“And You Are…?”

And now it’s August 31^st! The last day of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. Just like in pre­vi­ous years, the prompt for today is a wild card: “Your cre­ation.” Or as Howard Simp­son put it the first year, “Draw your own orig­i­nal char­ac­ter. The King would want you to cre­ate char­ac­ters you own.”

Because this year’s theme all month has been the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters, I’m bend­ing the rules. So here’s a char­ac­ter I came up with back in 1981 as my own addi­tion to the FF cast: the Wiz­ard’s niece.

At that point (thanks to old comics I’d been loaned by some col­lege friends), I was sort of under­go­ing a crash course on a lot of Mar­vel char­ac­ters and sto­ries that I did­n’t pre­vi­ous­ly know about. I appar­ent­ly knew about the Fright­ful Four and their clas­sic line­up, and had become aware that in the years post-Kir­by/Lee, with Medusa no longer part of the group, the Fright­ful Four tend­ed to have a rotat­ing fourth mem­ber when­ev­er they would show up again (I think I had seen Thun­dra show up in that capac­i­ty). Some­how, the idea of the Wiz­ard hav­ing a niece who would join the group occurred to me. It seemed like the fam­i­ly rela­tion­ship might make for an inter­est­ing dynam­ic in the group.

Before any­one asks, I don’t remem­ber her name. Maybe I nev­er came up with one (A pro tip, kids: jot notes to your­self, in case you’re look­ing at your work years lat­er and don’t remem­ber things)! I do remem­ber that her pow­er was either men­tal or mag­i­cal in nature, and I believe it was sup­posed to be focused through the jew­el on her fore­head. Around that time, I’d also had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to read some of Jim Star­lin’s Adam War­lock sto­ries, so that may have been in the back of my mind with the jewel.

I don’t think this was part of Mar­vel con­ti­nu­ity yet back when I did my orig­i­nal draw­ing, but prob­a­bly the gem would’ve worked as being part of the Infin­i­ty Stones.

I always feel a bit embar­rassed when post­ing real­ly old draw­ings, but at least it’s proof that I maybe got a lit­tle bet­ter in the inter­ven­ing years!

So that’s a wrap (at least offi­cial­ly) for Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025! I was­n’t entire­ly sure I was going to get through every­thing in time, but here we are! If you’ve seen what I’ve done in past years, you may right­ful­ly be expect­ing a sort of “encore” tomor­row. So feel free to swing by for that.