Interesting observation. I think it was always Kirby’s tendency to go his own way on things. In Sean Howe’s “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story” (review here on 10/10/12), Howe describes the Lee/Kirby collaboration as the two men discussing plot, Kirby sometimes taking notes, Kirby doing the pages at home, and then Kirby turning in a complete work with margin notes that frequently had little to do with the (loosely-defined) original plot. That those books have any connection at all to the rest of the line is probably down to Lee, who recognized that cross-title continuity was helping to sell his full line of books (and that mania for continuity would only accelerate when Roy Thomas took over for Lee, at least on the best-selling books).

But even a passing acknowledgment of other Marvel Universe events is missing from books like Panther. Because Kirby effectively created his mid-70s Marvel books (Cap, Black Panther, Eternals, 2001, Machine Man) entirely on his own in California, there’s even less of a sense of those books inhabiting the “Marvel Universe.” Eternals was dragged kicking and screaming into the MU (to its detriment I think), and that run on Panther and Cap is miles removed from anything else Marvel did before or since.

All these years later, I value these Kirby books for their vertical isolation from the rest of the Marvel line, but buying them off the rack in the 1970s I remember experiencing some cognitive dissonance, particularly with what was happening in Cap.

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