By now you know I’m participating in the second annual Jack Kirby Tribute Month, created by Howard Simpson to mark the month of Jack’s birth (he would turn 107 later this month if he were still with us).
The new thing Howard’s introduced this year is weeks that have an overall theme to each day’s prompts, and this week’s theme is the Fantastic Four. I did a group shot yesterday, and today’s prompt (the first of the individual shots) is the Invisible Woman.
At first, her only power was to turn invisible. But I think Jack and Stan realized pretty quickly that this didn’t quite give her enough to fully hold her own with the rest of the group. So they had her develop an additional power: the ability to create force fields. That did the trick.
Sue Storm was originally known as the Invisible Girl, and it wasn’t until John Byrne’s run on Fantastic Four in the ’80s (second best in my opinion only to Jack and Stan’s original run!) that she was re-christened the Invisible Woman. Byrne came up with some of the most creative uses for her powers that had ever been seen, and managed to show once and for all that she was a force to be reckoned with!
Hope you like, and feel free to come back tomorrow to see who’s up next!
Wow… Your choice of psionic field background really highlights Ms. Storm amazingly well. Both the colors and the shapes stir the imagination. I had to revisit the force field origins in issue 22 again as I did not remember that much about psionics coming into the storyline as a skill/ability. It was fun to go back to some of the old issues, but surprising as to the degree of paternalism present. Sue has grown as a character. The other fun fact that I did not know was that Stan played with the idea of Sue needing to take her clothes off in order to be invisible. Good idea to dump that thought. I would have liked to been the fly on the wall for that discussion between Jack and Stan, assuming there was one. I had to drag out my copy of Marvel Masterworks #1 to read Stan’s presentation for FF. In it Stan directly addressed Jack about the clothing issue, saying he might “adjust that gimmick somewhat.”
Glad you liked this.
I can’t really take much credit for how I depicted the force field. That dotted line was pretty much standard. It’s the old comics thing of “how do you depict something that people can’t see in the comic, but make it so the reader can see it?” About the only thing I did was to try to create the impression something was going on just outside the frame that gave her a reason to create a force field.
Like most comics, the FF went through a period where they were still figuring out some things. The Thing is definitely a big one, not just for his visual, but also the way he talked. But there are also other aspects. I think ultimately they got rid of any questions about how their uniforms did or didn’t interact with their powers by coming up with the idea of unstable molecules. That gave them an “in story” explanation for why Sue’s uniform would disappear when she did, why the Torch’s uniform didn’t just combust away every time he flamed on, and why Reed’s uniform stretched with him.