Today, we head back 50 years to see the debut of Jack Kirby's brilliant horror/fantasy character, the Demon Etrigan!

This is "Look Back," where every four weeks of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each spotlight will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first spotlight of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we look at weeks broadly, so if a month has either five Sundays or five Saturdays, it counts as having a fifth week) looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.

This is a bit late, but let's go to June 1972 for Jack Kirby and Mike Royer's introduction of Etrigan the demon in The Demon #1.

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WHY DID JACK KIRBY CREATE A DEMON CHARACTER?

One of the interesting things about Jack Kirby is that his prodigious comic book output wasn't just amazing, but it was also sadly EXPECTED. In other words, he had page quotas when he came to DC and those page quotas were crazy high. When he gave up Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen, in 1972, he had to then replace it with a new series (as well as the black and white magazines that Kirby had been experimenting at with DC that didn't last very long at all), so DC wanted him to do some comic books in the same vein as the then-popular books like House of Mystery and Weird Western Tales, so Kirby gave one of those concepts a spin with his horror/fantasy series, the Demon.

As I wrote about in an old Comic Book Legends Revealed, the design of the Demon was based on one of Jack Kirby's artistic idols, Hal Foster. Foster was one of the most popular comic strip artists of the 20th Century. He first came into prominence in the world of comics with his work on the 1929 Tarzan comic strip. Hal Foster was such a fresh visionary artist that soon he (well, he or Alex Raymond) was the most copied artist in comics, as artists would swipe from him constantly. In the late 30s, Foster wanted to work on his own comics, so he created Prince Valiant, an extremely popular epic historical adventure that still remains in newspapers today (Foster retired from the strip in 1971 and passed away a decade later). In one storyline fairly early on in the series run, Prince Valiant had to come up with a disguise. So he killed a goose and skinned it, using its skin and its various body parts to create a mask that looks like, well, a demon!

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As an homage to Foster, Kirby decided to use that design as the inspiration for his new Demon character.

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The first issue opens with a striking battle sequence set in the days of King Arthur, as Merlin the sorceror has to find a way to hide a book from the impending attack of Morgaine Le Fey...

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Merlin turns to a demon that he had under his power, Etrigan, to hide away the Eternity Book to protect it from Le Fey..

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It is hard to properly explain how cool of a comic book The Demon #1 is, as it is just PACKED with content. Jack Kirby was the kind of writer who would have, like, four good ideas for an ARC, and they would all be crammed into a single issue. It's really amazing just how packed to the gills with awesome ideas this comic book. And we haven't even (officially) met Jason Blood, yet!

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WHAT IS THE CONNECTION BETWEEN JASON BLOOD AND ETRIGAN THE DEMON?

When we finally meet Jason Blood, he gets an awesome introduction, along with the credits for the issue. One of the underrated things about Jack Kirby's DC work at this point is that he was able to get a new inker. DC initially gave him Vince Colletta, but eventually Kirby was able to get Mike Royer and it really helped the artwork. Not that it was bad with Colletta, but it went to a whole new level with Royer.

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Kirby was always good at supporting casts, and he gave Jason Blood an eclectic mixture of interesting personalities for his supporting cast right off the bat...

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But then, Jason Blood, who has been mysteriously blacking out for some time now and waking up in strange places next to some devastation, finally get the reveal we had been waiting for all issue, and it comes with the now iconic rhyme as Jason turns back into Etrigan the Demon!

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The comic book had an unusual final page that served almost as a "Coming soon!" and wow, look how striking this final page is! It's not so much of a cliffhanger as it is, "You better tune in next time, because this is going to be awesome."

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DC loved this first issue so much that it had Kirby rearrange his schedule so that he could make it a monthly right away.

If you folks have any suggestions for July (or any other later months) 2012, 1997, 1972 and 1947 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we're discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.