I picked up this book and read it over the last few weeks. It is much nicer than I expected. I was expecting a trade paperback, and it turned out to be a hardcover, that closely matches the DAYS OF THE MOB and SPIRIT WORLD hardcovers. But where those previous 2 volumes were all black and white, DINGBAT LOVE has a lot of color material. Of the 175 pages of the book, about 95 of them are in color.
Also, 24 of those 175 pages are editorial text pages in color, and nicely designed, and closely resemble the THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, making this book almost look like a hardcover annual or special of that magazine.
I'm struck how, from just a 6-year stint at DC from 1970-1975, that there were well over 200 pages of unpublished material by Kirby he produced for DC. That's a lot of unpublished material !
I count SPIRIT WORLD 2, DAYS OF THE MOB 2, TRUE DIVORCE CASES 1, SOUL LOVE 1, DINGBATS 2, DINGBATS 3, and SANDMAN 7.
Only SPIRIT WORLD 2 was published while Kirby was still at DC (in WEIRD MYSTERY 1, 2 and 3, and DARK MANSION 6). That had to piss Kirby off, that he created that enormous amount of material and then DC never published it. And many of them were very thick issues, 48 or 52 pages. Plus dozens of rejected covers. As I cited before, in the 15-issue JIMMY OLSEN run alone, there were at least 6 rejected Kirby covers.
Of 150 published comics by Kirby at DC from 1970-1976, that's 7 aborted complete issues, and when you consider how big some of these magazines were, it represents page-count for at least 10 normal comics. So it's gratifying to see this stuff finally in print.
Several of these stories existed only in pencil form, and a few of them were commisssioned to be inked by Mike Royer specially for this book, and nicely colored by Tom Zuiko. Most of these pages were in the collections of private collectors, and many of them were tracked down as far away as Europe for use in this book. There are three missing pages that could not be found, and John Morrow hopes they will be found later and included in a later edition.
Another cool aspect is that many of the pages are shown in pencil form, side-by-side with the completed pages. And double-page spreads are seamlessly printed as multiple 2-page fold-outs. A lot of nice surprises. My one complaint is all these side-by-side pencils with completed pages interrupt the story flow while reading. But it's hard to complain about all these extras, and all the thought that clearly went into making this book such a nice package. It's not how I would have compiled the same material, but I'm so glad Morrow did it this way. Not a disappointment.
