Forbidden Rituals

The other day I read Jack Kirby's delightfully batshit-insane and somewhat paranoid Spirit World, a comic magazine that lasted but a single issue. At a glance, you'd assume it was your typical supernatural anthology comic circa 1970, complete with its own horror host, Doctor E. Leopold Maas ("Essentially, I try to separate the devil from the deep!!"). But then you see the fumetti-style stories, and the bizarro layouts and photo-illustrations and then you realize that Kirby was trying something quite different from the Creepys and Eeries of the day. The magazine has a fever dream feel to it, offering up disturbing questions and ominous warnings ("Don't Plan On Visit Paris in the Year 1983") instead of your tired shock or twist endings. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, comes a page of Sergio Aragones one-panel gags ("Weird Humor.") It's a trippy read.

DC Comics has just reprinted Spirit World in a gorgeous, slender hardcover edition, and an essay from Mark Evanier (who served as one of the assistant editors on the magazine) reveals that Kirby has something much more ambitious in mind. Kirby wanted to do a proper magazine, complete with "full color, glossy paper, photo features, name authors ads, columns... and lots of comic book stories aimed at a more adult audience," writes Evanier. Kirby had just left Marvel for DC, and was bursting with ideas. Kirby was especially keen to experiment with fumetti. The reaction, according to Evanier?

A great idea, the creative folks at DC said.

An expensive, impractical gamble, the business folks said.

Slowly, Kirby's vision was hobbled into something a little more in line with other comic mags of the day. Black and white art, no columns, no name writers, just Kirby and his assistants (Evanier and Steve Sherman) who had three weeks to create the entire thing from scratch. While the end result is still a lot of weird fun, I wish Kirby had been given the opportunity to execute what he had in mind.

I hope DC will reprint the other Kirby magazine experiment from the same year, In the Day of the Mob, inspired by Godfather-mania:

Though, um, wasn't it the 20s that were roaring? Anyway...