despite all being from the same publisher, the entries are very different from each other. I even have more Harvey Comics coming up in the next few weeks.

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Number 750


The non-alarming Alarming Tales


I bought Alarming Tales #1 off the drugstore spinner in 1957. It filled me with the sense of wonder and awe I always had when I read Jack Kirby stories. My copy of the comic disappeared years ago, but I never forgot it. "Alarming" is hardly how I'd describe the contents. The word "imaginative" would describe it better.

These scans are from the one-shot Shocking Tales digest Harvey published in 1981, before the company demise. The only story from Alarming Tales #1 they didn't include in the digest was "Logan's Next Life," which I got from an Internet scan of that issue. "The Cadmus Seed" reminds me of the real-life story of Dr. Cecil Jacobson, an egoist fertility doctor who fraudulently used his own sperm to impregnate women. The next-to-last panel in this story cracks me up.

"The Fourth Dimension Is A Many-Splattered Thing" has been shown online before, probably because it has one of the greatest splash panels ever. It's a fairly routine story, but I always remembered the splash. "The Last Enemy" reminds me of Kirby's later Kamandi. "Donnegan's Daffy Chair" I liked because of the ambiguous ending. I was able to use my imagination and think of where Donnegan could have been.

Re-reading this comic decades later was a revelation to me in how much of the contents I remembered despite owning the comic for a short time over fifty years ago.

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