A magical house ad…
By WALT GROGAN
In my travels across the internet, I stumbled across this kinetic Jack “King” Kirby drawing of Captain America taking on Gotham’s Caped Crusader, the Batman! The aging newsprint makes it appear to be from either Comics Buyer’s Guide, The Comic Reader or perhaps Amazing Heroes. (You tell me!)
Well, I couldn’t leave well enough alone, so I cleaned it up a bit.
But even that wasn’t enough! It occurred to me that maybe this could have been the second Marvel/DC superhero crossover in the 1970s. Kirby was pumping out some awesome comics and since he had been at both major companies in the Bronze Age — and had already provided covers for the Marvel Treasury Edition line and done both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles — it seemed like this could have been an undertaking by the King.
Because it was in its raw pencil form, I briefly considered inking this awesome piece but remembered that sometimes you’d see a house ad touting a new book with unfinished preliminary pencil art, so I decided this would work perfectly as exactly that.
I splashed some color on it, added trade dress around it and came up with this. Enjoy!
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MORE
— BATMAN, WE ARE THE GREATEST: The Best Comic Book That Never Was. Click here.
— JERRY ORDWAY’s DYNAMIC DUO: The DC Series That Should Have Been. Click here.
May 7, 2025
I was going to order a few (can’t beat that low postage charge), but unfortunately, I live in the lower 48. Bummer.
May 7, 2025
Looks great Walt! And I remember seeing this piece in an Amazing Heroes issue that focused on the Bat-art collection of Todd Reis. He’s the guy who made those impressive 3D diormamas out of comic covers and pages by stacking multiple copies of cut-up comics together. He would trade those to comic pros for some fantastic original Batman art. Roy Thomas named the character Obsidian after him, with a changed spelling to Rice.
May 7, 2025
My memories are somewhat vague, but I originally saw the piece in fanzine in 1989. I think it was the Amazing Heroes with the Kevin Nolin Batman cover, but don’t hold me to that. There was a guy who made 3d shadow boxes for comic artists and he got an original Batman art piece as part of his payment. Whatever magazine had the article showed some of the artwork he received as payment. The Batman/Captain America Kirby piece was one of those.
The Batman/Joker art by Walt Simonson that was used for the cover of Batman 366 was originally done for his collection. If the link below works, you can see Simonson’s account of the origin of his art for the guy’s collection.
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Sorry my memory isn’t better, but 1989 was a long time ago!
May 7, 2025
Instead of Jack handling both story and art, I’d like to think of a DC writer handling the former. Any thoughts on that? I lean toward Len Wein mostly because he had written for both DC and Marvel in the 70s and was pretty good at tackling a diverse range of characters. The John Byrne Batman-Cap team-up in the 90s was a lot of fun.
May 7, 2025
Steve Englehart would’ve been another great choice – as a key writer of both characters.
May 7, 2025
Walt, that’s a great splash page and find. Wonder if Thomas Wayne bandaged Bucky in WW2?
May 8, 2025
Oh those two were made to team-up! The phrase “The Brave and the Bold” was made to describe those two heroes!
May 8, 2025
I agree, Jack. Englehart would be a good choice.