Challengers of the Unknown

Jack Kirby’s ‘I Died a Thousand Times’

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« Great Scott! What a mess! Did we walk away from that? » — Rocky Davis

A couple of years after our big move, I’m still going through boxes, here at WOT? Headquarters. The other day, I came upon a stack of the long-running French anthology digest Big Boss (and its sidekick series, ‘Big Boy’), acquired who knows when and where… but surely for a song. Big Boss and ‘Big Boy’ (the quotation marks were part of the title!) were a most affordable source of vintage second-tier DC material like Roy Raymond, TV Detective; J’onn J’onzz, Martian Manhunter; Detective Chimp… and standalone tales from My Greatest Adventure, Tales of the Unexpected, House of Mystery and House of Secrets… essentially infamous editor Jack Schiff‘s row to hoe in the DC plantation.

This is Big Boss no. 6 (Oct. 1971, Arédit-Artima); cover by Ruben Moreira.

One might be inclined to say that, with its themes of adventurers cheating death or living on borrowed time, I Died a Thousand Times inspired Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown, except that Ace, Rocky, Prof and Red had burst into print a few months earlier. Suffice it to say that they sprang from the same fertile well. It’s always intriguing to observe how the particular seed of an idea can be grown in a myriad of directions.

If you’ll forgive me the intrusion, this is how the opening panel appeared in the Big Boss reprint. In order to make things more readable in the digest format — and in black and white — Arédit‘s in-house art department routinely reframed and even augmented the artwork, with varying degrees of competence and success. This is one of the more accomplished efforts.

The story’s writer is unknown (though it features a most Kirbyesque plot); it was pencilled and likely inked by King Kirby, and originally appeared in My Greatest Adventure no. 16 (July-Aug. 1957, DC); edited by Whitney Ellsworth; Jack Schiff; Murray Boltinoff and George Kashdan… let’s just say DC *was* a tad heavy on the management side in those days.

Though Kirby’s standalone short stories of this period are as charming and inventive as you’d expect, this modest trove of material has by and large been neglected. While a handful of these tales (The Thief of Thoughts; The Creatures from Nowhere!; The Cats Who Knew Too Much!; The Man Who Betrayed Earth; The Negative Man; and The Stone Sentinels of Giant Island) were semi-randomly reprinted in the early 1970s when DC had lots of pages to fill, this one didn’t resurface in North America until 2011’s pricey-then-and-pricier-now hardcover Jack Kirby Omnibus no. 1.

– RG