DARKSEID … NOW EVEN MORE DEVIANT!: Blowing off a guy’s head with a stick of dynamite is pretty darn evil, but a flesh-tone coloring error cranks the badness on this cover up to 11. Jack “King” Kirby illustrated this Amazing Heroes #47 [Buy from Mile High] cover from 1984; the colorist, mercifully, remains uncredited.
I thought I read somewhere that some joker actually did this deliberately. It might have been in the final issue of Amazing Heroes where various people reminisced about their work on the magazine. I hope that I’m wrong . . .
Scott:
That’s interesting. I’ve never heard that, but I’ve never read the last issue of Amazing Heroes (it’s one of a handful of issues I still need). If I ever track that down, I’ll be sure to update the info here.
Cheers,
Andrew
That is Hilarious!
While the pink tone is weird, I can see part of the dilema. If the colorist had made it the traditional cartoon RED, it would have been confused with Orions costume color and looked like some kind of bizzare, elongated arm without a hand shoved in a giant mouth.
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As the executive editor of AMAZING HEROES for almost all of its run, I can speak to this with authority.
(1) It was Tom Mason, who at the time was the designer on AH and did the cover seps. He will survive on the internet forever for this.
(2) It was quite unintentional. On the untrimmed cover, Kirby had drawn the other end of the stick of dynamite, removing any phallic… I was going to say “taint” but I don’t want to dig myself in deeper. Once the mohel, I mean printer, trimmed off that crucial quarter of an inch, the color (which yes, was chosen so that the dynamite wouldn’t look like an extension of Orion) made the illusion unavoidable. In fact, I suspect that playing around with it in Photoshop, it’s hard to find any shade of red (your standard comic book dynamite/firecracker being redm after all) that doesn’t either maintain the pornographic illusion or start bleeding into Orion.
I never found out what Jack thought about it. I was too embarrassed to ask.
The ‘Tributes’ section of the final issue of Amazing Heroes (#204) includes this comment from Steve Freitag, Fantagraphics news editor, 1983-84.
“For an AH cover of Jack Kirby’s New Gods (#47), art director Tom Mason made the dynamite stick in a character’s mouth a little less red, and a little more flesh-colored, than was absolutely neccessary… it was good for a laugh.”
Kim: Thanks for stopping by. I was a big fan of Amazing Heroes and continue to read The Comics Journal to this day. When this post went up back in 2010, it went viral and drove massive traffic to Comics Bronze Age. I loved the extra viewership, of course, but disappointed that it took a penis joke to make it happen. Sigh.
Phil: Your Visual History of Indie Comics site is pretty cool. People should check it out.
Cheers,
Andrew
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