Day 26 now of Jack Kirby Tribute Month 2025 (curated by Howard Simpson), and all month, we’ve been focused on the Fantastic Four and related characters. Today’s prompt is Blastaar, “the Living Bomb-Burst.”
Like Annihilus, Blastaar also comes from the Negative Zone. He’s the deposed despot of his home planet, sentenced by his people to be put into a containment suit and strapped to an asteroid, floating in the void of space when we first see him in FF #62. In an accident, Reed Richards gets sucked through the portal in his lab into the Negative Zone (all the FF visits to the Negative Zone seemed to end up being very dangerous), and he ends up at one point clinging to one side of Blastaar’s asteroid. During the rescue of Reed, Blastaar manages to break out of his suit and follow, escaping to Earth and teaming up with the Sandman. Let’s just say: mayhem ensues.
Blastaar can fire powerful blasts of concussive force from his hands, making him a dangerous adversary. He’s a very intense and anger-prone personality, which causes Sandman to wonder whether he’s making a mistake in teaming up with such a wild card.
That’s all for Blastaar. Tune in tomorrow to see who comes next!
I am thinking Blastaar was every bad boy’s dream of anti-villain villain. What power. Your use of tightly-gripped hands and the dark fiery explosion in the background are a terrific visual of the destructive potential of the character. The storyline could have been expanded to Blastaar learning how to control the power of all the universes. I would rather not cheer him on, though. Thanks
Glad you liked what I did here. Over on LinkedIn, Howard Simpson (who’s curating the list) made the observation that generally, centering a character in the frame can tend to be boring and static, but that I had somehow managed to work it in an interesting way. I could easily have had him just firing off blasts, but that felt too obvious. So I risked an experiment, putting Blastaar front and center, up close and personal, and trying to get a sort of pre-explosion sense of tension into it. Experiments don’t always work, but the consensus this time seems to be that this one did for most people.