other dimensions – Coke & Comics

Prisoner of the Slave World!
Featuring: Ant-Man
Release: December 3, 1962
Cover: March 1963
12 cents
Plot: Stan Lee
Script: L.D. Lieber
Art: Don Heck
10 pages

I read this story in Marvel Masterworks: Ant-Man/Giant-Man vol. 1.

This is a pretty momentous issue. We’ve read a variety of Marvel comics together here. We’ve taken peeks into the past and the future, and checked out some of Marvel’s “weird tales” books with tangential connections to our superhero comics. But we’ve mostly been reading superhero series of the early ’60s. We’ve followed the Fantastic Four, Hulk, Human Torch, Thor, and Ant-Man. What have all these series had in common? They’d all been drawn by Jack Kirby.

Now, for the first time, Jack is going to take a break from drawing several comics a month and draw one less. This issue of Ant-Man will be drawn by Don Heck. We’ve met Heck once before. He drew a Medusa story we checked out in Tales to Astonish. A great artist in his own right. He’d been associated with the company that will become Marvel off and on for almost a decade at this point, drawing westerns, war stories, and sci-fi/fantasy tales.

Prisoner of the 5th Dimension!/Trapped in Another World!
Featuring: Human Torch
Release: September 11, 1962
Cover: December 1962
12 cents
Plot: Stan Lee
Script: Larry Lieber
Art: Jack Kirby
Inking: Dick Ayers
13 pages

I read this story in Marvel Masterworks: The Human Torch vol. 1.

Once again, we see Stan is giving full credits for the art team, including the letterer Art Simek. Stan credits himself with the plot, but I’ll add some notes based on my general understanding of the usual working relationship; they details of this have been debated by lawyers and historians for decades, so take my musings as those of a non-expert relating what he’s heard. It was very common that Kirby also usually made significant plot contributions, despite the lack of annotation in the credits. The general working arrangement would be that Stan and Jack would talk out ideas together in loose terms, then Kirby would go draw the comic, which includes most of the storytelling details, and then the script and final inks would be filled in after. The busier Stan got, the looser those initial planning conversations were, and the more plotting work was left to Kirby when he was drawing the comic.

Tag: other dimensions

Tales to Astonish #41

Strange Tales #103