Day 22 of this year’s Jack Kirby Tribute Month, curated by Howard Simpson, and the theme all month has been the Fantastic Four and related characters. Today’s prompt: the Frightful Four!
It’s something of a standard device in heroic fiction to try to create an opposite for your hero (or heroes). So it stands to reason that Kirby and Lee at some point were likely to come up with a Frightful Four to oppose the Fantastic Four (which they did in issue #36). You might expect that they would’ve come up with a whole group of new characters (Kirby was obviously creative enough to do so), but for some reason, that wasn’t the path they took.
Instead, they took a Spider-Man villain (Sandman), and put him with two villains (the Wizard and Paste-Pot Pete, later known as the Trapster) who had each previously gone up against the Human Torch in his solo strip over in Strange Tales. To come up with the requisite four, they created a new character, Medusa, who would later go on to be revealed as a member of the Inhumans.
Jack and Stan must have liked working with the Frightful Four, because they rated no less than six appearances during their FF run, plus they also showed up in a couple other titles around that time too.
You might be a little surprised by Medusa’s outfit here. Since I had already drawn her some days back, I thought it would be fun to show her here in the outfit Jack gave her in her first appearance, as a member of the Frightful Four. With her very next appearance, she was redesigned into what could be considered her classic uniform, with her hair fully exposed.
As sometimes happened with Kirby, the look of characters would sometimes change a bit over time. The Wizard’s helmet started off as one height, but ended up quite a bit taller by the group’s last appearance during Jack and Stan’s run in issue #94. Initially, Jack had also given him these sort of “face guards” that got streamlined away later on. I kind of liked those, so I brought them back here (at least subtly). It’s kind of a mix of the later helmet silhouette with that element from the earlier helmet.
Figuring out color was also a bit of a challenge, as it changed a bit over those appearances.
Hope you enjoyed my take, and feel free to come back tomorrow to see who’s next!
Thanks for posting all these great Kirby characters, Mark! Looks great as always!
Thanks for stopping by, Don! Glad you’re enjoying the work!
I missed most of the Frightful Four material through their later run. I guess I did not realize the comedic stumble-footed nature of the encounters. The very early stories I had a handle on, as the separated to-be-frightful characters went one on one with various good guys before their gathered group appeared in FF.
It think it is interesting that early on, the Frightful ninnies had costumes the color of the Challengers of the Unknown. Great goony Sandman you got going. Thanks again.
Glad you enjoyed my shot at these characters, Joe. As discussed before, it seems like the colors for some of these supporting characters tended to be worked out on the fly, before they finally settled on hard-and-fast official color schemes and formulae.