PREVIOUS COVER • MAIN MENU • NEXT COVER

The Mighty Thor #141
June, 1967

ROLL YOUR MOUSE OVER THE IMAGE
TO VIEW THE UNPUBLISHED VERSION

I don't know what the heck happened with this one.  The unpublished cover is a mess of a drawing, so much so that it's obvious Jack Kirby didn't pencil it that way.  Jack had some quirks in his drawing style but he never drew figures as awkwardly constructed and balanced as the villain is on that cover.  The Thor drawing is pretty weak and the various energy lines emanating from the figures are clearly not the way Kirby did that kind of thing.

So I'll take a guess and say that Jack did a drawing for the cover and that in the pencil stage, Stan didn't care for it and had someone else start redrawing.  Or maybe Kirby didn't even do a beginning drawing and they had someone imitating him and tracing parts of old drawings.  It would not even surprise me if the whole cover was actually the composition of inker Vince Colletta, swiping an old Kirby Thor figure and then trying to imitate Jack on the Replicus figure.

In any case, we can assume that shortly before press time, the folks in the office realized they had a stinko cover and they couldn't get a brand new one drawn and still make the deadline.  So the published cover is cobbled up from stats of the interior with the largest scene reinked and retouched so that it would work larger.  As such, it's not a bad cover.