Amazing Fantasy #15 is, of course, famous for the debut of Spider-Man. The story has been reprinted quite often, and I'm sure many visitors to this site know it well. But the original Spider-Man story only takes up half of the issue. The second half features a series of short mystery tales, also by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. So if you haven't seen them, here's the back half of Amazing Fantasy #15 that you never hear about...

Interestingly, the two stories with the particularly unnecessary splash pages ("Man in the Mummy Case" and "Martians Are Among Us") were created before the Spider-Man story, according to their job numbers. Which suggests to me that Lee found he was two pages short when he was writing the stories -- possibly due to the new format stemming from the Spidey tale -- and had Ditko draw up what amounts to a filler page for each to pad out the issue. As "The Bell-Ringer" already had a three-quarter splash with some of the story running across the bottom, adding filler to the other two stories made the most sense. That's all idle conjecture on my part, but you have to admit that those two splash pages look pretty out-of-place relative to the rest of the issue, and the layout of the "Martians" one looks unusually awkward for Ditko. I wonder if anyone's done any actual research into those pages.

You know, there used to be a sales gimmick that publishers used to try to boost sales: monkeys. Put a monkey or an ape or a gorilla on the cover, and sales were bound to go up for that issue. Seriously, that was a thing for many years. I mean, who doesn't love monkeys, right?

So for no reason other than it sounding fun, here are some of my favorite monkey covers in my collection! And I will tell you, in all honesty, some of these were purchased SOLELY because of the monkey on the cover. (I limited this to one cover per title, so there aren't scads of appearances by the Red Ghost and Gorilla Grodd.)  

A little over a year ago, Ben Garrison drew a political cartoon that took shots at Dilbert creator Scott Adams. I tried my damnest to analyze what Garrison was trying to say but ultimately I just could not figure everything out. The cartoon itself made no sense without any context and Garrison's 700+ word commentary raked Adams over the coals... for entirely the wrong things. Adams was very much in the wrong and an asshole about everything that prompted Garrison to draw the cartoon in the first place, but Garrison seemed to so completely misunderstand what Adams had actually said and did that he completely undermined his own rage. He was literally mad at Adams for things Garrison imagined. And even with Garrison's almost entirely imagined problems with Adams, his cartoon still didn't make much sense on its own.

So, with Adams shooting himself in the foot a week ago, I was interested to see what Garrison might do with that. Here's the result...

I literally have no idea what Garrison is trying to say here. With last year's piece, I could at least kind of see what he was trying to get at with most it, even if I never did figure out the final panel's "punchline." But this one, I'm at a complete loss. I mean, there seems to be some notion of Black people not liking Dilbert and/or Adams and Dogbert seems to be concerned about what I presume is a downward trending sales chart, but Adams and Dilbert are doing... I really don't know. Adams has never used Dilbert to reach out to POC; in fact, the only time he's ever included POC in the strip was to make fun of them. So why Dilbert is reaching out to them in an apparently friendly gesture completely does not represent the strip in any way. And why is Adams the one trying to remove Dilbert from their presence? It was the newspapers who were removing Dilbert from people's presence before the Andrews McMeel syndicate dropped their contract with him entirely. I mean, yes, they were responding to Adams' hate speech, so it was ultimately his fault in that regard, but he didn't say any of that in order to get Dilbert cancelled. The strip's cancellation was just a by-product of Adams being a racist asshat.

Garrison's extended explanation offers no clues that I can find either. He notes that white slowly becoming a minority in the US is a bad thing, and President Biden's comments (not about Dilbert, just in general) do nothing but fuel racial division. He slides into a general hating on Black people and run-of-the-mill "George Soros is destroying everything" anti-Seminitism, before circling back to being sympathetic with Adams, claiming that it's not fair that Adams' hate speech cost him not just his job but his ability to make a living since he'll be banned by all social media and banks will close his accounts. Apparently, all of his outrage at Adams from last year has been totally forgotten.

But nowhere does he come close to explaining anything about the cartoon itself.

The Saturday Night Live bit with Dilbert over the weekend wasn't very funny, but it made sense. Garrison's comic from a year ago mostly had a message behind it; it was poorly executed and based on almost total fabrications, but it was at least nominally coeherent. This is just... I don't even know what the fuck this is.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Semi-Obligatory Dilbert Commentary
https://ift.tt/LS1IqlT

Kleefeld on Comics: The Dreaded... Bob Phantom
https://ift.tt/F4mx0Rv

Kleefeld on Comics: Jack and Me
https://ift.tt/9EgBXuz

Kleefeld on Comics: Fly-By-The-Seat-Of-Your-Pants Publishing
https://ift.tt/t1x3F5p

Kleefeld on Comics: Everybody Need See Buckaroo
https://ift.tt/Fo7RC3x

It's been a hectic week, so I'm just getting caught up on some things. Here are two of the Frazz comics from Tuesday and Wednesday...

Help me out here, Internet -- are these the first instances ever of a comic strip directly referencing Buckaroo Banzai? What a brilliant movie to be so far under people's radar! (Jef Mallett, in some notes about these strips, even notes that he's never actually seen the film!)

One thing that's always struck me about the birth of the Marvel Universe is that Stan Lee was really just flying by the seat of his pants all the time. He just kept throwing stuff against the wall; some of it stuck, some of it didn't. But Stan had this peculiar talent for quickly recognizing what was sticking and playing that up. What I just realized, though, was -- while there was some latent talent there -- that style of editting/publishing was learned from Martin Goodman. Case in point...

The Human Torch character first appeared in Marvel Comics #1. The book also featured relatively new characters like the Sub-Mariner, the Angel, the Masked Raider, and Ka-Zar. After a little while, publisher Martin Goodman realized that the book (since retitled Marvel Mystery Comics) was successful and started publishing other superhero books, including Red Raven Comics. Red Raven wasn't as recognizable, though, and the title was changed to The Human Torch with #2. Sales were excellent, and it soon occurred to Martin that he ought to have a comic story where the Human Torch met and fought with his other big-name character, the Sub-Mariner.

(Curiously, despite this astute assessment of things here, Martin also had some bizarre observations about comics' popularity. He tried, at various times, to replicate title names, font styles, and color palettes of popular comics to build readership.)

So Martin convinced Human Torch creator/writer/artist Carl Burgos and Sub-Mariner creator/writer/artist Bill Everett to do one story where their two characters meet each other and fight. Martin also wanted to capitalize on the characters' immediate popularity, so he asked them to create the entire 60-page story over a single weekend. Carl and Bill quickly pulled in every artist they could to work on the story. Over the next few days, around a dozen guys eat, drank, drew, wrote, and occassionally slept in that one apartment. Carl was reserved for drawing the Torch's and Toro's heads and other significant poses while Bill was reserved for the same duty on Namor. From time to time, one or two of the guys would leave to buy cigarettes, beer, or food for everyone, but for the most part everyone powerered their way through creating a 60-page, completed story in one weekend.

Monday morning rolled around, and the completed(!) story was turned in to Martin. The artists were paid and Martin rushed off to the printers. Evidently in his haste, though, he didn't realize that he had already published a Human Torch #5. Possibly, in part because he had started the title with #2, meaning that there were only four issues of that particular title. But the new story went to press, rolling out to the newsstands with a large "No. 5" printed on every cover.

Whether Martin never realized the error, or just decided to roll with it is unclear, but the issue after that was indeed published as #6. But now, decades later, fans of Golden Age comics have to contend with a line of comics that looks like this...

Red Raven Comics #1 Human Torch #2 Human Torch #3 Human Torch #4 Human Torch #5 Human Torch #5 Human Torch #6...

With stories like that floating in Stan Lee's early career in comics, it's really no wonder that he continued on in exactly the same way in the 1960s!

I was born in 1972. By that time, Kirby was already well-known and established as The King of comic book storytelling. Indeed, he had alreayd caused a huge stir by leaving the Marvel Universe that he co-founded to create a new universe with his Fourth World series at DC, which also was beginning to wind down. By the time I was old enough to read and, more significantly choose what I wanted to read, Jack was largely retired from doing month-to-month publications.

As I noted quite some time ago, I didn't really become a fan of the comic book medium until 1983. Marvel and DC had both left Jack behind for young hot-shots like John Byrne and Frank Miller. So for an eleven-year-old -- for whom history is largely unknown and even wholly irrelevant beyond one's own memory -- I had no real grasp on who Jack was or what he had done.

My favorite comic at the time was John Byrne's Fantastic Four. Over the course of a few years after beginning the series, I learned something of the comic's history. In the days before the Internet, information was relatively scarce and costly for the limited resources of an early teenager. I have to admit to being somewhat grateful a year or two later for the arguements Jack had with Marvel about their returning his original artwork -- it gave rise to a number of articles about Jack's history in comics, as well as articles about his early creations at Marvel. This proved to be an invaluable source of information for my sponge-like brain at the time. I didn't fully understand all of the issues involved, but I understood the basic history at least.

As the years progressed, I continued learning more about the Fantastic Four. In my search for back issues, I began reading the original Lee/Kirby stories. My resources were expanding (I had gotten a job at McDonald's) but it was still slow-going. The demands of my college major were especially absorbing (including spending whole weeks at a time living out the campus studios) and I did little more than read the new issues as they came out. It wasn't until I finished college in 1995 that my parents got me a copy of Fantastic Four #1 as a graduation gift, and essentially finalized my collecting old stories about the FF.

Now in the working world, I began taking a larger interest in the men behind the Fantastic Four. I had learned a few things about Stan and Jack over the years, but that was usually tangental to the Fantastic Four themselves. And it was only then that I learned that Jack Kirby had died. And it was only AFTER that that I really began to appreciate what Jack had done. Not just for the Fantastic Four, but for the comic industry as a whole. I had heard he had been influential, but it wasn't until I started, really started, to read about Jack that his impact began to sink in. I began to understand just how much impact he had indirectly had upon me.

When I can, I like to express my appreciation to people who made an impact on my life. Not just in comics, but in life in general. Several years back, I made a point of writing letters of appreciation to some of the surviving teachers I had back in high school. When I read a particularly moving story or see an especially well-done show, I'll try to say something to those involved. It's not a matter of trying to gain their favor, or bask in the light of their talent(s) hoping something might magically transfer to me through osmosis... I simply and sincerely want to show my appreication. When I talk to comic book creators, I give them my honest opinion and make a point to elaborate on exactly why they (or their work) had an effect on me.

But I never did that with Jack. I only paid attention to his shadows while he was alive, and I never took the opportunity to see if I couldn't tell him what he meant to me. Jack wasn't exactly a spring chicken by the time I could even read his name, but I feel like I should have made a stronger effort. Maybe I couldn't have flown out to see him at Comic-Con, and maybe he didn't have e-mail (almost no one did then!) but I could still have written a letter. I could have c/o'd it through Marvel or DC or someone. Maybe it wouldn't have been as articulate as I could make it now, but it would have been something.

I don't have many regrets in my life; I'm fairly happy with how things have gone overall. But if I could go back in time to tell myself anything, I'd see if I could look up myself at age 16 or so. I'd say, "First of all, this high school crap is just crap; things get much better for you in college. Secondly, tell Jack Kirby what a great storyteller he is." That's it. (Well, I might add something about investing in Marvel Comics when they drop below 50 cents a share!)

I never really knew Jack to say that I miss him. I'm envious of anyone who ever had the pleasure of even meeting himand I am sorry that I never told him what he did for me.