Sometimes you stumble upon crazy syncs in the most unlikely places....
See, a funny thing happened after I finished the Wizards, Workings and Walk-Ins opus; I started looking through some of Kirby's late-period Marvel work for variations on the themes we explored. And one storyline in particular stood out...
The 1976 Captain America Annual (which hit the stands in January) had Cap fending off a UFO invasion in a rural community all by himself.
In normal continuity, you'd have 10,000 superheroes flying in and destroying any sense of real jeopardy, which is one of the reasons that Kirby was so annoyed by having to deal with the continuity that he co-created in the first place.
But there are a couple of weird clues in this story which are worth looking at.
First of all, the very strange orange popsicle-type spaceship design that we saw hit the stands in the issue of Amazing Adventures cover-dated the same month as the Betty and Barney Hill abduction makes a re-appearance.
UPDATE: Here's a freaky sync with Mike Clelland's encounter on The Hidden Experience. Read as soon as you're done here.
Even stranger is that after a bit of bait-and-switch Cap ends battling a space vampire who feeds on "lifeforce," as he tells us repeatedly throughout the story. In other words, very much the same plot as Colin Wilson's novel Space Vampires, which would hit the bookstores a mere two months later.
Now, the two gentlemen may have met and compared notes at some point but I can't find any evidence of that at all right now.
Kirby loved to borrow an idea as much as the next guy (he knocked off Rollerball around the same time in Cap's monthly title) but I can't find any evidence that he had seen Wilson's manuscript or vice versa.
Given Kirby's track record, we might have to chalk this up in the weirdness column.
The dialogue in the final page of the story seems to have been given a polish by consulting editor Marv Wolfman but Kirby has Cap meet with some "Majestic-12" types, who basically tell the superhero to keep his god-damned mouth shut about the alien invasion, and that maybe someday (read: "never") they'll tell the whole truth about it to the public. And it all ends with Cap speaking for Kirby and telling the readers to keeping watching the skies because the Truth is out there and so on and so forth.
A few years later Kirby fan Dan O'Bannon would team up with Tobe Hooper for the Space Vampires film, which was renamed Lifeforce for American release.
The film starred a woefully miscast but highly resonant Steve Railsback (who played Manson in Helter Skelter and Duane Barry in The X-Files) and boasted an Oscar-worthy performance by Mathilda May as the Queen of the Space Vampires.
Well, if not an Oscar than an AVN Award, for sure.
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