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Early Cosmic-Era Starlin, Where Monsters Dwell 20 Cover Art at Auction

The month after debuting Thanos & Drax in Iron Man & the same month his Captain Marvel saga launched, Where Monsters Dwell shows the Jim Starlin cosmic era had begun.

The early elements of Jim Starlin's cosmic saga at Marvel have become a cornerstone of one of the most successful movie franchises ever created, some 50+ years after its beginnings in Iron Man #55 and Captain Marvel #25 in 1973.  But around the time that Starlin was beginning to work on the foundations of his cosmic Marvel saga, he also got an assignment to do a cover for another Marvel cosmic story in the series Where Monsters Dwell.   That issue came out a month after the introduction of Thanos and Drax in Iron Man #55, and the same month his now-legendary Captain Marvel began, and it shows Jim Starlin very much in a cosmic frame of mind.  And it's no wonder: he had been assigned to create a new cover for a reprint of a Jack Kirby and Stan Lee science fiction epic in which an alien capable of wreaking havoc on entire planets in order to keep his own form of peace in the cosmos had decided that Earth's civilization must be destroyed.  The incredibly destructive caped green alien on that cover bears a little resemblance to Drax the Destroyer as well.

In addition to his interior art finishing work on Amazing Spider-Man, among Starlin's earliest assignments at Marvel were a number of covers, largely for reprint series.  These included Where Monsters Dwell, Marvel Super-Heroes, Marvel Triple Action, The Mighty World of Marvel (UK), Spider-Man Comics Weekly (UK), and the reprint era of X-Men and Sgt. Fury.  Covers for such series could likely be assigned farther in advance than the norm, and in the two-month February-March 1973 cover-dated period that coincides with Iron Man #55-56 and Captain Marvel #25, Starlin is credited with a staggering 26 covers, per GCD.  Obviously, many of those must have been completed far in advance, and it certainly seems like Starlin must have been in his cosmic frame of mind while working on this Where Monsters Dwell #20 cover.

One can imagine Starlin thinking through his ideas for Iron Man and Captain Marvel with Thanos, Drax, and company, inspired by his college psych class and what Kirby had been doing at DC Comics, and while working on that, he gets an assignment to do a cover interpretation of a different cosmic Kirby saga that is sort of a parallel track to Thanos:  to keep peace in the cosmos, the alien Klagg has destroyed entire civilizations, and Earth is next.  Starlin put his own stamp on the elements involved here, as both the alien Klagg and his giant robot look very different than what Kirby had done for this story, which had originally appeared in Tales of Suspense #21 (Marvel, 1961).

As our friends at Comic Connect pointed out to us recently, it's interesting to speculate the reasoning behind why some of the original covers were modified or replaced on some of their 1970s-era reprint titles.  They were doing several reprint series at this time, and even a number of horror/monster-era reprint series, including Where Monsters Dwell, Monsters on the Prowl, and Where Creatures Roam.  Looking at some examples of the Where Monsters Dwell title in particular, the first notable change was with issue #3, where Marie Severin essentially just updated the original to make the background and people look more '70s.  Issue #8 has a much more notable change, updating the insets-and-arrows early 1960s Marvel cover style to a full-bleed image by Severin and Bernie Wrightson, that keeps the original Kirby concept intact.  The classic Gil Kane example of issue #13 again preserves the original Kirby concept while doing what a lot of these changes seem to do: make the human element more prominent. Similarly, John and Marie Severin bring the humanity more front and center for #14 and #15.

Starlin and Dave Cockrum's cover for issue #18 is a faithful remix of the elements in the Kirby original of Strange Tales #91, but Starlin's issue #20 cover might be the most extreme departure from the original for the entire series.  On Kirby's original 1961 cover for Tales of Suspense #21, the alien Klagg's humongous robot dwarfs even the buildings in the scene, and the people seem like ants. In the reprinted story, the robot is a combination interstellar ship and planet destroyer that the alien pilots.  Starlin abandons this concept entirely and creates an alien of his own design, much different from Kirby's original, and a robot that is perhaps "only" 10-12 feet tall.  Kirby's classic small-bodied big-headed alien has been replaced by the type of design that had clearly been on Starlin's mind for the creation of Drax (a design that had also been inspired by his own horror character Dr. Weird from his fanzine days).

Perhaps most of all, in contrast with Kirby's Galactus-sized and unfathomable cosmic danger on the cover of Tales of Suspense #21, Starlin's cover here shows a cosmic menace that can express human emotions, even if they aren't exactly human — a concept that has helped make his Marvel work resonate in the decades since.  A fascinating footnote to the beginning of Starlin's cosmic era at Marvel,  the original cover artwork for Where Monsters Dwell #20 by Jim Starlin and inked by Frank Giacoia is currently up for auction at Comic Connect.

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