He's Magically Vicious

Despite the Kirby-centric paragraph to the left,
the art here is credited to Dick Ayers. Just FYI.

So it's fair to say that I'm a fan of Jack Kirby. However, I don't think I've read as much of his material as I would like - in terms of collections, I believe I only have The Forever People of his Fourth World books, and a couple trade paperbacks of his '70s Captain America and the Falcon run. So when I saw a reprint of the Joe Simon/Jack Kirby run of The Fly for cheap at a local comic show, I made sure to snatch it up.

The Fly is one of the Archie Adventure Series heroes, published by, yes, Archie Comics. The company actually started out publishing superheroes (under the name MLJ Magazines), but America's Favorite Teenager soon eclipsed his super-brethren in popularity and became the publisher's flagship character.

Where does The Fly figure into this? He's not one of the "Golden Age" heroes of MLJ, for one, having been created by Simon and Kirby in the early 1950s. He became part of their core stable in years to come, though - whenever there was an Archie superhero revival, you'd be sure to see him alongside The Shield and the Black Hood (who did start out in the '40s), even if he was sometimes called Fly-Man.