“Thunderbolt and Lightning, Very Very Frightening!”

It’s now Day 27 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. The prompt for today is Goldie Gold (from the car­toon Goldie Gold and Action Jack). But (as always seems to hap­pen at least once dur­ing these Kir­by Trib­ute Months), I’ve elect­ed to go off the reser­va­tion today. Instead, I’ve drawn the Light­ning Lady, from Jack Kir­by’s Cap­tain Vic­to­ry, pub­lished through Pacif­ic Comics. I thought she’d be a good fit along­side the oth­ers on this list of Kir­by women, and I did­n’t want to miss this opportunity!

Cap­tain Vic­to­ry was a big deal when it was announced. Jack Kir­by was doing a new com­ic, and he was­n’t doing it for Mar­vel or DC! He was doing it for a brand new pub­lish­er called Pacif­ic Comics. Not only that, but he would own all the rights to this new com­ic and all the char­ac­ters! And hav­ing Jack on-board meant that oth­er top comics cre­ators were also inter­est­ed in doing things through Pacific.

I’m hav­ing a hard time find­ing this now, but I recall read­ing some­where that Cap­tain Vic­to­ry was inspired by Jack­’s reac­tion to see­ing films like E.T. and Close Encoun­ters, which he thought were far too opti­mistic about first con­tact. Instead, he thought our first alien encoun­ters might be more like what has often hap­pened his­tor­i­cal­ly when an advanced civ­i­liza­tion meets a more prim­i­tive one. Spoil­er: it often does­n’t go well for the less-advanced civ­i­liza­tion, even when it’s unin­ten­tion­al. That was the idea Jack was work­ing with.

The first six issues of Cap­tain Vic­to­ry dealt with Capt. Vic­to­ry and the Ranger crew of the Galac­tic Dread­nought Tiger chas­ing down the Insec­ton horde. Unfor­tu­nate­ly in the course of the chase, the horde finds a new world to invade and infest: Earth. Cap­tain Vic­to­ry and crew track them there.

The leader and queen of the Insec­tons is the Light­ning Lady, com­mand­ing their inva­sion. Per her name, one of her more vis­i­bly impres­sive pow­ers is gen­er­at­ing pow­er­ful bolts of elec­tric­i­ty. She’s one of Kir­by’s more strik­ing late peri­od char­ac­ter designs, and I could­n’t pass up the oppor­tu­ni­ty to include her among this list of Kir­by women!

I hope you enjoyed my take on the Light­ning Lady! Please feel free to come back again tomor­row to see who’s next, as I return to the prompt list.

2 thoughts on ““Thunderbolt and Lightning, Very Very Frightening!””

  1. There is a lot of miss­ing space in this series for me. All the issues were not nec­es­sar­i­ly avail­able, sell­ing out imme­di­ate­ly. I still have the first four books, I believe. Like with any­thing Sci-Fi comic­booky, belief must be sus­pend­ed. I am curi­ous how Light­ning Lady came to be in charge of this group look­ing for a new home like some Puri­tans tak­ing their rather biz­zare ideas to North Amer­i­ca? That being said, it’s easy to get lost in Kir­by’s art pre­sen­ta­tion. He could always always pull off macro skies rival­ing watch­ing the real skies at night in a Dark Skies loca­tion on the plan­et like the area I grew up (slight­ly south of the now threat­ened BWCA). Spec­tac­u­lar stuff dwarf­ing IMAX. Your Light­ning Lady is filled with col­or. I like that espe­cial­ly com­pared to the yel­low­ing comics of that era. And the high hair could sort of be tak­en as tip to Dol­ly. Thanks Mark.

    Reply

    1. I believe in Jack­’s mind, the Insec­ton horde are less like Puri­tans than they are a virus. An espe­cial­ly dan­ger­ous one. While the Puri­tans were look­ing for a new home, that was not the Insec­tons’ goal at all. They were just look­ing for anoth­er plan­et to infest, strip of life and resources, and then move onto the next one.

      Col­or in the Cap­tain Vic­to­ry book is inter­est­ing. At least ini­tial­ly, it’s my under­stand­ing that instead of the usu­al col­or markups, Steve Oliff would first paint col­ors onto his col­or guides with­out think­ing of how they fit with­in the stan­dard palette. Then, either he or some­one else would attempt to trans­late that into the stan­dard palette. So the col­ors have a dif­fer­ent look from oth­er comics of the time. The main col­or on the Light­ning Lady is some­thing I’m told comics col­orists used to call “Drac­u­la black,” where instead of just using straight 100% cyan, they’d also add 25% magen­ta and 25% yel­low to it. It did­n’t get used all that often, so it’s kind of dis­tinc­tive here.

      Lat­er in the run, they moved over from process col­or to actu­al paint­ed col­or. So if some­one were to put all that mate­r­i­al into one col­lec­tion, they’d have to make some deci­sions about how best to han­dle the col­or for consistency.

      Reply

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