Come Sail Away!

I’m sure many of you out there have heard of Sailor Moon. The inter­est­ing thing is that this char­ac­ter has been around for longer than most peo­ple real­ize. Back in the mid-/late-’70s, Mar­vel Comics licensed the rights to the char­ac­ter, and Jack Kir­by did a com­ic. Col­lec­tors who know about it often have a hard time turn­ing up copies of this book. This is a scan of a pan­el from that rare comic…

…Not buy­ing it? Okay, I con­fess; I just told you a big, fat, stinky lie. Jack Kir­by nev­er drew Sailor Moon (at least, not to my knowl­edge!). This is me. There’s appar­ent­ly this inter­net meme that all the cool kids are doing, where you take this one par­tic­u­lar image of Sailor Moon and draw it in your style. It occurred to me that it might be fun to put a spin on it and do it Jack Kir­by style.

One oth­er con­fes­sion: Sailor Moon is a bit after my time. Grow­ing up, the Japan­ese ani­ma­tion that I got to see on TV were things like Speed Rac­er, Kim­ba the White Lion and (my favorite of these) Tobor the 8th Man (I often get a lot of blank looks when I men­tion that one). Even though I’m prob­a­bly late to this par­ty, I thought it might be fun to get in on this meme.

6 thoughts on “Come Sail Away!

  1. Lyle Alan Dodd

    As usu­al, you nailed the look! Both in Kir­by con­cep­tion and in char­ac­ter design. I don’t know any­thing about memes, but I rec­og­nized Sailor Moon. There’s a lit­tle bit of Thena in there…

    By the way, I was total­ly buy­ing the Kir­by sto­ry. Espe­cial­ly in the con­text of Jack doing a 2001: A Space Odyssey adaptation.

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      Glad you liked it. Any time I try to draw like Kir­by, I do have to ref­er­ence it and re-steep myself in it, bor­row bits and pieces. And some of the books I was look­ing at when doing this were issues of The Eter­nals, so there prob­a­bly is a bit of Thena in there.

      I’m not all that well-versed in Sailor Moon either, but I have the impres­sion that the car­toon came along much lat­er than the ’70s. Ear­ly ’90s, maybe? It has a big fan base! How­ev­er, with all the licensed comics Mar­vel was doing back in the mid-’70s, I thought I could spin a halfway-plau­si­ble sto­ry about this being Jack­’s work. Sounds like I was right!

      Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      🙂 Ha! Haven’t thought about that in awhile. Not going to explain it for oth­er site vis­i­tors either. This will remain an “inter­net mystery.”

      Good hear­ing from you today!

      Reply
  2. Lyle Alan Dodd

    Qual­i­ty mem­o­ries amongst some great art! Who could do bet­ter! Good to hear from Don.

    Mark, are you going to post some­thing new soon? Or is that a bad question?

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      I’ve got a num­ber of things in mind I want to do. Like with many things, it’s a ques­tion of find­ing the time.

      Reply

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