Monthly Archives: August 2024

Carrying the Weight of the World

It’s August, and that means it’s also the sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month (cre­at­ed by Howard Simp­son). Basi­cal­ly there are char­ac­ter prompts for each day. I par­tic­i­pat­ed in this last year (you can find what I did here on the site), and I’m going to try and do them all again this year.

A new wrin­kle for this year’s Kir­by Trib­ute Month is that each week has a spe­cif­ic theme. There are only three days that fall with­in August this first week, and the theme is Kir­by’s issues of DC’s 1st Issue Spe­cial. Today’s prompt is Atlas, who appeared in 1st Issue Spe­cial #1.

I nev­er saw this com­ic on the spin­ner rack back when it came out, but like most of the oth­er issues of this title, it was­n’t too cost­ly to buy when I final­ly came across a copy years lat­er. Atlas is set in an ancient time, seem­ing­ly before writ­ten his­to­ry, and to me feels a bit like Jack­’s take on a Conan the Bar­bar­ian type of char­ac­ter. Like the vast major­i­ty of Jack­’s work, you get to the end of that issue, and it feels like there’s a lot of poten­tial, if he had been giv­en the green light to con­tin­ue the story.

I’d nev­er tried to draw Atlas before, so it was fun to do this! Hope you enjoy, and stay tuned for tomor­row’s entry!