Was Jack Kirby the First Superhero Artist to Break Panel Borders?

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and twenty-ninth installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Here is part one of this week's legends. Click here for part two of this week's legends.

NOTE: If the CSBG Twitter page hits 11,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow the CSBG Twitter page!

COMIC LEGEND:

Jack Kirby was the first superhero artist to break the borders of the panels of the comic book story

STATUS:

False

One thing you might have noticed over the years of Comic Book Legends Revealed is that when it comes to comic book innovations, Jack Kirby is sort of like Mark Twain when it comes to cool quotes, people tend to give him credit even when he's already so accomplished that he really doesn't need credit for things that he didn't do.

An example of this is in Marvel Mystery Comics #15, featuring one of Jack Kirby's pre-Captain America creations, the Vision....

In the story, Jack Kirby has the Vision break the borders of the panels in the comic...

This was a rare occurrence at the time and heck, it's still not all THAT common today.

Most artists followed the panel borders strictly...

It is often referred to as the first time that an artist broke the panel borders like that.

Kirby did it a lot more with the Vision character, as seen in this bit from Marvel Mystery Comics #25...

I don't even know if the guy I'm going to use as the guy to beat Kirby to the punch was even the first one HIMSELF, as someone else might have beaten HIM to the punch that I don't know about, but at the very least, he was ahead of Kirby.

Lou Fine was a slightly older artist (about three years older than Kirby) who broke into comics right when Will Eisner and Jerry Iger were beginning their packaging studio, which would sell completed comic book stories to publishers.

Fine, when he started out in superhero stories on The Flame, was a traditional panel designer...

However, in 1940, while working on the Doll-Man feature in Feature Comics, he began to break from convention a bit, like with the horse in these pages...

and with Doll-Man in this page...

In late 1940, soon before Kirby's Vision story, Fine launched the Ray feature in Smash Comics and there Fine made a big deal out of breaking the panels borders at least once an issue...

So while Lou Fine might not even be the first guy to do it, he was definitely ahead of Kirby.

Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed - Was a scene filmed at the end of Alien where a xenomorph egg was hidden on Ripley's escape craft?

OK, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

Here's my brand-new book, 100 Things X-Men Fans Should Know And Do Before They Die, from Triumph Books.

If you want to order a copy, ordering it here gives me a referral fee.

Here's my second book, Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? The cover is by Kevin Hopgood (the fellow who designed War Machine's armor).

If you want to order a copy, ordering it here gives me a referral fee.

Follow Comics Should Be Good on Twitter and on Facebook (also, feel free to share Comic Book Legends Revealed on our Facebook page!). Not only will you get updates when new blog posts show up on both Twitter and Facebook, but you'll get some original content from me, as well!

Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends. -- half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...