 RAWHIDE KID #40 June 1964 Jack Kirby/Sol Brodsky original artists |
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1964 was a very good year for the-then young Marvel Comics Group. By then, already a hopelessly devoted fan of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, I had no problem working up enthusiasm for anything they did. Even, as it turned out, teaming up two of their Wild West gunslingers! Okay, sure--as things went in the Marvel Pantheon, Rawhide Kid and the Two-Gun Kid were several steps--make that a couple whole floors--below the likes Spider-Man and the Hulk,but somehow this cover made the prospect of this pair of marginal members of the ever expanding Marvel Universe meeting for the first time seem tremendously exciting! |
| Of course,it wasn't. The pairing was pleasant, but not particularly riveting. Not like that cover. The magnificent Kirby, too busy with more important features like the Fantastic Four, Thor, and a host of others, left it to Dick Ayers to illustrate the actual story, and while he did a fine if unexceptional job, it's that Kirby image that still resonates after all this time. Who would have ever thought that a leather-clad cowpoke jumping outof a tree would make for such a memorable image? And just who ever would have thought,decades later, that very same cowpoke would be pushed out of the closet?? But that's a whole 'nother story!?!... | |