This is now Day 15 (about the halfway point!) of this year’s Jack Kirby Tribute Month, curated by Howard Simpson. Today’s prompt is Hela!
I drew Hela once before for a previous Jack Kirby Tribute Month here. You can see for yourself how striking her character design is. Hela appeared during Jack’s run on Journey into Mystery/Thor exactly four times. And every time, she looked different!
Part of this was how Jack drew her, while another part of it was color. Hela was colored differently each time. Usually in purples!
A thing I’ve realized over the course of these Kirby Tribute Months and researching these characters, is Jack was something of an “impressionist” when it came to his character designs. Sometimes even characters you think of as having a fixed design can shift their appearance, from issue to issue, and even panel to panel. When you look at them casually, you think they’re all the same. But when you study the details analytically, as an artist, you begin to see how things actually shift around.
You’d think that the default look for Hela (seen here, based on how she looked in Thor #150) would’ve been based on the last time Jack drew her. But surprisingly, this is not the case! Jack drew her one more time, in Thor #154, where she was colored in purples, pink, and with a dark blue cape. All of the different depictions involved a full bodysuit with some kind of surface designs, a hood, a cape, and some kind of horned configuration around her head.
I don’t know if Stan Lee and John Romita (Marvel’s de facto art director by then) forgot about this final appearance drawn by Jack, or just decided they preferred Hela’s look in #150. I was almost tempted to draw her in one of those other looks, but decided it might be a bit too far removed from what’s become the default look for people to recognize her right away. Plus, this really is a striking design!
Hope you like Hela. Swing by tomorrow to see who’s next, if you like.
With regard to the coloring of Hela’s costume, was Jack that involved with the coloring of the books? I am confident that he drove the plots and influenced the diaglogue, as there is plenty of evidence of that, but I don’t recall seeing color direction.
Great rendering here, Thor #150 will always be one of my top 1o Kirby covers.
Glad you like my take.
Yeah, I don’t know that Jack had any particular say over the coloring of his characters at Marvel at this time. There’s evidence that later at DC, he sometimes came up with color schemes for his Fourth World characters. Mister Miracle, for example.
Jack actually knew how to color. He knew how to mark up a color guide correctly for the separators. There’s ample evidence of that. He would sometimes do color guides for the Sky Masters of the Space Force newspaper strip that he drew for a time in the late ’50s. Plus when he returned to Marvel in the ’70s, he colored at least a portion of the 2001: A Space Odyssey adaptation he did. Perhaps there are other things he colored at this time too, but I’m not aware of it. I know that other artists at Marvel in the ’70s would occasionally handle the coloring of their own books.
She is reaching out this year, lending her hand to Thor, no doubt. But we could get away with suggesting the viewer, inviting that person to look inside. Do you know of any specific assignments given for cover artists to create that feel with a cover, or was it an understanding? I am one of those who had never noticed any of the color changes you mentioned, unless they were really glaring. And interestingly enough, I just moved my copy of the Sky Masters GoFundMe (I believe it was) to my right last night. Thanks Mark.
The situation around covers varies quite a bit from publisher to publisher, and time period to time period. I feel like at this point, Jack was still generating his own covers, based on what he believed were the needs of the story and its selling points. Later in the Thor run, I think he was getting more art direction from John Romita (at Stan Lee’s request).
When Jack returned to Marvel in the ’70s, I think he generated his own covers for the books he was writing and drawing, but I know that when they used him to do covers for other titles (say Avengers), they would provide him with layouts by other artists to work from. They wanted the look and feel of his style, but channeled in a certain direction. And Jack was apparently willing to play along.
There’s a whole area of study that could potentially be done around comic covers, and the different methods and processes various publishers used in creating them.