Altered Images

Recently in another forum on Facebook, a Jack Kirby fan piped up and asked if we had "seen the mini-Magneto at the elbow."

At first I thought he was talking about when Mutant Alpha regressed Magneto back to infancy so that he could relearn his life's lessons. But no, he posted, "he's just next to the Stranger's elbow".

It took a couple of exchanges before we got an image scanned and posted to show what he meant. In the meantime, I started thinking how many times Magneto would have been pictured WITH the Stranger. And I came up with approximately four intersections.  X-men #11 being the first and most famous. X-Men #18 when the Stranger comes looking for his "pet" but they are not pictured "together". Another might be in Avengers #47 or so, when Dane Whitman (The new Black Knight) accidentally imports Magneto and Toad back to earth somehow. (so it would be in flashback) and the only other appearance of the Stranger that I could think of would have been the Tales to Astonish #89 3-part Gil Kane story where the Stranger comes for the Hulk but settles for the Abomination, as the strongest there is. (Again, it would have to be a flashback image.)

Turns out, the guy was talking about the Jack Kirby cover to X-men #11, way back in 1965 when The Stranger first appears and floats over the X-men and Professor X on the streets of Manhattan. I've seen the scan posted on the Facebook account, and damn if it isn't real!  There's a mini-Magneto just to the left of the Stranger's elbow, leaning out of a third floor window in the background buildings behind the Stranger figure.Cover for Fantastic! (1967 series) #20

I was puzzled. How had I missed this for so many years? I had originally seen this cover in in-house ads that were SO popular at the time, and had frequently wondered what the story behind the Stranger was....who was this White-Haired guy in a trench coat that was as large as Galactus (in the current run of FF stories that I had) stepping on top of the NYC population?  At least, that's how I interpreted the strange perspective of this Kirby cover.  Since then, I have been told that the figure floats between the Beast and Marvel Girl as they react to the stranger's approach to Prof X. But that's not what I saw as a kid.  I saw the X-men rushing to warn Prof X of this giant that was floating on the other side of the street.  It made sense to me because I had seen an earlier search for a mutant where the team (Beast, I think) that had mistaken a worker standing o glass or plexiglass for a levitating mutant. And, I had just read FF #49 where Ben knocks Galactus off the Baxter Building, but he floats in mid-air as he recovers.  So, the seeds had been placed i my perception for this optical illusion.

But now, I had a new optical illusion that I was grappling with. There was a hither-to-unseen mini-Magneto on the cover of X-men #11 where I had never noticed him before.

I began to suspect fraud, or photoshop doctoring, but a blow up inset also thoughtfully provided and posted convinced me, it was a Jack Kirby figure of Magneto that I had never seen.

I decided the way to confirm this was to look at any copies of the cover reprinted anywhere I could find them. I started with the Marvel Masterworks volume of X-Men #11 and quickly found the image on the front cover, but the gold foil frame obscured any trace of Mags.

Cover for Marvel Masterworks (1987 series) #7So I flipped inside and looked at the reprinted cover. The back ground gray of the buildings were darker than I recalled...not battleship gray, but elephant gray, and again, no Magneto. But it is clear that that widow contains a plate of glass.Cover for The X-Men (1963 series) #11  

I was about to give up, not owning an original X-men #11, but not recalling where I would have put a reprint copy since it has been reprinted at least three times that I know of.  But the my eye fell on the inside cover illustrations of the four Marvel Masterworks volumes that were printed that year...Spidey, FF, Hulk, and X-men.  Sure enough, X-men #11 was in black and white on the inside front cover, and to my shock, there's a mini-Magneto in that window.

I grabbed for my reading glasses and searched for a magnifying glass to see the wee figure. In fact, many posters on Facebook had been joking about "Wee Magneto" and now I could see the evidence for myself.  There was NO question, Jack had drawn Magneto on the cover but in some way, the figure had not made it into the published versions.

I began to suspect that the inside cover illustrations may have been from reprints or foreign editions of the issue, and I still suspect that has some role in the mystery, though I don't know why. Immediately, i began to suspect Vinnie Colletta's short cuts, but I don't know if he did the inks on this cover. (It turns out the inks both inside and on the cover belong to Chic Stone! The GCD confirms this!)

It made sense that Jack would have included some hint of Magneto on the cover...cause this was the big wrap up..."The Triumph of Magneto"... and to leave him off would have run counter to good advertising.   But left off he was!

So, does anyone else know the story behind the "mini-Magneto" that at one time appeared on the cover of X-men #11 but now does not? Or is it the other way around?

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  • PS: I'm wondering about that blacked out billboard as well. This was the era of ads for the MMMS showing up on covers, on billboards, and in a lot of Kirby covers.  So I was wondering if that billboard had an old MMMS orange square originally.

    Nope, instead it says "Introducing  the Stranger" in the original cover!

  • What's wrong with the cover on the GCD?

  • Kirk typically linked to the covers rather than downloading them and reuploading them into his messages. It's likely the link has been broken.

    -- MSA

  • I went to the GCD to look at the cover.The small and medium images work but the large image just says the same thing it does above "See the original covers at www,comics.org).

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