Spirit World HC

by Robert Greenberger

Ever since Jim Warren found a formula for producing black and white stories in magazine form, others have tried to emulate it with inconsistent success. Several years after Creepy and Eerie debuted, Marvel dipped a toe into those waters with Spectacular Spider-Man, with Stan Lee and John Romita producing a fresh retelling of the Spider-Man origin for potential new readers. That same year, 1968, Gil Kane also tried his hand at black and white publishing with the crime story His Name is…Savage, but poor distribution doomed the effort after just one issue.

Then there was Web of Horror, where we got the first glimpses of the next generation of talents ; guys like Mike Kaluta and Bernie Wrightson. Skywald showed up in late 1970 with a new line of knock off books Nightmare, Psycho, and Scream which also gave that next generation of talents an outlet.

Marvel and DC Comics both took steps into the magazine field in 1971 as Stan tried again with the more adult-oriented Savage Tales, frontlining Conan. That summer, Jack Kirby tried his hand with two books, In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World. The latter is resurrected, backed with additional tales from the color titles Weird Mystery Tales and Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion. According to Mark Evanier in Jack Kirby Collector #13, “Big magazines, small magazines, tabloid-sized magazines, weekly comics, novels. Jack was really at that point of the belief that comics had to get out of the 32-page format to survive.” What’s interesting to note, especially this fall, is that Kirby saw the future and recognized comics had to evolve or die.

Under contract to DC, Kirby had already gotten started on his Fourth World titles when he turned his gaze towards the magazines, both of which were produced simultaneously. While traditional comics allowed him to explore cosmic themes, Kirby saw the other formats as a way to produce graphic material in different genres, from crime to romance. He reportedly had scores of ideas for titles and formats, including a fumetti title that saw some partial work done before being scrapped. Kirby saw the value in a Dracula magazine that didn’t interest DC and was nixed once Marvel announced their own Dracula revival. Kirby produced Mob and the infamous Soul Romances (a blaxploitation incarnation of True Divorce Cases) but DC rejected the latter and suggested Spirit World.

The supernatural was not new to Kirby since he and Joe Simon did Black Magic back in the 1950s and DC was happily reprinting those tales at the time. He saw the magazines akin to the European offerings, slick paper, advertising and full color while DC saw them as cheap competition to Warren and eventually they wore Kirby down. Worse, Kirby’s Spirit World cover was delivered and then handed over to Neal Adams to rework into something publisher Carmine Infantino thought was commercial.

The content, as you will see in the forthcoming hardcover collection from DC Comics, is hosted by Dr. E. Leopold Maas, paranormalist and the stories within are less horror and terror and more suspense and pseudo-science. Stories involve JFK’s assassination, Torquemada, and even the predictions of Nostradamus. The content is aimed at older readers with a reliance on Kirby’s patented collage work and themes that touch on the paranormal. Kirby relied on California-based assistants Evanier and Steve Sherman with the former coming up with plots and the latter doing the photography for the collages. “We did a lot of research for Jack,” Evanier told author Jon B. Cooke, “because we wanted to make it authentic.”

The art style may look familiar given the Vince Colletta inks but study the storytelling and page construction and you will see Kirby was stretching himself after a decade of straight super-heroics. The magazines should have worked but each were canceled after one issue with the blame being squarely placed on sister company Independent News for failing to properly distribute them alongside their other offerings such as the high visibility Playboy. “We never saw an issue on the newsstands in L.A.,” Evanier recounted, “so we went down to the warehouse to pick up copies. They had not even left the warehouse. DC actually later on sold them in ads in the comics because those issues had not gone out to whole states.”

A second issue had been completed, with Colletta replaced by the more appropriate Mike Royer, but the stories were broken up and run off in Weird Mystery Tales and the gothic Dark Mansion. Now they are presented together for the first time and are well worth a look. DC is finally doing right by the King, releasing the book at the 10” x 13.5” size, reproducing the pages at the size they were meant to be read at.

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Spirit World HC

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