Originally Posted By: Pig Iran
Kirby is solely responsible for making me love comics.
I was about 6 at the time I read Marvel Treasury #11..the Fantastic Four. "This Man, This Monster" made me realize the power comics had....even at that young age. I didn't fully understand the story, but I did get the redemption and sacrifice angles, and that a hero comes from the unlikeliest of places.

Nowhereman, check out Kirby's 1970's Black Panther run. If you don't like that you may never like Kirby.



Yeah, "This Man, This Monster" from FANTASTIC FOUR 51 is pretty widely agreed on as the single best issue of the series, an outstanding story by Stan Lee, and among the best issues by Kirby as well. If not the single best work by both. It came on the end of a wave of creativity that gave us the Inhumans and Attalan (FF 44-47), the Silver Surfer and Galactus (FF 48-50), then this great one-shot issue, then the Black Panther and Wakanda (FF 52-53), then a riproaring battle between the Thing and the Surfer in FF 55, then an epic battle between the FF and Dr. Doom (FF 56-60), then Blastar and the Negative Zone (FF 61-63), the Kree Sentinel (FF 64-65), then "Him" who later reached new heights in Starlin's WARLOCK series (FF 66-67).

Anyone who reads these and still tries to argue that Kirby is a talentless hack... these issues are the ones that defined Marvel!

In 1989, one day after work I went by Tropic Comics in Fort Lauderdale, and they had just purchased the originals of Kirby's FF 51 pages. What a treat that was, to see the original title page for "This Man, This Monster". They had already negotiated to sell that single page alone to a guy for $6,000 !

It makes my head spin to imagine what that page must be worth now, at a time when copies of ACTION COMICS # 1, and DETECTIVE 27 now sell for well upwards of $1 million each. I was talking to a local comics shop dealer a week ago, that I thought there would be a ceiling reached on what these originals would sell for. He said he thought so too. But we were both wrong, there's no limit in sight.