“You’re Dragon, Man!”

On Day 29 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, ded­i­cat­ed to the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters, today’s prompt is Drag­on Man!

D‑Man starts off as an inan­i­mate fig­ure cre­at­ed by State Uni­ver­si­ty Prof. Gilbert. But Dia­blo (in his sec­ond appear­ance in FF) man­ages to bring life to Drag­on Man! Pre­dictably, chaos ensues.

Drag­on Man isn’t real­ly bad; more just sim­ple-mind­ed and eas­i­ly manip­u­lat­ed. He’s very strong, very tough, flies, and…oh yeah; he can breathe fire! In his first appear­ance, Sue’s pres­ence seems to be a calm­ing influence.

The char­ac­ter makes five appear­ances dur­ing Jack and Stan’s FF run, and ends up being part of the batch of issues that intro­duce the Inhu­mans too. He also seems to be a favorite “toy” for lat­er cre­ators to play with, as he’s shown up in a bunch of oth­er titles.

I feel like Jack must have had at least a slight fas­ci­na­tion with the idea of “Drag­on Men,” as this was­n’t the first time he was involved with a con­cept like that. Way back in the Gold­en Age, he and part­ner Joe Simon did the first issue of what would soon become Faw­cett’s Cap­tain Mar­vel Adven­tures. One of those sto­ries fea­tured a race of Drag­on Men who had enslaved humans on Sat­urn. More about it here.

The penul­ti­mate post is com­ing up tomor­row! What will it be? Come by and find out!

2 thoughts on ““You’re Dragon, Man!””

  1. The wit­ty titles to the dai­ly spots should not go unmen­tioned. Good one for today. Drag­ons are sure the all-pur­pose beast. It seems they can go any which way on the good-to-bad behav­ioral char­ac­ter spec­trum. There is a sort qui­et nobil­i­ty that you cap­ture with your ver­sion of Drag­on Man. And I am very pleased that you actu­al­ly gave life to CM #1 using well drag­ons from more or less the oth­er side of the good/evil line of demar­ca­tion. That is a nice piece of per­son­al accom­plish­ment to have brought a mean­ing­ful illus­tra­tion to a vast­ly impor­tant “cov­er­less” book. Thank you.

    Reply

    1. Thanks for your com­ments on Drag­on Man.
      When I was research­ing that first issue of Cap­tain Mar­vel Adven­tures #1, and all the work Joe Simon and Jack Kir­by did on it, it just struck me that the real cov­er felt like an after­thought. Like some­one in edi­to­r­i­al sud­den­ly real­ized, “Oops! This has to go to press right away and we for­got to do a cov­er!” I mean, they did­n’t even have an actu­al logo for the title! Just some quick type, slammed across a Capt. Mar­vel fig­ure that could’ve been pulled from else­where like clip art!
      Since Simon and Kir­by were doing the inte­ri­ors, I thought about what a cov­er from them might look like. And of all the sto­ries in that issue, I felt like the Drag­on Men one made for the best cov­er sub­ject. Though I got­ta say, try­ing to draw like Gold­en Age Jack Kir­by while he was try­ing to draw like C.C. Beck is not an easy thing!

      Reply

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