Marvel Essentials We'll Probably Never See No.5

When Jack Kirby returned to the Marvel fold in 1976 after a stint working at DC, it really seemed like they didn't know what to do with him.

A triumphant return to the Fantastic Four title would have been the obvious choice, as he never got credit for his writing and plotting on what was certainly at the time "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine!".

Kirby actually ended up both writing and drawing his 1940 co-creation Captain America for a spell, which I suppose was an even more obvious choice, but still a damn good one.

So apart from a handful of vanity projects that will no doubt appear in these pages in due course, what else was Jolly Jack let loose on?

ESSENTIAL 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY Vol.1

Just why Marvel decided to release an adaptation of Kubrick's frustrating movie some eight years after it's release is a mystery to me. And it wasn't a modest publication either, being an 80 page magazine size "Treasury Special" written and drawn by Jack Bloody Kirby (with back-up articles too, no less).

What's even more surprising is that Marvel decided to try and make an ongoing monthly series of it.

"Based on Concepts of the MGM Movie by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke", the regular series initially focused largely on cavemen, spacemen, evolution and expanded on themes that Kirby had been toying with during his brief tenure with the Distinguished Competition. (Kirby's contemporary project "The Eternals" also ran along similar lines, but this was the mid-1970s, and the scribblings of Erich von Daniken and his ilk were all very much in vogue).

But, hey. Cavemen drawn by Jack Kirby...

Anyway, Issue 8 saw the introduction of a character that was to seal the fate of the series that spawned him, and Mister Machine (yes, that's what I said) was soon judged worthy of his own solo title. So after an embarassingly brief run of 10 issues, Marvel decided to stop paying royalties to MGM and Kirby moved his attentions to the further adventures of his bizarre new character.

But don't just take my word for it. Tune in to the Security Kitchen again for the next column in this series and see what did (and didn't) happen next...