This is the penultimate day of this year’s Jack Kirby Tribute Month, curated by Howard Simpson. Officially, only one more day to go! And the prompt for today is the Scarlet Witch!
The Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff) first appeared way back in X‑Men #4, where (alongside her brother, Quicksilver), she’s part of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Yet unlike the other members, she’d really rather not be there. Her heart isn’t in it. She’s only there under a sense of obligation to Magneto, while her brother is there largely just to protect her.
Later, they part ways with the Brotherhood and become part of the Avengers. The Scarlet Witch’s mutant power was the ability to alter the laws of probability, so that the improbable would happen. She’s known for her beauty, but has more of a shy and retiring personality.
Studying her earliest appearance, I was surprised to discover that her headpiece actually wrapped all the way around her head, in the style of a wimple. Later on, it became more just a frame around her face.
If you read up on her and all the things that happened to her character post-Kirby, it’s a lot. Some good, and some…not so much. I often just ignore those things, as I find they can make my head hurt. The best policy generally is to stick with Jack and Stan. They got it right the first time.
I hope you liked my take on the early Scarlet Witch. If you’ve followed Jack Kirby Tribute Month in previous years, you know that the 31st is always sort of a wild card day. “Draw your own original character. The King would want you to create characters you own.” So by all means, you’re welcome to swing by and see what I end up doing! As I type this, I haven’t even drawn it yet.
Good piece. And thanks for resurrecting the word “wimple.”
Boy, did I love those early X‑Men books. They were in my young mind truly something different. And I was not that young: a sophomore in high school living a double life as a comic book reader and a HS student with all the baggage that can go along with that. Perfect title for my moment. And than it mutated (no pun intended) into a vast array of nonsense. Or maybe when the transformations were happening, so was I changing. As the origins of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver came to light, and there were a lot of us who had those sorts of European roots in our small town, I cannot say there was a sense of any kind of “validation,” but I wonder. Likely the associations came with the face; the X’s were young.
Yeah, as you said, I wish that Jack and Stan’s creation would have kept going, or that it had a conclusion of some sort. But nothing seems to in the comic book world. And I have a question about your hand art. I noticed Jack also sort of does this. The end of the fingers are very pointed. I suspect you are doing this a salute to Jack? Thanks Mark.
Oddly, while I have a number of Kirby’s Silver Age Marvel books in my collection (reprint or otherwise), I don’t have much in the way of X‑Men! Or Avengers, for that matter. I’ve got reprints of a few early Avengers tales, but nothing for X‑Men. No real reason, other than maybe I prioritized some of the other books. That stuff is all probably out of price reach now.
The “pointed” fingers here is just kind of a cartoonist shorthand for more delicate fingers with long fingernails on them. I wasn’t consciously following Jack’s lead, but it’s possible it was an unconscious influence. I tend to do it even when I’m not drawing female Kirby characters.