Friday, March 14, 2008

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ART

ITEM! You do your very best day-in-and-day-out pilgrim, and it’s just never enough. Turns out it was a good thing that Marvel didn’t print enough of the recent Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure. For those True Believers who somehow, some-way missed this one (and for shame on you if you did!), it was a Raucous Re-creation by your Yours Truly and Joltin’ Joe Sinnott (with an able assist by the talented Rascally Ron Frenz) of the never-published original Lee-Kirby story for FF #102. For what happened to that story in 1970, see this rapturous recap.

So why is it a good thing that the print run on this Marvelous Masterpiece was unbelievably underestimated? Because try as we might, there was one page of King Kirby’s pencils to the original story that no-one no-how could come lay their little No-Prize lovin’ mitts on. Believe me, we tried everything. I even sucked it up and personally called Lovely Lisa Kirby and Garrulous Greg Theakston just to triple-check that they did not possess the mischeiviously missing page. Finally, we just had to wing it with a page of Kredible Kirbyesque Kopy-cat pencils from Ronny-Boy.

Now this from Titanic Tom Brevoort! The missing page has suddenly surfaced. Some kid bought it on ebay no less! Even always authoritative Johnny “There’s always To” Morrow got caught flat-footed on this one. What to do, what to do? I guess it’s back to the drawing board for another even-more complete recreation, hopefully coming soon in an adequate print run to a comic shop near you. I’ll have to re-gear my bustling brain all over again to script this one page. Merciless Marvel Management wasn’t sure that the Smiling One had it in him the last time to get the job done. But I gotta tell you, Fearless face Fronters, it’s just like riding a bike. It’ll be a cold day in Hell before your Uncle Stanley forgets how to ignore Jack’s margin notes and dramatically dialogue a comic book the way he sees fit! ‘Nuff Said!

Excelsior!
Smiley

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