On the Green

August 1^st means it must be Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month once again! This is the fourth one, I believe. Once again, I’ll be work­ing from a prompt list gen­er­at­ed by Howard Simp­son. Hope­ful­ly, I can get through all of them in time. Howard’s come up with an inter­est­ing theme this year. Just for fun, I won’t tell you what it is, but you should be able to fig­ure out what’s going on fair­ly quickly.

Today’s prompt is Galaxy Green and her “Astro-Chicks” (Hey, don’t get mad at me; I did­n’t name them that!). If you’re not famil­iar with these char­ac­ters, there’s good rea­son for it.

If you know any­thing about Jack­’s career in comics, you know that he worked in mul­ti­ple gen­res, and was also inter­est­ed in try­ing dif­fer­ent for­mats. Ear­ly on when he left Mar­vel to go to DC in the ear­ly ’70s, he exper­i­ment­ed with a cou­ple of themed mag­a­zines for reg­u­lar news­stand dis­tri­b­u­tion: In the Days of the Mob, and Spir­it World. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, only the first issues of those mag­a­zines were ever published.

From what I’ve read, Jack was aware that there was also a mar­ket out there for more adult comics. Galaxy Green was his sort of qua­si-attempt at cre­at­ing some­thing in that vein, though clear­ly he was­n’t com­fort­able get­ting too bla­tant. He only drew two pages, both of which were inked and let­tered by Mike Roy­er. The pages only hint­ed at spici­ness in the most oblique way, and it’s safe to say they prob­a­bly would­n’t have been all that sat­is­fy­ing to your aver­age under­ground comics fan. So Galaxy Green and the “Astro-Chicks” are a bit of an odd­i­ty in Jack­’s body of work.

I’m not sure if the two pages were ever actu­al­ly used to pitch the strip to a pub­lish­er or not, but they were only done in b/w back then (Roy­er had added a lit­tle zip-a-tone in spots to give them a lit­tle more punch). Makes sense, for an under­ground com­ic in that era. I debat­ed just doing these char­ac­ters in b/w here, but then decid­ed they might look a lit­tle odd along­side the oth­ers if I did that.

So I col­ored them. I picked up my col­or cues from an instance where a French pub­lish­er did some­thing with Galaxy Green years lat­er, and had Jack­’s first page col­ored. But I’ve changed the col­ors a lit­tle bit, tweak­ing them so they all fit with­in the stan­dard 64 col­or palette comics used dur­ing most of Jack­’s career. It’s sort of a self-imposed rule I have with my Kir­by Trib­ute draw­ings, to work with­in that palette.

I hope you enjoy my take on this group. Feel free to tune in again tomor­row to see what’s next!

Update: Check out Howard Simp­son’s take over on Face­book, where he drops a lit­tle more knowl­edge about these char­ac­ters and what they were done for!