Posted By Dan Greenfield on Aug 28, 2025 | 9 comments

Fred Van Lente returns with his annual birthday homage to the King…

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Since 2020, 13th Dimension contributor Fred Van Lente has written an annual celebratory column for Jack Kirby’s birthday. This year is no different! For 2025, he’s joined by Jim Beard, whose companion piece you can find here. Plus, make sure you check out this week’s FRANCO FRIDAYS and SCOTT SHAW! SATURDAYS. Dig it. — Dan

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By FRED VAN LENTE

When you say, “Kirby Giant Monsters,” most people rightly assume you mean the Atlas/Marvel monster titles that directly preceded The Fantastic Four #1 (which, not to belabor the point, has a pretty big kaiju on its cover, too).

But for this annual Kirby birthday celebration — the King was born Aug. 28, 1917 — I’m going to include stories dating back to 1954, when the “kaiju” craze as we know it began. That year Ray Harryhausen’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) premiered in Japan as The Atomic Kaiju Appears, marking the first use of that word in a movie title (literally, it means “Strange Beast”).  Not coincidentally, that year also saw the debut of Ishiro Honda’s classic Godzilla. After the King of the Monsters first trashed Tokyo, hordes of Japanese and American giant monsters began stomping across movie and TV screens.

The King of the Comics was if nothing else a cartoonist who followed the zeitgeist, and he created plenty of giant monsters prior to his second go-around (of three) with Timely/Atlas/Marvel. I’ve selected my 13 favorites from the Golden Age of Strange Beasts, emphasizing monsters that have the most fun stories to go with their nutty names and smashing (literally and figuratively) designs.

Of all the many TOP 13 lists I’ve done for 13th Dimension, this one might have been the toughest to whittle down to a clean baker’s dozen due to a surfeit of good options. Let me know what you think of my choices in the comments!

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13. UNCLE HUGO

A Giant: Noggin

Nature: Mutation

Attitude: Secretive

Weakness: Bullets

First Appearance: “Head of the Family,” Black Magic #32 (Prize, 1954)

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby produced this PG-rated horror mag as a kind of spookier Young Romance, another S&K Prize title; relationships often feature prominently in the stories.

Case in point: Francie Bleeker has the hots for handsome Hungie Fester, despite his intense attachment to his siblings: big-handed Hugel, wide-eyed Hugard, and sharp-paletted Huguette. Mysterious Uncle Hugo is an invalid who lives behind a door that Francie’s not allowed to open.

Faster than you can say “Bluebeard,” Francie is crossing the forbidden portal to discover Hugo is a giant head who directs his other family members as if they were parts of his body: Hugie is the face, Hugel the muscles, Hugard the senses, and so on. Unfortunately, Francie’s freaked-out screams bring the locals running with their rifles, spelling the end of the fractured clan.

Okay, so Uncle Hugo isn’t big enough to be a true kaiju, that’s why he’s only No. 13 on the list. But this story is great and he’s clearly an ancestor to one of my all-time faves, MODOK, so I felt compelled to put him on here. The awesome Jerry Grandenetti cover above, depicting Hugo with Hugel, is from the 1970s DC reprint series and is an on-model recreation of the Kirby original.

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12. CREATURE FROM KROGARR

A Giant: Krogarrian (trill those R’s)

Nature: Extraterrestrial

Attitude: Desperate for Validation

Weakness: Overdue Electric Bills

First Appearance: “I Was Captured by the Creature from Krorgarr!” Tales to Astonish #25 (Marvel, 1961)

A hostile alien inventor kidnaps a hapless Earth couch potato through his television set, which the Krogarrian uses as a receiver for his teleportation device. The Creature marches the captured Earthman to the Krogarrian Patent Office to prove his machine works, but the human deadbeat never paid his power bill. When his electricity is shut off his TV goes dark and he gets zapped back to Earth. I love this story, because it dares to ask what would happen if the Zeta Beam was created by a moron.

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11. DIMENSION ZERO ARROWS

A Giant: Projectile

Nature: Extradimensional

Attitude: Stabby

Weakness: Green Arrow and Speedy

First Appearance: “The Mystery of the Giant Arrows” and “Prisoners of Dimension Zero,” Adventure Comics #252-253 (DC, 1958).

Are Giant Arrows really giant “monsters?” Well, they crash into cities and cause massive property damage, scaring the crap out of screaming bystanders, so I am totally counting them.

Kirby briefly took over the “Green Arrow” strip from veteran artist George Papp and steered it in, well, a Kirby-er direction, abetted by Red Skull creator Ed Herron and Dave Wood, who co-plotted and scripted this gonzo tale that sends Oliver Queen and Roy Harper to a dimension of kaiju-sized aliens to stop the source of the monster projectiles. GA creator and powerful DC editor Mort Weisinger hated Kirby’s take and lobbied for his removal, but not before the King drew the Emerald Archer’s best-known origin tale, “Green Arrow’s First Case” (with a Herron script), that introduced Queen honing his archery skills while stranded on a desert island.

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10. FIN FANG FOOM

A Giant: Shorts-Wearing Dragon

Nature: Extraterrestrial

Attitude: Hates Commies

Weakness: Sleep-Inducing Herb

First Appearance: “Fin Fang Foom!” Strange Tales #89 (Marvel, 1961)

I’ve always thought this Kirby kaiju was hugely overrated. People dig him because of his silly name and totally unnecessary, usually purple shorts — like most male lizards, I assume he can retract his Fin Dong Foom inside his body to preserve his modesty. See, you learned something today.

A Taiwanese lad chastised by his dad as a coward for not joining the army (protagonists’ masculinity is constantly under attack in the Marvel monster books) goes to mainland China to awaken the legendary dragon as a counter to the PRC fleet poised to invade his island home. Foom picks up the Great Wall of China and slings it around like a bullwhip, which I have to admit is extremely badass and is the only reason he and his pointless shorts made this list.

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9. MOOMBA

A Giant: Idol

Nature: Extraterrestrial

Attitude: Conquer-y

Weakness: Wily Shamans

First Appearance: “The Unbelievable Menace of Moomba,” Tales to Astonish #23 (Marvel, 1961)

You may have slept through the part of Anthropology 101 where they told you that all wooden carvings created by the tribal peoples of the world are actually the same race of conquest-minded aliens. True story! From his African home, Moomba commands his legions of tchotchkes to beat the crap out of the peoples of Earth until the United Nations surrenders to his mahogany hordes. His undoing, though, is the shaman of the local tribe where he lives, who freezes him with some powerful incense smoke. Spooked, Moomba and his followers merge into a giant wooden rocketship to fly back home.

You wouldn’t be out of line wondering what Kirby himself was smoking for this one.

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8. DRAGON EGG MONSTER

A Giant: Statue

Nature: Magical

Attitude: Smash-y

Weakness: Aggressive Wishing (yes, really)

First Appearance: “The Secrets of the Sorcerer’s Box,” Showcase #6 (DC, 1957) 

Despite its name, the Challengers of the Unknown feature did not take many chances with its formula. Kirby often hewed to the template of this first appearance script by Dave Wood, in which our adrenaline junkie quartet runs afoul of some alien artifact or mystic chest with a series of Mystery Box surprises for them. (I realize I’m not describing this trope very well, but if you’ve read this title you know exactly what I’m talking about.) The coolest menace from any one of these monstrous grab-bags is the giant red statute that hatches from the Dragon Egg spit out by the Sorcerer’s Box, looking like it stepped right out of a Ray Harryhausen sword-and-sandal epic.

Kirby did not actually draw many issues of this title about purple-jumpsuited daredevils after he co-created them with Wood; he’d lose a lawsuit to his Challengers and Green Arrow editor Jack Schiff over money Schiff believed Kirby owed him for getting him the Sky Masters of the Space Force newspaper strip gig.

It was an unfortunate project to get blackballed from DC over, because Sky Masters (also scripted by Wood) never caught on; for this reader, its space heroics were way too “grounded” and, frankly, a waste of Kirby’s talents. Kirby wound up at Marvel, where he’d improve on the Challengers formula with a a title that initially very much resembled it, Fantastic Four.

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7. TRULL

A Giant: Well, Actually, a Fairly Regular-Sized Steam Shovel

Nature: Extraterrestrial/Terrestrial Hybrid

Attitude: Conquer-y

Weakness: Elephants

First Appearance: “Trull! The Inhuman!” Tales to Astonish #21 (Marvel, 1961) 

A metal-based alien crashes fatally to Earth; his spirit floats away to possess a steam shovel at an African worksite where a disgraced architect stops the foreman from abusing an elephant. Trull starts shoveling the crap out of everything that moves; the construction workers promptly surrender. Clearly, Earth is doomed. Trull delights in a montage describing all the terrible things he’s going to do to us (a constant Kirby motif, continuing well into his Marvel superhero days) until the elephant our hero saved head-butts the inhuman into junk. The moral of this story: Elephants hate aliens. It’s just science.

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6. THE HULK (1960)

A Giant: Escaped Convict

Nature: Extraterrestrial

Attitude: Enslave-y

Weakness: Faulty Wiring

First Appearance: “I Was a Slave of the Living Hulk,” Journey into Mystery #62 (Marvel, 1960)

A henpecked electrician revives a crashed alien he dubs “The Hulk” (given name: Xemnu) and is not thrilled to discover he’s just escaped from an alien prison planet. Xemnu hypnotizes Earth to build him a giant spaceship to get him even farther from Space Jail, the problem being its rockets will be so powerful it will destroy Earth when it launches. Xemnu plans to take his human savior along, but to save the homeworld the Terran sabotages the spaceship so it blows itself up at blastoff instead. And his wife still doesn’t believe him! Harumph.

Comics being what they are, the OG Hulk would of course run afoul of his 1962 namesake, most recently in Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk run. Dig this rad Alex Ross Xemnu.

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5. ALIEN BRAT (& HIS CAT)

A Giant: Dennis the Menace

Nature: Extraterrestrial

Attitude: “Mine! Mine! Mine!”

Weakness: Responsible Parents

First Appearance: “The Human Pets,” Challengers of the Unknown #1 (DC, 1958)

This obnoxious kid with his enormous green forehead drops a big red ball spacecraft in a farmer’s field that captures the Challengers when they investigate, whooshing them back to a terrarium in his room on his home planet. They escape from the enclosure only to have the kid’s giant cat chase them around. Finally, they use a pop gun to alert the kid’s even bigger parents, who chew him out before sending our hero quartet home. (Note from Dan: Do you think Ralph Bakshi and co. ripped off Kirby’s design of the kid? I do.)

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4. COLOSSUS

A Giant: Statue

Nature: Extraterrestrial/Terrestrial Hybrid

Attitude: Hates Commies

Weakness: Boredom

First Appearance: “I Created the Colossus,” Tales of Suspense #14 (Marvel, 1961)

The Soviet government forces a sculptor to build a giant monument to the regime’s greatness. In one of those good news/bad news situations, a visiting alien takes the colossus over and promptly starts trashing the USSR. Eventually, the alien gets tired of all this destruction and leaves in a second saucer. The Commies don’t know about the alien, though, and the sculptor tricks them into getting their act together lest the Colossus come back to life once more. Colossus would make a comeback with his own strip in Astonishing Tales in the 1970s, renamed “It” to not confuse him with a certain X-Man, but very much confusing him with Theodore Spurgeon’s OG swamp monster, who also starred in its own Marvel comic. All the good names are taken, people.

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3. THE GREEN THING

A Giant: Ignatius Rex, “An Ordinary Weed”

Nature: Experiment Gone Wrong

Attitude: Conquer-y

Weakness: Another Equally Pissed-Off Plant Thing

First Appearance: “The Green Thing!” Tales of Suspense #19 (Marvel, 1961)

A scientist travels to a remote island to test his Miracle-Gro on the tropical plant life and creates a 7-foot-tall broccoli who tries to kill him as its first step to conquering Earth. After Greenie wins an awesome throwdown with a shark that predates Lucio Fulci’s Zombie 2 by many years, the desperate scientist reanimates a second plant so they can fight each other. I love this daffy story.

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2. ULTIVAC

A Giant: Robot

Nature: Experiment Gone Awry

Attitude: Conflicted (see below)

Weakness: His Creators Suck

First Appeared: “ULTIVAC is Loose!” Showcase #7 (DC, 1957)  

When an ex-Nazi scientist and a bank robber wind up in the same cell and decide to make a giant robot together, you just know this won’t end well. In their second appearance, the Challengers of the Unknown add a lady member, computer expert June Robbins, who becomes Fay Wray to ULTIVAC’s mechanical Kong. The giant bot has a penchant for sticking his giant hand in windows like the big ape. After numerous run-ins with the Challengers, ULTIVAC declares his intention to use his vast robot powers to help humanity, but his dirtbag creators destroy him rather than share him with the People of Earth, so his ending is as tragic as Kong’s, too.

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1. GROOT

A Giant: Tree

Nature: Extraterrestrial

Attitude: Kidnap-y

Weakness: Termites, woodpeckers, tent caterpillars, Dutch elm disease (I’m just spitballing on those last three)

First Appearance: “I Challenged…Groot, the Monster from Planet X!” Tales to Astonish #13 (Marvel, 1960)

OG Groot is way less lovable than his Vin Diesel-voiced, tri-vocabularied MCU counterpart. He comes to Earth to bring a whole town back for study by commanding the trees to make a big net around it with their roots and fly it through space to Planet X. (Yes, really.) The local rednecks pump Groot full of bullets to no avail (he’s a tree, dummies) and they’re fresh out of ideas until a local biologist, henpecked for cowardice by his wife, introduces a deadly species of termite into Groot’s body who chew him into submission. How do you like them apples, Leslie?

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MORE

— The TOP 13 JACK KIRBY SERIES of the ’60s and ’70s — RANKED. Click here.

— The TOP 13 Essential JACK KIRBY CAPTAIN AMERICA Stories — RANKED. Click here.

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Comics writer/playwright/bon vivant Fred Van Lente is a funny guy. Sign up for updates on his upcoming projects and check out the trailer for his comics-writing course at his web site, fredvanlente.com. He and his wife, Crystal Skillman, wrote the play King Kirby.