Sorry to disappoint you, fans! This isn’t so much a script as a reminiscence of what went through the envisioning of what the cover would be. i.e., Where the image was swiped from. The obvious source is this:
Above: The Brute that Walks, page Seven, Panel Two, originally printed in Journey into Mystery #65 (1961, Atlas Comics, which later became Marvel Comics), drawn by the great Jack Kirby, the King of Comics. It was reprinted in 1970 in Where Creatures Roam #1 (Marvel Comics). I had a small stack of these 1970’s reprints of these late 1950’s-early 1960’s comics, and while writing and drawing my Doris Danger comics, I flipped through them for my “inspiration” (swipes). Notice in my version, I wrote “After the King.” This is in reverence, deference, and acknowledgement of my parody and homage of Jack Kirby’s work. I regularly post in the comics as well, my acknowledgement of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s “Atlas Comics” giant monster work, in addition to a suggestion of buying these classic quaint compendiums. And I do so now as well!
The Brute that Walks was a scientist who drank a potion he had concocted, hoping it would make him more manly, because his girlfriend thought he was a wimpy science nerd. It turned him into a humongous ape creature. The Kirby image above, in my opinion, is “inspired” (swiped) from THIS famous movie scene:
Above: King Kong (1933, directed by Merian C. Cooper).
In the 1970’s, right at the same time Marvel was reprinting these 1960’s Kirby monster comics, DC was releasing a lot of horror comics, most of them (the ones I enjoyed most) with covers signed LD. These covers invariably had images of people who had no clue of a situation they were in, but WE saw the horror and terror right behind them, just out of their view.
I loved these pretty obvious, kinda cornball “shocking twists,” and the amount of story these “right-before-the-instant” images conveyed.
Stan Lee, writing the Giant Monster stories with Kirby for Atlas, has commented about including what he called “Henry James” style twist endings to his stories. So for example, in The Brute That Walks story above, the scientist turned into a giant monster trying to make himself manly so that his girl friend wouldn’t think he was a wimp, then he went after his girlfriend and scared her, because he was a giant monster now, and then he turned back into a man, and his girlfriend said, You’re so manly for saving me from that giant monster. “Gasp! What a twist!”
They’re both enjoyable in their way, but I probably enjoyed the twists of the DC comics covers better than the stories of Stan Lee, so I cheated my genre a bit, by swiping the language of giant monsters and the art style of Jack Kirby, but the twist-style of DC covers – for THIS cover, which you can see if you click the “Published” link below.
