Journey Into Mystery #107

When the Grey Gargoyle Strikes!

Featuring: Thor
Release: June 2, 1964
Cover: August 1964
12 cents
Written by: Stan Lee, who needs the money
Drawn by: Jack Kirby, who enjoys the practice
Inked by: Chic Stone, who loves the publicity
Lettered by: Art Simek, whoever he is!
18 pages

We get a significant new addition to the canon of Marvel villains with the Grey Gargoyle. He’s got a pretty cool hook; he turns people to stone. In whatever early comics I first saw the character in, I didn’t fully appreciate the name. I got the alliteration and that gargoyles are often rendered in stone. But there’s a little more to it that I think later artists would fail to capture. We see in this initial image of the character that Kirby really has gone out of his way to make it so he can look like a gargoyle in the right pose.

It’s a particularly good opening splash page, and that’s before we even get to the light poetry of the narration rhyming: “small” with “all”.

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