Red Raven Comics #1

History

The book was assembled by Joe Simon immediately after he left Fox Feature Syndicate to become Timely's first in-house comic book editor — the Grand Comics Database records it as his debut freelance editorial assignment for the company. Simon recruited Jack Kirby, who was still transitioning away from Fox, and the two collaborated on the cover (Kirby pencils, Simon layouts, with lettering attributed to Howard Ferguson per researcher Greg Theakston); the central cover figure was adapted from a Hal Foster Prince Valiant strip. Because Kirby appears to have joined Timely only partway through production, Simon assigned the 17-page Red Raven lead story to artist Louis Cazeneuve rather than Kirby, while Kirby penciled the interior Mercury story — his earliest known sequential art for the company. Tellingly, the issue contains no house ads promoting a second issue of Red Raven Comics; instead, the back-matter promotes Marvel Mystery Comics and Mystic Comics, strongly suggesting that Timely had already decided to kill the title before it shipped, folding its numbering into The Human Torch beginning with issue #2.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First and only appearance of the Red Raven Comics title: cover-dated August 1940 (on-sale May 29, 1940), published by Timely Publications; the series numbering was immediately inherited by The Human Torch with issue #2.
• First appearance and origin of Red Raven (created by writer Joe Simon and artist Louis Cazeneuve): a human boy orphaned by a crash on a floating Bird-People island, raised by its king and returned to humanity with artificial wings on his twentieth birthday.
• First appearance of Mercury in 'Mercury in the 20th Century,' penciled by Jack Kirby — his earliest known interior art credit for Timely Comics — with script by Martin A. Bursten (confirmed not a Kirby pseudonym per Grand Comics Database research).
• First appearance of Pluto as a villain in the Mercury story, posing as warmongering dictator 'Rudolph Hendler' of 'Prussland' — a thinly veiled stand-in for Hitler, reflecting Timely's pre-U.S.-entry caution about naming Nazi Germany directly.
• Through retroactive continuity established in Marvel Universe #7 (1998, written by Roger Stern), the Mercury of this story was identified as the Eternal Makkari and the Pluto as the Deviant shapeshifter Kro, making this issue the earliest-recorded appearance of Kirby's Eternals/Deviants mythology in Marvel continuity.
• The cover is Jack Kirby's first documented cover work in comics; art credits (from Greg Theakston's 'The Complete Jack Kirby Volume One') identify pencils by Kirby, layouts by Simon, and lettering by Howard Ferguson; the central figure was adapted from a Hal Foster Prince Valiant strip.
• Also contains first appearances of: the Human Top (Bruce Bravelle, written and drawn by Dick Briefer under pseudonyms), the Eternal Brain (Professor Carmody), space adventurer Comet Pierce, Magar the Mystic, and comic-relief Officer O'Krime.
• A partial digital reprint was published by Marvel (Amazon Kindle, December 2019), but per a reader annotation it omits four of the seven comic stories and the text story; as of 2025, much of the issue has never been reprinted in any format.

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