I was bored.

Summer of 1972. Stuck on a cross-country vacation with my family (big sis got to bow out because she said to Mom 'I'd feel like I was grounded.'). We were going all the way from Minnesota to Washington, DC to see the sights.

We camped along the way at KOA campsites. I got to be a wizard at playing pinball. There usually was a pool.

But I was bored. Three weeks on the road was getting to be a drag. I stepped into the snack shop of yet another campsite in search of a pinball machine. Instead I saw a spinner rack with comics. I bought one on a lark:

Now, in my naiveté I confess I didn't know about re-issues or reprints. I thought every comic from Marvel or DC was fresh and new. What I had in my hands was not the latest comic about the Fantastic Four but a re-hash of an old issue. Later on when I figured it out -art from 1966 not 1972- (it explained the short hair on Johnny Storm). Marvel's Greatest Comics #37 Sept 1972 was merely a repackaging of Fantastic Four #50 May 1966.

But what an issue to reprint.

In this part of the Fantastic Four's development they encountered space aliens, Mole people, Doctor Doom (a prototype predating Darth Vader of metal masked evil genius), the whole gambit. But they had yet to come up against an enemy whose only vice was that he needed to drain the planet Earth of its power to recharge himself thereby killing off all life on Earth: Galactus!

(I always found it strange he needed to have the letter 'G' built into his costume).

Equally strange was the way he was stopped: By having The Human Torch go out into the universe and find a teeny tiny little gun that looked like a paint sprayer applicator: The Ultimate Nullifier! It was either Reed Richards snuffs out all existence or Galactus leaves.

As Kirby's output, this particular comic didn't have a whole lot of fight scenes or splashy action. Yet I was still mesmerized.

Why was that? Could it be because the dynamic poses, the anatomy suggesting something powerful and ponderous? The psychedelic acid-trip like montage of Johnny Storm's voyage from the Outerzone to get the Nullifier? Maybe it was seeing an artist who was drawing at the peak of his game, Jack Kirby who was re-defining the invisible forces of magnetic frentic energy scattered across panel to panel?

Maybe it was seeing an artist who was drawing at the peak of his game, Jack Kirby who was re-defining the invisible forces of magnetic frentic energy scattered across panel to panel? At any rate, it was a comic that influenced me greatly in years to come, all from a random purchase somewhere on the road to DC 1972.

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