Great Covers – FANTASTIC FOUR #33

It doesn’t completely work, but this Jack Kirby cover to FANTASTIC FOUR combines a photographic collage with hand-drawn figures. Throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s, Kirby experimented with incorporating collages into his comics work–he apparently produced them often, to relax. But the printing technology of the time, especially on the interior pages, wasn’t really up to reproducing them well.

Here on the cover, though, the reproduction is pretty good. And yet, it still doesn’t quite work. That one bit of undersea plant life in the foreground just doesn’t look as though it’s in front of Mister Fantastic and Sue Storm enough. Still, this cover would have looked like nothing else on the comic book racks this month.