Prophecy! Reincarnation! Haunting! Black Magic!Boy, this timed out nicely. I wanted to follow up my post on Jack Kirby's odd In The Days of the Mob with his one other magazine from that same time, Spirit World. And what better day to do that than on Friday the 13th?
On the surface, Spirit World seems like a better fit in terms of being the type of material better suited for a comic magazine, rather than the 30's-era gangsters of In The Days of the Mob, but once you get a look inside (and past the at-least-partly-drawn-by-Neal-Adams cover), you see the contents were even more offbeat.
It opens with "The President Must Die!", a three-page photo collage sequence about the real-life woman who supposedly had premonitions that JFK would be killed, which leads to a written-and-drawn-by-Kirby sequence "Premonition--Black Art or Mass Art?" hosted by Dr. Leopold Maas, who will provide hosting duties similar to Warden Fry in Mob. Dr. Maas tells the story of Lucille M., who tried to contact the President to tell him of her premonition, her visions of a man and a rifle. Unfortunately, she calls too late--the President has already left on his trip. Oddly, even though the story mentions Dallas, and the idea of the motorcade, Kennedy himself is never shown or mentioned specifically.
Next is a profile of what supernatural believers called "The House of Horror"--a haunted mansion in New Jersey called The Calder House. A group of ghost hunters investigate and, based on what you see them encounter, they were lucky to escape with their lives!
Things get really weird with the next story, "Children of the Flaming Wheel", which is a fumetti, or photo-illustrated, sequence, about a weird ritual one man went through over his obsessions with UFOs. Helpfully included in the middle of the magazine was a pull-out poster, similar to the idea used in Mob, except this one is another photo-collage of weird, vaguely-creepy images, adorned with the word "Souls"--and that's it--in big letters:
If any kid felt compelled to hang this on their wall, I hope they turned out ok.
Another Kirby tale, "The Screaming Woman", follows, about a woman who believes she is reincarnated from a woman who lived through--and suffered the torments of--the age of Torquemada. The level of gruesome violence and almost-nudity in this tale is a little shocking--its certainly not something you expect coming from Jack "King" Kirby, and I think it only goes to emphasize that he was reaching for a very different audience with these books.
Next is another faux-true-life text story by Steve Sherman and Mark Evanier, this time "based upon the notes made from research done in conjunction with Dr. E. Leopold Maas." I bet these guys had fun writing these things.
Kirby illustrates the next story "Amazing Predictions", all about Nostradamus and his visions of the future. It ends with this cheery, full-page photo illustration:
Another Kirby tale, "The Screaming Woman", follows, about a woman who believes she is reincarnated from a woman who lived through--and suffered the torments of--the age of Torquemada. The level of gruesome violence and almost-nudity in this tale is a little shocking--its certainly not something you expect coming from Jack "King" Kirby, and I think it only goes to emphasize that he was reaching for a very different audience with these books.
Next is another faux-true-life text story by Steve Sherman and Mark Evanier, this time "based upon the notes made from research done in conjunction with Dr. E. Leopold Maas." I bet these guys had fun writing these things.
Kirby illustrates the next story "Amazing Predictions", all about Nostradamus and his visions of the future. It ends with this cheery, full-page photo illustration:
...and with that, we conclude the first issue of Spirit World! See you next time!
Oh, wait...not just yet. After the above, we get a full-page of Sergio Aragones' "Weird Humor", which looks even weirder considering what its opposite.
As I mentioned in the previous post (and gone into more depth in Allan Harvey's excellent article in Back Issue! #10), Kirby had dreams of supervising a whole line of full-color, slick, ad-revenue-driven magazines that would feature comic-book content, but not exclusively. He would run everything from California, envisioning a whole new audience for more adult material (btw, you can see some of the material Jack prepared for the never-published Spirit World #2 in the first three issues of DC's Weird Mystery Tales color comic).
Somehow, that didn't pan out, and DC "downgraded" these two magazines into black-and-white (to make them more like the competition, one would expect), but Kirby, being the pro he was, did his best to make these as good as he knew how despite the new restrictions. And while I don't think either of these magazines (or the one that never even saw print, a romance comic-magazine called Soul Love) would've ever succeeded in the long run, you can see how Jack was trying something different, and what's wrong with that?
Oh, wait...not just yet. After the above, we get a full-page of Sergio Aragones' "Weird Humor", which looks even weirder considering what its opposite.
As I mentioned in the previous post (and gone into more depth in Allan Harvey's excellent article in Back Issue! #10), Kirby had dreams of supervising a whole line of full-color, slick, ad-revenue-driven magazines that would feature comic-book content, but not exclusively. He would run everything from California, envisioning a whole new audience for more adult material (btw, you can see some of the material Jack prepared for the never-published Spirit World #2 in the first three issues of DC's Weird Mystery Tales color comic).
Somehow, that didn't pan out, and DC "downgraded" these two magazines into black-and-white (to make them more like the competition, one would expect), but Kirby, being the pro he was, did his best to make these as good as he knew how despite the new restrictions. And while I don't think either of these magazines (or the one that never even saw print, a romance comic-magazine called Soul Love) would've ever succeeded in the long run, you can see how Jack was trying something different, and what's wrong with that?
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