Here on Day 20 of this year’s Jack Kirby Tribute Month, today’s prompt is Mad Harriet of the Female Furies. Like all the Furies (except Big Barda), she first appeared in Mister Miracle #6. I drew her for a previous Jack Kirby Tribute Month here.
A thing I’ve realized over the course of doing these Jack Kirby Tributes is that Jack would sometimes take what could be termed an “impressionistic” approach to his costume designs. While they would look consistent to readers, often the details could shift from issue to issue, and sometimes even panel to panel! The average reader wouldn’t notice this or be bothered by it, but you only start to see it when you have to analyze these designs to draw them for yourself.
Mad Harriet is particularly tricky. Once you get beyond her face and hair, things fluctuate and change quite a bit. Adding to this is the fact that the colorist (or colorists, for all I know) would change things around too! So you have to make a number of decisions when drawing her.
Anyway, that’s Harriet! Hope you enjoyed this take. Who’s next? swing by tomorrow to see!
Nice rendering, she really looks like she’s coming out of the panel at you!
Regarding the costume changes Jack would make, it always struck me that Priority One with Jack Kirby was telling the story. I have yet to read a Kirby drawn book that didn’t track. Many artists over the years have commented on how they would look at how he handled certain things, the layouts/pacing of a story, even the way the characters were positioned in a panel. I’m not sure who it was that said that Kirby developed “the language of comics”.
Thanks!
While Jack also always shot to be interesting and dynamic, he never forgot that Job #1 was to tell the story clearly, so the reader wouldn’t get lost. I’m not sure how many artists are looking at his work today, but there’s definitely still a value in doing that. My own thought is that Jack created much of what I’ve come to think of as the “visual grammar” of comics storytelling (here in the U.S.), and the things he didn’t outright create himself, he took and developed further.
Occasionally in conversations with comic fan friends, the idea of a “comics Mt. Rushmore” comes up, and which four artists you’d put up there. Though it depends on which day you ask me, pretty much every day, it’s a given that Jack would be one of them. No question.