Amazing Adventures #4 - With These Rings, I Thee Kill

This is the last of the four half-issues of AMAZING ADVENTURES that Jack Kirby wrote and drew featuring the Inhumans, and was also the last (in publishing order, he probably drew it earlier) original material by him from Marvel for five years (not counting the cobbled-together story published in FF #108). Of course they'd be hitting the reprints pretty hard for their Kirby fix in those years, with an average of over five books a month with Kirby reprints. I think Marvel actually printed more pages of Kirby while he was over at DC than DC did.

Anyway, back to the Inhumans. This is still a lot weaker than the writing he would be doing in just a few months, and Chic Stone's inks seem especially rough compared to his usual work. A shame, as I'm sure he did have some good ideas for the oft-delayed Inhumans series that these four half-issues don't really show.

Picking up from last time, the Inhumans uncover the Eye of Yin as the Mandarin had planned, and he's able to take the eye from them and absorb its power into his rings. Of course one of the first things he does is turn on his loyal underling, which is a scene I like in a low-rent Doom/Darkseid kind of way.



After an all-too-brief battle Black Bolt is able to defeat the Mandarin kind of easily, and then, well, I guess the Inhumans return to the Great Refuge and lived happily ever after, never bothered by humanity again.

Published 1971