Author: Mark

Getting the Lay of Things

It’s occurred to me that recent­ly I’ve kind of trapped myself into almost every­thing I post need­ing to be a big pro­duc­tion: a ful­ly-real­ized cov­er, with inks, let­ter­ing and col­or­ing. I’m giv­ing myself license to not always have to do that, hence this post of work from the past.

Reg­u­lar vis­i­tors to this site will know that I’ve had a long­time asso­ci­a­tion with Big Bang Comics, going back to when it first was pub­lished through Cal­iber. And I’ve kept that con­nec­tion even to today. Over the length of my asso­ci­a­tion, I’ve had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­tribute in var­i­ous ways. I’ve pen­ciled sto­ries and cov­ers, done ink­ing, col­or­ing, designed char­ac­ters and logos, and even con­tributed ideas to sto­ries here and there.

But you would­n’t know that I also got to do rough lay­outs for oth­er artists to work with! What you see here are lay­outs done for a sequence in Big Bang Comics #14, which was part two of some­thing we referred to as the “Time­bomber” sto­ry­line. Erik Larsen saw fit to loan Gary Carl­son his Sav­age Drag­on for this sto­ry, where Drag­on end­ed up with a lit­er­al time­bomb strapped to his chest that kept explod­ing and bounc­ing him around through dif­fer­ent time peri­ods (and art and writ­ing styles). Along the way, Drag­on met up with var­i­ous Big Bang heroes and villains.

For the final sequence of Big Bang #14, it was sup­posed to have a “Bronze Age Jack Kir­by at DC” kind of feel to it. As I recall, when this job came up, I was too busy at the time with my day job in ani­ma­tion to actu­al­ly pen­cil it myself, but I did agree to do lay­outs (seen here) for anoth­er artist. If you have a copy of the com­ic, you’ll see that my lay­outs were giv­en to pen­cil­er Joe Zier­man, who did a pret­ty good job of tak­ing the “Kir­by-ness” of my lay­outs and fol­low­ing through with it in his pencils.

Oh, by the way: I also did Ster­anko-style lay­outs for the sequence pre­ced­ing this Kir­by one, AND a cov­er rough/thumbnail lay­out for this issue that was giv­en to Rich Buck­ler (which I even did a col­or guide for). So I was kind of all over this issue, but in sort of an “invis­i­ble” way.

Though I love see­ing oth­er peo­ple’s roughs, I always feel a lit­tle fun­ny about post­ing my own. So hope­ful­ly vis­i­tors enjoy this.

Seeing Red

…Yeah. Pret­ty silly.

The ori­gins of this one go back a lit­tle over a year now, to this post. I’d also post­ed that Red Tor­na­do cov­er on LinkedIn, where peo­ple start­ed bring­ing up oth­er humor­ous super­heroes who’d also based their cos­tumes around red long underwear.

Over time, that grad­u­al­ly sparked an idea: why not put all those char­ac­ters togeth­er on one team? I had to make a list first, to be sure not to for­get any of them that were men­tioned to me. While that was per­co­lat­ing, I remem­bered the cov­er of Jus­tice League #1 from 1987, by Kevin Maguire and Ter­ry Austin. Seemed like a great basis for assem­bling this team of longjohn-suit­ed heroes for a cov­er shot.

For those who might not rec­og­nize all these char­ac­ters, I’ll clue you in. The front row (L to R) fea­tures For­bush Man and Her­bie, the Fat Fury. In the mid­dle row is Super Goof, the Red Tor­na­do and Cap­tain Klutz. And the big guy there in the very back is Supersnipe.

If this were a real com­ic, it would def­i­nite­ly qual­i­fy as quite odd! Includ­ing Go-Go checks also made sense to me, for some rea­son. Hope you enjoy!

“T,” and Sword and Sorcery

This one will require a bit of explain­ing. Per­haps I say that more often than I should here, but it’s def­i­nite­ly jus­ti­fied this time.

It’s a fun­ny thing; you can know some­one for years, and still learn new things about them. That hap­pened to me recent­ly with my friend Vic Dal Chele. Vic (like most of us work­ing in ani­ma­tion) may not be a house­hold name to you, but most like­ly you’ve seen some­thing he worked on at some point. I met Vic ear­ly in my ani­ma­tion career, but we did­n’t actu­al­ly get to work togeth­er on the same project until a few years lat­er. We end­ed up col­lab­o­rat­ing on a num­ber of projects in the years since, and got to be good friends.

Recent­ly, I had the chance to meet up with Vic at a local restau­rant for lunch. Spur of the moment, I asked him a ques­tion which had nev­er occurred to me to ask before. Both of us knew that our mutu­al friend Lar­ry Hous­ton (of X‑Men: The Ani­mat­ed Series fame) had pub­lished his own comics pri­or to get­ting into ani­ma­tion. Remind­ing Vic of that, I asked whether he’d ever done any comics of his own before. He con­fessed that he had!

Back in the mid-’70s (well before his ani­ma­tion days), Vic pub­lished an issue of a com­ic he did called The Leg­end of Tau­ran. He was a bit embar­rassed to admit it though, because of the lev­el of the work. I became a lit­tle intrigued to look it up, and dis­cov­ered some­one actu­al­ly had a good qual­i­ty copy avail­able for pur­chase (at a rea­son­able price) on eBay, which I bought. When Vic found out I’d done that, he told me, “You’re a nut!”

The com­ic con­tained three strips: “The Leg­end of Tau­ran,” “Tom­mie Gunne” and “F.O.R.C.E.” It leans towards being an under­ground com­ic in spots (most­ly the Tom­mie strip), hence a “Sug­gest­ed for Mature Read­ers” advi­so­ry on the back cov­er. I can under­stand why Vic was a bit embar­rassed by the lev­el of his work. It shows a young artist still fig­ur­ing out how to draw, and grap­pling with how to get his ink­ing tools to do what he wants them to.

But under the rough sur­face, you could see he was try­ing. Hard. He had some inter­est­ing ideas in the sto­ry he was telling, and it made sense in ret­ro­spect that he man­aged to find his way into enter­tain­ment, and ani­ma­tion specifically.

I got inspired to take a crack at doing a cov­er for a sec­ond issue of The Leg­end of Tau­ran, just for fun. And as I often do, I put a bit of a spin on it, mak­ing it look more like a main­stream com­ic that might have come out around that time.

There are many who get into ani­ma­tion who were always aim­ing them­selves in that direc­tion from the very begin­ning. How­ev­er, it’s also true that there are a num­ber of us who orig­i­nal­ly aspired to work in comics, but end­ed up in ani­ma­tion instead as our day job. Vic and I are def­i­nite­ly mem­bers of the lat­ter tribe.

So this is my trib­ute to my friend Vic. And to all those oth­er fans and aspir­ing artists who are dri­ven to cre­ate their own comics and put them out there, warts and all. Get­ting some­thing done and pub­lished puts you miles ahead of oth­er artists who are always talk­ing about the great com­ic they’re going to do one day, but they nev­er actu­al­ly get around to doing it.

The Leg­end of Tau­ran, Tom­mie Gunne and F.O.R.C.E are ™ & © Vic Dal Chele.

It’s a Blast!

Long­time vis­i­tors to my site might know that I was a con­trib­u­tor to Gary Carl­son’s Big Bang Comics. But before Big Bang Comics, there was Mega­ton!

There was this whole eco-sys­tem of fan and semi-pro inde­pen­dent comics going on in the ’70s and ’80s that I had bare­ly any aware­ness of at the time. If a com­ic showed up in a comics shop, or if the pub­lish­er had suf­fi­cient funds for an ad some­place like The Comics Jour­nal, Amaz­ing Heroes, or oth­er sim­i­lar mag­a­zines back then, then I might have heard of it. But there were a lot of self-pub­lished comics that nev­er got that expo­sure. It was kind of “the wild west” for peo­ple who want­ed to get eye­balls on the work they were putting out.

Mega­ton was one of those comics that I had no clue about its exis­tence when it was orig­i­nal­ly com­ing out. The com­ic fea­tured the title char­ac­ter, while also serv­ing as an anthol­o­gy show­cas­ing oth­er char­ac­ters. Gary Carl­son had a knack for find­ing artists to work for him who were right on the verge, sort of “almost ready for prime­time” play­ers. But this was a dou­ble-edged sword, in that often he’d only get a sto­ry or two out of an artist before they’d get the call from Mar­vel or DC. Gary was either the first to hire, or gave very ear­ly work to, artists like Butch/Jackson Guice, Erik Larsen, S. Clarke Haw­bak­er, Angel Med­i­na, and Rob Liefeld.

Gary man­aged to get eight issues of Mega­ton out, with col­or cov­ers and b/w inte­ri­ors. In August of 1987, plans were announced to expand into a whole Mega­ton Comics line (start­ing off with four titles), this time with col­or inte­ri­ors. Mega­ton vol­ume 2 #1 was slat­ed to be one of those titles. The artist was going to be Gary Thomas Wash­ing­ton (here­after GTW), who had drawn the Mega­ton strip since vol­ume 1 #7.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, none of those comics ever came out. The bot­tom had kind of fall­en out of the mar­ket at that point, and Gary was forced to pull the plug. GTW had com­plet­ed art for all of #1, part of #2, and a char­ac­ter con­cept sketch for #3 when the order came down.

Here’s where we get into “fan­ta­sy world” ter­ri­to­ry. While I got in pret­ty close to the ground floor on Big Bang Comics, if I had even the slight­est clue about Mega­ton back then, I prob­a­bly would’ve reached out to Gary to try to get work. So maybe I could’ve end­ed up becom­ing a con­trib­u­tor to Mega­ton in 1987.

I did­n’t want to over­write the work GTW had done, so I avoid­ed the first two issues of vol­ume 2. #3 seemed fair game. If you’re famil­iar with Big Bang Comics char­ac­ters, the visu­al for the vil­lain in the back­ground may be con­fus­ing to you. He does­n’t look like the Pink Flamin­go who’s the Knight Watch­man’s arch­neme­sis. That’s because this is the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the char­ac­ter (based on a con­cept sketch by GTW), who was intend­ed as a vil­lain for Mega­ton in vol­ume 2 #3. He got retooled for Big Bang. This will prob­a­bly be the first time any­one out­side the Big Bang/Megaton orbit has ever seen this ver­sion of the character.

Any­way, folks, I hope you enjoy this cov­er of a com­ic from anoth­er timeline/universe!

Art Vs. Artist Again

It’s appar­ent­ly that time of year, when artists look back and post a sam­pling of the work they’ve done the pre­vi­ous year in this for­mat on social media. I’ve been see­ing some of these pop­ping up on LinkedIn the last few weeks or so, with the #ArtVsArtist hash­tag. Look­ing back, it’s been awhile since I did one (2020!), so I thought maybe I’d do it again, join in on the fun.

Any reg­u­lar vis­i­tors here will prob­a­bly rec­og­nize sev­er­al of these from posts I’ve made this year. I debat­ed using a more cur­rent image of myself in the cen­ter, but ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to stick with the same one I used last time. It’s a 12-year-old me, and if you saw the whole pho­to, you’d see I was attempt­ing to do a paint­ing (in oils, no less!) of the USS Enter­prise from Star Trek (the Orig­i­nal series, of course). We all have to start some­where (though the truth is I had been draw­ing for years even before this).

Any­way, thanks for stop­ping by, and a Hap­py New Year to you!

I Knew in a Moment It Must Be St. Nick

Long­time vis­i­tors to my site might recall I have a tra­di­tion around this time of year of doing some­thing San­ta Claus-relat­ed. For awhile, I was­n’t quite sure whether I was going to be able to make it this year, but here we are! It’s a Christ­mas mir­a­cle! (Okay; not really)

This is an unusu­al one. I was work­ing on a Christ­mas-relat­ed project these last weeks that real­ly kicked my butt chas­ing the dead­line. It required a lot of research, and I had to work kind of at or beyond the extent of my abil­i­ties. Sort of out­side my com­fort zone, as I’m real­ly more of a cartoon/comic guy. But as is some­times the case with real­ly chal­leng­ing projects, this end­ed up also very rewarding.

This image was one of the illus­tra­tions gen­er­at­ed for the project: the real St. Nicholas, 4th cen­tu­ry bish­op of Myra (in mod­ern day Turkey). Also known as Nicholas the Won­der­work­er, he was the real life basis for San­ta Claus. Based on what images I could find online (like old icon paint­ings), I thought an illus­tra­tion with the two of them togeth­er would make for an inter­est­ing comparison.

So in a way, this year you get a “twofer” of San­tas. I guess that’s all, except to wish all my vis­i­tors a very Mer­ry Christ­mas, and all the best in the New Year!

Those Little Monsters!

Long time vis­i­tors to my site might recall that around Hal­loween, I have a tra­di­tion of doing some­thing Franken­stein-relat­ed. This year, it’s a fake com­ic cov­er for Gold Key’s The Lit­tle Mon­sters!

If you grew up in the ’60s, and you want­ed a com­ic book fea­tur­ing your favorite car­toon char­ac­ter, most like­ly you were going to buy a Gold Key com­ic. They had man­aged to sew up the rights to pret­ty much all of them. And with edi­to­r­i­al offices here on the west coast (most of the pub­lish­ers were based in New York City), it placed Gold Key in a unique posi­tion, giv­ing them access to artists who in many cas­es had actu­al­ly worked on those cartoons.

Though the bulk of Gold Key’s books were licensed prop­er­ties, they also came up with some of their own indige­nous cre­ations. This book was one of them. Some­thing that was def­i­nite­ly part of the pop cul­ture land­scape at the time were old mon­ster movies and TV shows (one of the cool parts of being a kid in the ’60s), and clear­ly The Lit­tle Mon­sters was inspired by that.

The Lit­tle Mon­sters must have sold fair­ly well, as the book made it through 44 issues spread over some 14 years (though based on the cov­ers, some issues look to have been reprints). Appar­ent­ly, who wrote and drew all these comics is a bit of a mys­tery. I found cred­its on comics.org for one issue that list­ed John Carey and Pete Alvara­do as hav­ing done art on some sto­ries. Both artists had worked for the ani­ma­tion stu­dios, and also did a lot of comics work for Gold Key. So maybe Carey and/or Alvara­do con­tributed to the oth­er issues too.

I’ve only got one issue of The Lit­tle Mon­sters myself (#7), but it’s a lot of fun. The art has a lot of charm to it, who­ev­er did it. One sto­ry, “The Return of the Spi­der,” seems to have been inspired by the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the Bat­man TV show that would’ve been air­ing around that time.

Hope you enjoyed my take on the Lit­tle Mon­sters. Have a safe and hap­py Halloween!

“A Good Cast Is Worth Repeating…”

So as you know if you were check­ing in all last month, I made it all the way through the 3rd annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. For awhile, I was­n’t sure I was going to get them all done in time, but I did! And just like in past years, I’ve com­bined all the pieces into one big image.

It’s inter­est­ing to see the char­ac­ters all togeth­er now in this con­text. It def­i­nite­ly ham­mers home the point that Fan­tas­tic Four in Jack and Stan’s hands gen­er­at­ed a huge cast of inter­est­ing char­ac­ters. The list of 30 prompts hit many of the high points, but the fact is that there were many more char­ac­ters that could also have been on the list. I know that the cov­er copy, “The World’s Great­est Com­ic Mag­a­zine!”, was Stan Lee using his usu­al gift of hyper­bole in pro­mot­ing the com­ic, but I think you can gen­uine­ly make a case that those first 100+ issues were, at the very least, in the run­ning for that award!

Along the way, I also came to real­ize (first­hand) that the list includ­ed some of the most detailed and visu­al­ly com­plex char­ac­ters Kir­by ever came up with! I tried to do them all justice.

That’s about all I have to say. Hope you’ve enjoyed my trib­ute to (and cel­e­bra­tion of) the King this past month.

“And You Are…?”

And now it’s August 31st! The last day of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. Just like in pre­vi­ous years, the prompt for today is a wild card: “Your cre­ation.” Or as Howard Simp­son put it the first year, “Draw your own orig­i­nal char­ac­ter. The King would want you to cre­ate char­ac­ters you own.”

Because this year’s theme all month has been the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters, I’m bend­ing the rules. So here’s a char­ac­ter I came up with back in 1981 as my own addi­tion to the FF cast: the Wiz­ard’s niece.

At that point (thanks to old comics I’d been loaned by some col­lege friends), I was sort of under­go­ing a crash course on a lot of Mar­vel char­ac­ters and sto­ries that I did­n’t pre­vi­ous­ly know about. I appar­ent­ly knew about the Fright­ful Four and their clas­sic line­up, and had become aware that in the years post-Kir­by/Lee, with Medusa no longer part of the group, the Fright­ful Four tend­ed to have a rotat­ing fourth mem­ber when­ev­er they would show up again (I think I had seen Thun­dra show up in that capac­i­ty). Some­how, the idea of the Wiz­ard hav­ing a niece who would join the group occurred to me. It seemed like the fam­i­ly rela­tion­ship might make for an inter­est­ing dynam­ic in the group.

Before any­one asks, I don’t remem­ber her name. Maybe I nev­er came up with one (A pro tip, kids: jot notes to your­self, in case you’re look­ing at your work years lat­er and don’t remem­ber things)! I do remem­ber that her pow­er was either men­tal or mag­i­cal in nature, and I believe it was sup­posed to be focused through the jew­el on her fore­head. Around that time, I’d also had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to read some of Jim Star­lin’s Adam War­lock sto­ries, so that may have been in the back of my mind with the jewel.

I don’t think this was part of Mar­vel con­ti­nu­ity yet back when I did my orig­i­nal draw­ing, but prob­a­bly the gem would’ve worked as being part of the Infin­i­ty Stones.

I always feel a bit embar­rassed when post­ing real­ly old draw­ings, but at least it’s proof that I maybe got a lit­tle bet­ter in the inter­ven­ing years!

So that’s a wrap (at least offi­cial­ly) for Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025! I was­n’t entire­ly sure I was going to get through every­thing in time, but here we are! If you’ve seen what I’ve done in past years, you may right­ful­ly be expect­ing a sort of “encore” tomor­row. So feel free to swing by for that.

“That’s Just Impossible!”

30 days now of Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025 (curat­ed by Howard Simp­son), and this year focused exclu­sive­ly on the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is sup­posed to be the Hate-Mon­ger, but I felt like going off-menu just this once and doing the Impos­si­ble Man! How could I resist?

The Impos­si­ble Man is anoth­er ear­ly char­ac­ter, appear­ing in FF #11. We find out that he comes from the plan­et Pop­pup, where the Pop­pu­pi­ans have a born abil­i­ty to instant­ly change into what­ev­er form they want in order to pro­tect them­selves from all the dan­gers on their plan­et. When Sue asks him his name, he replies, “Name? We Pop­pu­pi­ans have no names! We know who we are!”

I.M. explains that he got bored on Pop­pup, and decid­ed it would be fun to come to Earth for a vaca­tion. And not real­ly under­stand­ing how things work on our plan­et, in amus­ing him­self, he man­ages to cre­ate all kinds of hav­oc. Some of it actu­al­ly quite dan­ger­ous! But there’s no mali­cious intent behind any of it, as he’s kind of child­like and more just mischievous.

“Impy” only shows up this one time dur­ing Jack and Stan’s FF run. Issue #11 was kind of atyp­i­cal­ly struc­tured, in that instead of one long sto­ry, it con­tained two 11-pagers: this one, and the also-mem­o­rable “A Vis­it with the Fan­tas­tic Four.”

While typ­ing this up, a visu­al asso­ci­a­tion occurred to me. Back in the ’50s, there was a low­er bud­get sci fi movie enti­tled The Man from Plan­et X. Some­one put a lit­tle effort into design­ing the title char­ac­ter, as he man­ages to present a strik­ing visu­al even on a more lim­it­ed bud­get. I took a crack at draw­ing the char­ac­ter myself awhile back. Visu­al­ly, he’s a got a sim­i­lar­ly long head which comes to a point on top. I can’t help but won­der whether the Man from Plan­et x might not have been in the back of Kir­by’s mind (maybe sub­con­scious­ly) when design­ing the Impos­si­ble Man.

One more day left of Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month this year. What will I do? You’ll have to swing by tomor­row to find out!

“You’re Dragon, Man!”

On Day 29 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, ded­i­cat­ed to the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters, today’s prompt is Drag­on Man!

D‑Man starts off as an inan­i­mate fig­ure cre­at­ed by State Uni­ver­si­ty Prof. Gilbert. But Dia­blo (in his sec­ond appear­ance in FF) man­ages to bring life to Drag­on Man! Pre­dictably, chaos ensues.

Drag­on Man isn’t real­ly bad; more just sim­ple-mind­ed and eas­i­ly manip­u­lat­ed. He’s very strong, very tough, flies, and…oh yeah; he can breathe fire! In his first appear­ance, Sue’s pres­ence seems to be a calm­ing influence.

The char­ac­ter makes five appear­ances dur­ing Jack and Stan’s FF run, and ends up being part of the batch of issues that intro­duce the Inhu­mans too. He also seems to be a favorite “toy” for lat­er cre­ators to play with, as he’s shown up in a bunch of oth­er titles.

I feel like Jack must have had at least a slight fas­ci­na­tion with the idea of “Drag­on Men,” as this was­n’t the first time he was involved with a con­cept like that. Way back in the Gold­en Age, he and part­ner Joe Simon did the first issue of what would soon become Faw­cett’s Cap­tain Mar­vel Adven­tures. One of those sto­ries fea­tured a race of Drag­on Men who had enslaved humans on Sat­urn. More about it here.

The penul­ti­mate post is com­ing up tomor­row! What will it be? Come by and find out!

The Devil, You Say!

As of today, we’ve reached 28 days (AKA  four full weeks) worth of draw­ings for this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. The theme has been the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters, and today’s prompt is Diablo.

Dia­blo, the evil alchemist, first shows up in FF #30. While the FF are tak­ing a vaca­tion in Tran­syl­va­nia(!), they go explor­ing and find an old cas­tle buried in a for­est. One night, the Thing hears a voice in his mind, call­ing out to him from a crypt with­in the cas­tle. The Thing frees Dia­blo from his impris­on­ment, and in return, Dia­blo gives Ben a more human appear­ance. But then we even­tu­al­ly find out…

Oops! Nope! Not going to spoil the sto­ry for those who haven’t read it. Let’s just say that with Dia­blo, not every­thing is as it seems, and the Tran­syl­va­ni­ans had rea­son to fear him and his abilities.

Strange­ly, Stan Lee appar­ent­ly would often say that Dia­blo was “the worst char­ac­ter we ever did.” Some have won­dered if maybe he was think­ing of an ear­li­er mon­ster char­ac­ter they did that used the same name. But when John Byrne lat­er got his shot to write and draw FF (sec­ond best run only to Jack and Stan’s, in my opin­ion), with a “back to basics” approach, he chose to kick every­thing off with Dia­blo as their oppo­nent in his first issue. Appar­ent­ly he saw poten­tial in the char­ac­ter that Stan didn’t.

This is off the top­ic of Dia­blo, but I would be remiss if I did not point out that today is also Jack Kir­by’s birth­day! Born August 28, 1917, if my math is cor­rect, that would make this his 108th. So with much love and respect, long live the King through the great body of work he gift­ed us!

We’re mov­ing into the last few days of the Trib­ute! Feel free to come back again tomor­row to see who comes next.

Just an Old-Time Puppet Show! Nothing Wrong Here!

On the 27th day of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, focused on the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters, today’s prompt is the Pup­pet Mas­ter, Philip Masters!

The Pup­pet Mas­ter is a very ear­ly antag­o­nist, intro­duced in Jack and Stan’s FF run way back in issue #8. At the same time, we also meet his daugh­ter Ali­cia for the first time, who ends up being a very impor­tant sup­port­ing character.

Apart from look­ing kind of creepy and ven­tril­o­quist doll-like, the Pup­pet Mas­ter does­n’t real­ly cut all that impres­sive of an appear­ance. He’s not on any list you might find of “best or most inter­est­ing­ly cos­tumed Kir­by char­ac­ters.” But he does have quite the pow­er! Using a spe­cial radioac­tive clay, he can make fig­ures of just about any­one, and force them to do his bid­ding. In his first appear­ance, he man­ages to take con­trol of the Thing, send­ing him against his team­mates! So heroes under­es­ti­mate him at their risk.

That’s all I have to say about the Pup­pet Mas­ter. Hope you enjoyed my depic­tion. Who’s next? Tune in tomor­row to see!

We’re Having a Blast!

Day 26 now of Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025 (curat­ed by Howard Simp­son), and all month, we’ve been focused on the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is Blas­taar, “the Liv­ing Bomb-Burst.”

Like Anni­hilus, Blas­taar also comes from the Neg­a­tive Zone. He’s the deposed despot of his home plan­et, sen­tenced by his peo­ple to be put into a con­tain­ment suit and strapped to an aster­oid, float­ing in the void of space when we first see him in FF #62. In an acci­dent, Reed Richards gets sucked through the por­tal in his lab into the Neg­a­tive Zone (all the FF vis­its to the Neg­a­tive Zone seemed to end up being very dan­ger­ous), and he ends up at one point cling­ing to one side of Blas­taar’s aster­oid. Dur­ing the res­cue of Reed, Blas­taar man­ages to break out of his suit and fol­low, escap­ing to Earth and team­ing up with the Sand­man.  Let’s just say: may­hem ensues.

Blas­taar can fire pow­er­ful blasts of con­cus­sive force from his hands, mak­ing him a dan­ger­ous adver­sary. He’s a very intense and anger-prone per­son­al­i­ty, which caus­es Sand­man to won­der whether he’s mak­ing a mis­take in team­ing up with such a wild card.

That’s all for Blas­taar. Tune in tomor­row to see who comes next!

The Klaw!

We’re mov­ing into our last sev­en days of Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025, ded­i­cat­ed to the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is Klaw, “the Mur­der­ous Mas­ter of Sound.”

Klaw’s ori­gin is very much entan­gled with the Wakan­dans and Black Pan­ther. We learn via flash­back in FF #53 that Klaw was a sci­en­tist who, in a ruth­less pur­suit of his research into the field of sound, decid­ed he had to have access to the Vibra­ni­um owned by the Wakan­dans. When T’Chal­la’s father King T’Cha­ka denies Klaw access, Klaw uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly shoots him dead on the spot! Lat­er, Klaw thinks he’ll shoot the young T’Chal­la, but he under­es­ti­mates the boy, los­ing his right hand as a result.

In FF #53’s present day, Klaw is cre­at­ing mon­sters of “sol­id sound,” using a con­ver­tor of his own inven­tion. Los­ing once again to T’Chal­la and the Wakan­dans, Klaw’s hid­den lab most­ly destroyed, he makes one last des­per­ate gam­ble, jump­ing into his con­ver­tor him­self. We don’t see the result of this exper­i­ment until #56, when he’s revealed to have been trans­formed into a being made of sol­id sound.

There’s a neat thing they do in these issues with the sound crea­tures, where all of them are col­ored bright red to visu­al­ly call them out. And when Klaw trans­forms, he too comes out red. His visu­al for the most part is a lot sim­pler than many oth­er Kir­by designs at the time, though the face is unique.

If you wan­na see who’s next, feel free to come back by again tomorrow!

Let Me Think About This for a Moment…

24 days in to this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month (curat­ed by Howard Simp­son), and the theme all this month has been the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is the Mad Thinker!

The Mad Thinker first shows up in FF #15. He has an amaz­ing abil­i­ty (assist­ed by com­put­ers) to pre­dict vir­tu­al­ly every angle, all the odds, and to work them in his favor when putting togeth­er his plans. In his first appear­ance, he had the FF basi­cal­ly beat­en, but for one small detail he could not have fore­seen (…and no, I’m not going to tell you what it is, if you haven’t read that story!).

The Thinker shows up six times dur­ing Jack and Stan’s reg­u­lar run of the FF, plus in three Annuals.

Over the course of his appear­ances in the book, like oth­er Kir­by char­ac­ters, he under­went some changes. He start­ed off with his hair only slight­ly longish for the day in his first appear­ance (1963), but it got longer, wilder and bushi­er by the time of his last appear­ance dur­ing Jack and Stan’s FF run.

In some ways, the Thinker’s look kind of plays against the stan­dard visu­al you’d expect when you think of a “mad sci­en­tist” type of char­ac­ter. Instead of some skin­ny, long-faced bald­ing type, the Thinker is more burly and hir­sute, prone to wear­ing cov­er­alls blue col­lar work­er style. How­ev­er, there was a thing you heard some­times back then about aca­d­e­mics being called “long­hairs.”

I kind of won­der what Kir­by had in mind, whether there was some thought of the Thinker tying in some­how as orig­i­nal­ly being from behind the Iron Cur­tain? His visu­al fits in pret­ty well with oth­er Mar­vel char­ac­ters of the time who they con­nect­ed more direct­ly to that as part of their back sto­ry. Like the Red Ghost.

And as a bonus, I also threw in the Thinker’s Awe­some Android. Though it’s real­ly kind of a sim­ple design, the visu­al has always grabbed me, from the moment I first came across it back when I was a kid. Some­thing about that face­less strange­ly-shaped head, and his malleability/adaptability.

That’s it for these guys. Come by and see who shows up next tomorrow!

You Psycho!

We’re at Day 23 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, focus­ing this time all month long on the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is Psycho-Man!

Psy­cho-Man debuted in Fan­tas­tic Four Annu­al #5. With access to all kinds of advanced tech, he’s a mas­ter of manip­u­lat­ing peo­ple’s emo­tions, and what they see. In fact, even when see­ing him, a hero can’t be total­ly sure of what they’re see­ing. I don’t want to say any more, for fear of spoil­ing things for any­one who might not have read the sto­ry yet. He also appeared in issues #76 and #77 of the reg­u­lar run of the book.

The char­ac­ter’s visu­al is one of those real­ly strik­ing designs that Kir­by came up with over and over again so eas­i­ly over the course of his career. It was almost more of an impressionistic/expressionistic thing with some of these designs, as they did­n’t real­ly seem to be fixed in a rigid way when you study them close­ly (like you have to do when try­ing to draw them). The things that are con­sis­tent are that face (col­ored gold­en-yel­low) with the open eyes, and the white and green of his outfit.

Psy­cho-Man’s hel­met and bare, high fore­head might be seen as some­thing of a design motif that would lat­er also pop up in Kir­by’s Dark­seid for DC.

That’s about all I have to say about Psy­cho-Man, except that he was fun to try to draw! Tune in tomor­row to see which char­ac­ter comes up next!

Just Frightful!

Day 22 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, curat­ed by Howard Simp­son, and the theme all month has been the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt: the Fright­ful Four!

It’s some­thing of a stan­dard device in hero­ic fic­tion to try to cre­ate an oppo­site for your hero (or heroes). So it stands to rea­son that Kir­by and Lee at some point were like­ly to come up with a Fright­ful Four to oppose the Fan­tas­tic Four (which they did in issue #36). You might expect that they would’ve come up with a whole group of new char­ac­ters (Kir­by was obvi­ous­ly cre­ative enough to do so), but for some rea­son, that was­n’t the path they took.

Instead, they took a Spi­der-Man vil­lain (Sand­man), and put him with two vil­lains (the Wiz­ard and Paste-Pot Pete, lat­er known as the Trap­ster) who had each pre­vi­ous­ly gone up against the Human Torch in his solo strip over in Strange Tales. To come up with the req­ui­site four, they cre­at­ed a new char­ac­ter, Medusa, who would lat­er go on to be revealed as a mem­ber of the Inhumans.

Jack and Stan must have liked work­ing with the Fright­ful Four, because they rat­ed no less than six appear­ances dur­ing their FF run, plus they also showed up in a cou­ple oth­er titles around that time too.

You might be a lit­tle sur­prised by Medusa’s out­fit here. Since I had already drawn her some days back, I thought it would be fun to show her here in the out­fit Jack gave her in her first appear­ance, as a mem­ber of the Fright­ful Four. With her very next appear­ance, she was redesigned into what could be con­sid­ered her clas­sic uni­form, with her hair ful­ly exposed.

As some­times hap­pened with Kir­by, the look of char­ac­ters would some­times change a bit over time. The Wiz­ard’s hel­met start­ed off as one height, but end­ed up quite a bit taller by the group’s last appear­ance dur­ing Jack and Stan’s run in issue #94. Ini­tial­ly, Jack had also giv­en him these sort of “face guards” that got stream­lined away lat­er on. I kind of liked those, so I brought them back here (at least sub­tly). It’s kind of a mix of the lat­er hel­met sil­hou­ette with that ele­ment from the ear­li­er helmet.

Fig­ur­ing out col­or was also a bit of a chal­lenge, as it changed a bit over those appearances.

Hope you enjoyed my take, and feel free to come back tomor­row to see who’s next!

J’Accuse!

Today com­pletes three weeks of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month (curat­ed by Howard Simp­son). The theme all month has been the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters, and today’s prompt is Ronan the Accuser.

As if the FF did­n’t have enough to deal with between Namor and the Skrulls, appar­ent­ly the Kree Empire also took issue with them! Because of the FF defeat­ing and destroy­ing the Kree Sen­try in FF #64, the Supreme Intel­li­gence of the Kree declares them guilty, and sends Ronan the Accuser to enact their sen­tence in issue #65.

Ronan is a for­mi­da­ble ene­my for the FF! He comes very close to suc­cess­ful­ly enact­ing the “extreme penal­ty.” (Per­haps because of the Comics Code, they weren’t quite able to just come out and say “Death.”). He presents a very strik­ing pres­ence, being about 8′ tall and wear­ing a unique uniform.

Ronan only made one appear­ance in the Fan­tas­tic Four com­ic, but he reap­peared lat­er in Avengers, Cap­tain Mar­vel and Ms. Mar­vel (books in which the Kree Empire was a presence).

It was fun to take a crack at draw­ing Ronan. Swing by tomor­row if you’d like to see who’s next on our hit parade!

“Mole!”

Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025, Day 20, and the theme all month has been the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is the Mole Man! The Mole Man was there at the very begin­ning, both of the Fan­tas­tic Four (issue #1), and the Mar­vel Comics universe.

As men­tioned yes­ter­day, those ear­ly issues of FF were kind of tran­si­tion­al. They still read and felt a lot like the mon­ster sto­ries Atlas/Marvel had been doing pre­vi­ous­ly. FF #1 gave us a char­ac­ter in Mole Man who had con­trol of a whole army of mon­sters, hid­ing in his under­ground realm. Today, we would prob­a­bly call him a “kai­ju mas­ter,” as some of these mon­sters were quite sizable.

Mole Man’s debut seemed to be root­ed not only in Mar­vel’s pre­vi­ous mon­ster comics, but also in kai­ju films like Godzil­la, and a tra­di­tion of “under­ground world” sto­ries (such as Jules Verne’s Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of the Earth, or the Bur­roughs Pel­lu­ci­dar stories).

For extra inter­est here, I added one of the mon­sters from that first sto­ry which caught my eye. It appeared to be made out of some kind of dark, liv­ing rock! It was­n’t giv­en a name in that sto­ry; no idea whether lat­er cre­ators might have giv­en it a name or not.

I also did the Mole Man for last year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. You can find it here.

The Empire Strikes Back

It’s now Day 19 of Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025 (curat­ed by Howard Simp­son), and the theme all month con­tin­ues to be the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is: the Super-Skrull!

We first meet the Skrulls very ear­ly on in the found­ing of the Mar­vel Uni­verse, in FF #2, where after fail­ing in their attempt to take over the Earth, as part of their defeat, the Skrulls agree to trans­form into cat­tle and let them­selves be hyp­no­tized into for­get­ting they were ever any­thing else(!). At this point, the FF did­n’t even have uni­forms. Much like the first issue, in a lot of ways, this sto­ry feels like it’s still a tran­si­tion­al one between the ear­li­er mon­ster books and the super­hero books they would soon become known for.

In issue #18, we learn that appar­ent­ly the Skrull Empire did not take kind­ly to the defeat of their inva­sion. And they were aware that the Fan­tas­tic Four were respon­si­ble. So they sent their most pow­er­ful war­rior, the Super-Skrull, to defeat the Fan­tas­tic Four and con­quer the Earth.

The Super-Skrull is a lot big­ger than the Skrulls we saw pre­vi­ous­ly. They were kind of puny, while he appears to be about the size of a pro wrestler. Not only that (and his nor­mal Skrull abil­i­ty to change appear­ance), but he’s equipped with all the pow­ers of the Fan­tas­tic Four (minus the Invis­i­ble Wom­an’s force fields; they had­n’t giv­en her that pow­er yet). Plus an addi­tion­al pow­er he reveals lat­er in the story.

He real­ly gives the FF a run for their mon­ey in his first appear­ance, but ulti­mate­ly they fig­ure out his weak­ness and defeat him. This time.

Hope you liked my take, and feel free to stop by tomor­row to see who’s next.

“Don’t Be So Negative All the Time!”

Here on Day 18 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, ded­i­cat­ed to the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters, today’s prompt is Annihilus.

We meet Anni­hilus as the ruler and tyrant of the Neg­a­tive Zone in FF Annu­al #6. Sue is about to give birth, and Reed deter­mines that she and their baby are in dan­ger. Sav­ing them requires he risk his life leap­ing into the Neg­a­tive Zone again, and of course, nei­ther John­ny nor Ben are going to let him go alone. And their quest forces them to cross paths with Annihilus…but I think I’m not going to spoil the sto­ry for those who haven’t yet had the chance to read it.

Anni­hilus presents a strik­ing visu­al, as sort of a metal­lic insec­toid humanoid. He imme­di­ate­ly comes off as scary and hos­tile from the first glance. Kir­by seems to have had a bit of a fas­ci­na­tion with the idea of insec­toid humanoids, going on to explore it again both in New Gods for DC, and in his lat­er cre­ator-owned Cap­tain Vic­to­ry for Pacif­ic Comics.

I’d nev­er tried to draw Anni­hilus before, and it was kind of fun! The col­or scheme was­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly what you’d expect based on the b/w draw­ing, but it def­i­nite­ly catch­es your eye.

That’s all for Anni­hilus. Who’s next? You’ll have to come back by tomor­row to see!

“Where’d You Get That Cool Helmet From?”

As you know, it’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025 (curat­ed by Howard Simp­son), and the theme is the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. We’ve moved into the rogues’ gallery, and today is the biggest of them all (lit­er­al­ly): Galactus!

Galac­tus as a char­ac­ter was like noth­ing no one had ever seen before in a super­hero com­ic when he showed up in Fan­tas­tic Four #48 (part one of what would come to be known as the clas­sic “Galac­tus Trilogy”).

He comes to Earth to con­sume our world and the ener­gy it con­tains, with no thought to any of the liv­ing beings on our plan­et. When the FF try to stop him, they quick­ly real­ize that they might as well be insects! Seem­ing­ly there is noth­ing they can do. In fact, if not for the Watch­er step­ping in to give them some assis­tance, the Earth would have met its end!

You might look at my depic­tion of Galac­tus here and feel like some­thing is a lit­tle odd com­pared to what you’re used to. That’s because (as I men­tioned in an ear­li­er post) I’ve set myself a rule to stick to how these char­ac­ters were depict­ed dur­ing Jack and Stan’s FF run. And in this case, I felt like stick­ing with Galac­tus’ por­tray­al in his first appear­ance, “The Galac­tus Trilogy.”

They were still fig­ur­ing out the Big G’s col­or scheme dur­ing the Tril­o­gy. Each issue, it’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. In fact, in the first issue (#48), he was red and dark green! It was­n’t until #50 when they got some­thing fair­ly close to what would become his stan­dard col­or scheme (though they weren’t yet using the blue-vio­let). For com­par­i­son, you can see my depic­tion of Galac­tus done for the first Kir­by Trib­ute Month here.

Hope you enjoyed this, and feel free to tune in again tomor­row to see which vil­lain comes up next!

The Hand of Doom!

Day 16 of Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025, focused on the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. We’ve moved from allies and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters into the rogues’ gallery. And the first prompt is none oth­er than Dr. Doom!

He’s arguably the FF’s arch­neme­sis. Vic­tor Von Doom has a per­son­al his­to­ry with Reed Richards, going back to when they met in col­lege when Doom was there as an exchange stu­dent. His mind rivals Reed’s (though in his arro­gance, Doom would be insult­ed if it was sug­gest­ed in his pres­ence that any­one even came close to being his equal!). He is a mega­lo­ma­ni­ac and per­fec­tion­ist, who can­not tol­er­ate the slight­est flaw. This is part of why he stays masked almost all the time.

The FF had a num­ber of adven­tures dur­ing Jack and Stan’s run where they went up against Doom. And over time, Kir­by gave him­self more artis­tic license to get expres­sive with Doom’s iron mask in show­ing his emo­tions. At times, the imagery could get quite chilling!

I drew Dr. Doom for last year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month too, and if you like, you can check that out here.

That’s our first vil­lain! Tune in tomor­row to see who comes next!

“Who’s a Good Boy?!”

It’s day 15 (about the halfway point) of 2025’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, focused on the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. On this last day of a group­ing of allies and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, today’s prompt is the Inhu­mans’ giant dog, Lockjaw.

Lock­jaw first shows up in FF #45, along with Crys­tal of the Inhu­mans. He’s large­ly Crys­tal’s pet (“large” being the oper­a­tive word), and is a strik­ing sight. All the Inhu­mans have spe­cial pow­ers, and Lock­jaw is no excep­tion. He’s able to tele­port him­self and oth­ers wher­ev­er he wants to go. In fact, there’s a peri­od where John­ny Storm and Wyatt Wing­foot accom­pa­ny Lock­jaw as he tele­ports around, hop­ing he will bring them to wher­ev­er Crys­tal and the oth­er Inhu­mans are trapped. It ends up being quite a jour­ney before they final­ly reach their desired destination.

I’ve been won­der­ing a bit about what inspired Jack and Stan to cre­ate Lock­jaw. This isn’t some­thing I’ve par­tic­u­lar­ly researched, but the thought of old paint­ed por­traits of nobil­i­ty or roy­al­ty came to mind, where they were some­times depict­ed with their pets. So why not a giant bull­dog befit­ting a roy­al fam­i­ly as unusu­al as the Inhu­mans? It’s only a guess, but maybe that was where Lock­jaw came from.

Tomor­row we move from allies and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters to the FF’s rogues gallery. Who’s going to be first? Check in tomor­row to see!

Wiggle, Wiggle!

It’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025, and the theme is the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. You might have real­ized that we’re in the midst of a group­ing of allies and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters. And today’s prompt is the Bax­ter Build­ing’s mail­man, Willie Lumpkin.

Willie first shows up in Fan­tas­tic Four #11, in the short slice-of-life sto­ry “A Vis­it with the Fan­tas­tic Four.” We first meet the poor lit­tle guy try­ing to lug in a ginor­mous mail­bag of fan let­ters for the FF. Inter­act­ing with them in the lob­by, he gets to show them his own spe­cial ability…

The lov­able Mr. Lump­kin only showed up a cou­ple of times dur­ing Jack and Stan’s FF run, both of those fair­ly ear­ly on. But lat­er cre­ators liked the char­ac­ter, and so he would show up again from time to time.

For some rea­son in that first appear­ance, the col­orist made the strange choice to col­or his uni­form green. I don’t recall ever see­ing a U.S. mail­man with a green uni­form. So I did some Googling to see if I could find out what mail­men were wear­ing in the ear­ly ’60s, and used that instead. I also took my col­or cues from that uni­form ref­er­ence, get­ting as close as I could with­in the lim­it­ed palette.

Willie was fun to draw! Hope you liked him. Check back tomor­row to see who our last ally/supporting cast mem­ber is.

Stay up Late

On the 13th Day of Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025 (curat­ed by Howard Simp­son), the theme (as you know by now) is the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is Franklin Richards, son of Reed and Sue.

Franklin was a late cast addi­tion dur­ing Jack and Stan’s FF run. Just mak­ing sure Sue could safe­ly give birth to Franklin result­ed in the rest of the team hav­ing to risk their lives by leap­ing into the Neg­a­tive Zone in FF Annu­al #6 (more on that in a future post).

I ini­tial­ly thought about try­ing to do some­thing fanci­er with my depic­tion, show Franklin using some of the pow­ers lat­er cre­ators gave him. But with all of these Kir­by Trib­ute FF images, I’ve made a rule for myself to stay with­in the lim­its of what Jack and Stan did dur­ing their run. And dur­ing that time, Franklin was pret­ty much just a nor­mal, healthy baby.

It might throw some of you to see him with brown hair, but that was how Franklin was depict­ed for a long time, even after Kir­by left the book. I’m not sure at what point he was shift­ed over to being depict­ed as blond, but that was how Franklin was being shown by the time John Byrne did his FF run. And doing some Googling, it seems there are now images of him also hav­ing black hair. No idea what that’s about.

That’s it for Franklin. If you like, come by tomor­row to see who’s up next.

Don’t Mess with the Governess!

We’ve reached Day 12 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, curat­ed by Howard Simp­son. This time out, it’s all about Fan­tas­tic Four-relat­ed char­ac­ters from Jack Kir­by’s and Stan Lee’s 100+ issues of “The World’s Great­est Com­ic Mag­a­zine.” We’ve been doing allies and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters for the moment, and today’s prompt is Agatha Harkness.

She shows up very late in Jack and Stan’s run, in issue #94. Reed and Sue are look­ing for a child-rear­ing spe­cial­ist who can pro­tect new­born Franklin when they need to go off on mis­sions, and have decid­ed to hire Agatha Hark­ness. In that intro­duc­to­ry sto­ry, “The Return of the Fright­ful Four!,” Miss Hark­ness proves her­self to be more than capa­ble of han­dling that job!

I would guess that Agatha Hark­ness was prob­a­bly inspired by some of the oth­er monster/horror mate­r­i­al that was around in pop cul­ture at the time. On TV, you had shows like The Addams Fam­i­ly, The Mun­sters, and new­com­er Dark Shad­ows. Ben Grimm even ref­er­ences Barn­abas from Dark Shad­ows, Drac­u­la, and late show hor­ror movies in his dia­logue. I’d sug­gest the sto­ry is one of the bet­ter ones from the lat­ter part of the Kirby/Lee FF run. It gives Kir­by a chance to stretch some of the hor­ror mus­cles he’d lat­er go on to use in The Demon for DC.

Hope you enjoy my take. Come back tomor­row if you’re curi­ous to see who shows up next!

The “W’s” Have It

On the 11th Day of this year’s Jack Kir­by Month, focused on Fan­tas­tic Four-relat­ed char­ac­ters, today’s prompt is John­ny Stor­m’s col­lege room­mate and good friend, Wyatt Wingfoot.

We first meet Wyatt in Fan­tas­tic Four #50 (as if there was­n’t already enough going on with­in the “The Galac­tus Tril­o­gy!”). It seems as though per­haps Wyatt might have been inspired by Native Amer­i­can Olympian Jim Thor­pe (one indi­ca­tor might be that Lee actu­al­ly gave the col­lege’s Foot­ball coach the name “Thor­pe”), though at first Wyatt showed no inter­est in athletics.

Wyatt had no super­pow­ers, but his nat­ur­al ath­let­ics, quick mind and brav­ery equipped him to accom­pa­ny the FF on sev­er­al adven­tures. A good friend, he accom­pa­nied John­ny Storm in his exten­sive search for Crys­tal and the Inhu­mans, at great risk.

I believe his last appear­ance dur­ing the Kirby/Lee FF run was in issue #80, where he enlist­ed the FF’s help to find out what was going on on the reser­va­tion with report­ed appear­ances of Toma­zooma, the Liv­ing Totem. In that last appear­ance, Wyatt was dri­ving around a sort of ATV called the Gyro­cruis­er, gift­ed to him by the Black Pan­ther. I thought it would be fun to include it here, add a lit­tle extra interest.

That’s all for the allit­er­a­tive Wyatt Wing­foot. (Stan sure did like those allit­er­a­tive char­ac­ter names!) Come back tomor­row if you’d like to see who shows up next!

Clear As…

Day 10 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, curat­ed by Howard Simp­son, and this year is focused on the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. At the moment, we’re in the midst of a group of allies and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is Crys­tal of the Inhumans.

Crys­tal first shows up in Fan­tas­tic Four #45, where most of the Inhu­mans were also first intro­duced. John­ny Storm encoun­ters her, is fas­ci­nat­ed by her, but she runs away, fear­ful of being seen by nor­mal humans. When John­ny flames on as the Human Torch, she is no longer fear­ful, think­ing he must be an Inhu­man also.

John­ny and Crys­tal quick­ly get very close (most would say she was John­ny’s first love), but they’re trag­i­cal­ly sep­a­rat­ed when the Inhu­mans’ Hid­den Land is trapped under an impen­e­tra­ble dome. John­ny spends a lot of time try­ing to get to her. Lat­er (in issue #81), she actu­al­ly joins the FF when Sue steps away for a time. Often referred to as an “Ele­men­tal,” Crys­tal has the pow­er to manip­u­late earth, air, fire and water.

In her first appear­ance, she just wore a white dress, which helped to give her a sort of inno­cent and ethe­re­al appear­ance (I’m pret­ty sure this had to be deliberate).

Some­thing about the way Jack drew her face in that first appear­ance made me think of Kathy Ire­land. Years lat­er, in the mid-’90s, when Producer/Director Lar­ry Hous­ton was doing a Fan­tas­tic Four car­toon, I got the chance to draw the char­ac­ter mod­el for Crys­tal. Anoth­er artist had drawn her in the yel­low cos­tume that kind of became her stan­dard out­fit lat­er (which I drew her in here). But Lar­ry had want­ed her in the white dress, since they were adapt­ing her intro­duc­to­ry sto­ry­line from issue #45 where she met Johnny.

I chose to also try to keep her ini­tial like­ness to Kathy Ire­land from that first appear­ance. No one told me to do that; it just felt right to do it, since it was a dis­tinc­tive face. But as it turned out, they actu­al­ly got Kathy Ire­land to play the char­ac­ter for that episode! Kind of neat it worked out that way.

I tried to achieve that same face here again, though this time with the yel­low out­fit. No idea how that hair­band and those “end­pieces” in her hair work, but they sure look cool!

Hope you like my take on Crys­tal. Feel free to come back tomor­row to see who shows up next!

A Hairy Situation

It’s now Day Nine of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, curat­ed by Howard Simp­son. This time out, it’s focused sole­ly on the Fan­tas­tic Four and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters from Jack and Stan’s 100+ issue run. Today’s prompt is Medusa, of the Inhumans.

In her first appear­ance, Medusa is actu­al­ly not an ally. She shows up teamed with the Wiz­ard, Sand­man and Pastepot Pete as the Fright­ful Four, in Fan­tas­tic Four #36. She makes a for­mi­da­ble ene­my, with psy­choki­net­ic con­trol over her lengthy, pre­hen­sile hair. It isn’t until FF #45 that we find out about the Inhu­mans, and that she’s part of the group.

Although the FF’s first meet­ings with the Inhu­mans don’t go well, over time, they become allies. After Jack and Stan’s run, Medusa even spends some time as a mem­ber of the Fan­tas­tic Four.

Medusa’s out­fit changes quite a bit over the years. It’s safe to say that what I’ve drawn here is more or less her clas­sic look. Though in her first appear­ance, her out­fit is quite dif­fer­ent! (Stay tuned!)

More often than not in comics, red hair has typ­i­cal­ly been depict­ed as a stan­dard com­ic book orange (50% magen­ta with 100% yel­low). But when they real­ly want the col­or to punch (like with Medusa), some­times they’d go full-on com­ic book red (100% magen­ta with 100% yellow).

Look­ing at it now, I feel like maybe a lit­tle bit of Wal­ly Wood crept into my depic­tion here, sub­con­scious­ly. But I can’t find him ever hav­ing drawn her. How­ev­er, I do remem­ber Dave Simons once doing a draw­ing of her in Wood’s style, so maybe that was in the back of my mind.

Hope you like, and (a hint) tune in tomor­row for anoth­er Inhuman!

“I Always Feel Like, Somebody’s Watching Me…”

We’re at Day Eight of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, ded­i­cat­ed to the Fan­tas­tic Four and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters. In the midst of a group of allies and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, today’s prompt is the Watcher.

The mys­te­ri­ous Watch­er first shows up in Fan­tas­tic Four #13, “The Red Ghost and His Inde­scrib­able Super-Apes!” The FF and the Red Ghost race to be first to land on the moon, and to every­one’s sur­prise, near ancient ruins in the Blue Area of the Moon, they first encounter the Watch­er. He explains that he comes from a very advanced world where his peo­ple roam the uni­verse, wit­ness­ing events on all sorts of plan­ets. The Watch­er breaks a cen­turies-long vow of silence and steps into their conflict.

He’s some­times referred to by the name Uatu, but he did­n’t gain that name until Cap­tain Mar­vel #39 in 1975. At this point and for the rest of Jack and Stan’s FF run, he was sim­ply “the Watcher.”

The Watcher’s appear­ance changes a great deal dur­ing the course of Jack and Stan’s run. In his first appear­ance, he was col­ored a pale yel­low, with a pur­ple cape and tunic. Lat­er in the run when he appeared, his pro­por­tions had changed, and his head got small­er. I elect­ed to go with his ear­ly look (because I pre­fer the more “oth­er-word­ly” look with the big­ger head and eyes with­out pupils), but his lat­er, more rec­og­niz­able col­or palette.

Why did his appear­ance change so much? I recall read­ing a con­jec­ture about that which seemed pret­ty rea­son­able (though I don’t remem­ber exact­ly where I read it). It was point­ed out that in inter­ven­ing peri­ods, the Watch­er had showed up in oth­er comics drawn by oth­er artists, and his appear­ance had been kind of altered. The the­o­ry was that Jack was try­ing to be con­sis­tent to what had become the Watcher’s cur­rent look, and that’s why he changed so much.

The Watch­er appar­ent­ly took an inter­est in the FF and their activ­i­ties, step­ping in from time to time (most notably in “The Galac­tus Tril­o­gy” in Fan­tas­tic Four #48–50).

Enjoy, and feel free to return tomor­row to see who’s next!

I Feel You!

It’s Day Sev­en of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, curat­ed by Howard Simp­son. Ded­i­cat­ed sole­ly this time to the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters, as of the last cou­ple days, we’re in the midst of a group of allies and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is Ali­cia Masters.

Ali­cia was intro­duced as the daugh­ter of the vil­lain the Pup­pet Mas­ter, in Fan­tas­tic Four #8. In the course of that sto­ry, Ali­cia meets the FF, and real­izes she has feel­ings for Ben Grimm, the Thing. Ben has feel­ings for her too, and their rela­tion­ship helps to soft­en and ground him after the tragedy of his muta­tion. We learn that Ali­cia is blind, and also a very tal­ent­ed sculp­tor. She becomes a reg­u­lar sup­port­ing char­ac­ter, play­ing piv­otal roles in sev­er­al sto­ries. Most notably in the Galac­tus Tril­o­gy, Fan­tas­tic Four #48–50.

Some­thing I real­ized in look­ing back on her appear­ances in the first 100+ issues is that there was a real effort to try to keep her fash­ions and hair­styles cur­rent. I notice that with a num­ber of the female characters.

That’s it for Ali­cia! Tune in tomor­row to see who’s next.

On the Prowl

We’re now at Day Six of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. This time, cura­tor Howard Simp­son has focused on char­ac­ters from Jack and Stan’s Fan­tas­tic Four run. And today’s prompt is the Black Panther!

Though Black Pan­ther was not the first black super­hero (most agree that dis­tinc­tion should go to the Gold­en Age char­ac­ter Lion Man), he was still ground­break­ing. Thank­ful­ly, they did­n’t go with the name “Coal Tiger” that they were appar­ent­ly con­sid­er­ing at one point (based on notes on an ear­ly sketch).

Since this Trib­ute Month is FF-themed, I opt­ed to base how I drew Black Pan­ther on how he first appeared dur­ing Jack and Stan’s FF-run. Kir­by and Joe Sin­nott (in the inks) real­ly pushed the black-spot­ting on his cos­tume, plus there was the short cape held on by a strap across his chest.

Instead of the stan­dard blues typ­i­cal­ly used in comics for black cos­tumes like this, ini­tial­ly they went with a col­or for­mu­lat­ed out of all three of the usu­al print­ers’ inks (cyan, magen­ta and yel­low) that mim­ic­ked gray. An actu­al gray was not pos­si­ble inside a com­ic in those days, with the lim­it­ed palette of 64 col­ors. It was a unique look. Lat­er, they changed the Pan­ther’s col­or to a more stan­dard blue. Most like­ly because they could guar­an­tee it would print more con­sis­tent­ly than the fake gray.

I almost drew the Pan­ther in the “tech­no-jun­gle” where he con­front­ed the FF in his first appear­ance. Such a wild con­cept (and very Kir­by), I don’t think they ever used that idea again after his first appear­ance. So I fig­ured going with a more reg­u­lar type of jun­gle foliage would prob­a­bly be best.

A bit of triv­ia: some years back in my day job in ani­ma­tion, I end­ed up (so far as we know) cre­at­ing the char­ac­ter mod­el for Black Pan­ther’s very first appear­ance in ani­ma­tion! It was in X‑Men: The Ani­mat­ed Series. You can read about it here.

That’s it for this one. Come by tomor­row if you’d like to see who’s up next!

Let’s Go Surfin’ Now,…

On Day Five of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, the prompt is Nor­rin Radd, AKA the Sil­ver Surfer.

It’s been doc­u­ment­ed (in Stan Lee’s own words) that the Surfer was ini­tial­ly Jack­’s cre­ation. There was no men­tion of a char­ac­ter like him in any of their plot dis­cus­sions, but Jack felt that a char­ac­ter as big (both phys­i­cal­ly and meta­phys­i­cal­ly) as Galac­tus need­ed some kind of a her­ald. Jack­’s ini­tial idea was that the Surfer had no pre­vi­ous exis­tence, and was a cre­ation out of noth­ing by Galac­tus. That gives more weight to his learn­ing about human­i­ty and turn­ing on Galac­tus in Fan­tas­tic Four issues #48–50, which have come to be known col­lec­tive­ly as “The Galac­tus Trilogy.”

Stan Lee lat­er adopt­ed the char­ac­ter as his own, and kind of devel­oped his own ideas about what he want­ed to do with him. He enact­ed them in the solo Sil­ver Surfer title: giv­ing him a pre­vi­ous exis­tence as Nor­rin Radd, who offers him­self up to Galac­tus as her­ald in order to save his home plan­et and the life of his beloved, Shal­la Bal. Inter­est­ing ideas in their own right, but kind of under­cut­ting what Kir­by had in mind initially.

An inter­est­ing “What If” is the last issue of that run of the Sil­ver Surfer title (issue #18), where they let Jack not just draw it, but also write it. For much of the run, the Surfer had often been depict­ed as depressed, bemoan­ing his impris­on­ment on Earth and the way human­i­ty act­ed. In this last issue (done just before the King left Mar­vel to go to DC), Kir­by had the Surfer final­ly get fed up with all the vio­lence he was con­tin­u­al­ly encoun­ter­ing on Earth. In a full page close-up on the final page, he angri­ly shouts, “Let Mankind beware! From this time forth–the Surfer will be the dead­liest one of all!” The next issue ban­ner at the bot­tom pro­claims “Next: the sav­age­ly sen­sa­tion­al new Sil­ver Surfer!” It would have been inter­est­ing to see where that would have gone!

I’ve drawn the Surfer a few times myself. There’s some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing about how sim­ple his design is, yet also strik­ing. He’s a fun chal­lenge to execute!

That’s it for today! Check back tomor­row for who’s up next.

Flame On!

We’re at Day Four of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month (curat­ed by Howard Simp­son), this time all Fan­tas­tic Four-themed. And com­plet­ing our Four is John­ny Storm, the Human Torch!

The pow­ers John­ny gained in their flight through the cos­mic rays were arguably the flashiest of the group, and actu­al­ly fit­ting his char­ac­ter (espe­cial­ly as the youngest mem­ber). He flew high and burned hot, much like his emo­tions some­times did in those ear­ly adven­tures. In those ear­ly days, some­times he would go beyond his lim­its and lose his pow­ers until he could rest and recov­er them.

Over the course of Jack and Stan’s orig­i­nal Fan­tas­tic Four run, John­ny grew and went through a lot. Some of which we’ll even­tu­al­ly get to in a lat­er post.

Well, that’s our Four! Who comes next, now that we’ve done them? Tune in tomor­row to see!

“What a Revoltin’ Development!”

It’s now Day Three of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, focused on Fan­tas­tic Four-relat­ed char­ac­ters. And today’s prompt is none oth­er than the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing himself!

It’s been said that every super­hero group needs a super-strong char­ac­ter. And Ben Grimm def­i­nite­ly fills that bill. But he’s more than that. His pow­ers came with an obvi­ous cost, and there’s a sad­ness and regret that peri­od­i­cal­ly come out (some­thing that some lat­er writ­ers have tend­ed to for­get or neglect over the years). He’s got a rough exte­ri­or (lit­er­al­ly!), but a big heart. Strong as he is, some­times the Thing would be in sit­u­a­tions where he was beyond his lim­its. But he nev­er would stop try­ing. And in a tough sit­u­a­tion, he’s def­i­nite­ly the sort of per­son you would want back­ing you up.

One more mem­ber of the group to go tomorrow!

It’s the Ones You Don’t See That You Gotta Look out For!

Day Two of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month (curat­ed by Howard Simp­son), and the whole month is ded­i­cat­ed to Fan­tas­tic Four-relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is Sue Storm Richards, the Invis­i­ble Woman!

Sue has a unique role in the Fan­tas­tic Four. She kind of acts as the emo­tion­al cen­ter or heart of the group. When Reed Richards would get too car­ried away in his head with his own thoughts, she could bring him back to earth and ground him. And he always trust­ed her to do that. When Ben Grimm would some­times get angry or depressed, she knew what to say to bring him back again. And when her younger broth­er John­ny would get hot-head­ed or too out-of-con­trol, she knew how to rein him in also. It’s kind of a sub­tle role, but an impor­tant one.

Ini­tial­ly after their flight through the cos­mic rays, Sue only had the pow­er of invis­i­bil­i­ty. But I think Jack and Stan soon real­ized that was­n’t enough for their nar­ra­tive needs, and gave her the sec­ondary pow­er to gen­er­ate force fields. Often those pow­ers have been used in large­ly a defen­sive way, but dur­ing John Byrne’s run on Fan­tas­tic Four, he came up with some inno­v­a­tive uses for her pow­ers that showed once and for all that she could hold her own with any­one else.

Feel free to come by tomor­row to see who’s next!

“That’s Just Too Fantastic!”

It’s August, which means it’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month again! Cre­at­ed by Howard Simp­son, this year’s prompts are all Fan­tas­tic Four-relat­ed. And things are kick­ing off with none oth­er than Mr. Fan­tas­tic himself!

Trans­formed like the oth­er mem­bers of the quar­tet by an encounter with cos­mic rays on a rock­et trip into orbit, Reed Richards is the leader of the Fan­tas­tic Four, and one of the most bril­liant minds in the Mar­vel Comics Uni­verse. He took the stretch­ing pow­ers he gained and found inno­v­a­tive ways to use them, not just in deal­ing with men­aces encoun­tered by the Fan­tas­tic Four, but even in his every­day work in his lab. Not hav­ing his unique abil­i­ties, most sci­en­tists would prob­a­bly find it phys­i­cal­ly dif­fi­cult to work on some of the equip­ment he designed.

Tune in again tomor­row to see who’s next!

“Lois, What’ve You Gotten Yourself Into??”

This is anoth­er one you can file under “ideas that popped into my head and would­n’t go away until I did them.”

I allud­ed in my pre­vi­ous post to hav­ing to look at a lot of Super­man mate­r­i­al while help­ing out with a recent Big Bang Comics project. In the course of doing that, this idea occurred to me: the Gold­en Age Super­man going up against Cthul­hu. And it would­n’t let go.

Final­ly, I had to do it. It’s not the first time I’ve tried to draw this ver­sion of Super­man. You can see it not only in the art I did as a kid (which I includ­ed with the pre­vi­ous post linked above), I also took a shot at him just pri­or to DC’s “New 52” era. So I’ve always had a soft spot for that ver­sion of the character.

To put the Gold­en Age Super­man up against Cthul­hu, I’m hav­ing to bend real­i­ty a bit in order to make it hap­pen. In the real world at this point in time, Super­man’s oppo­nents were still basi­cal­ly reg­u­lar non-pow­ered humans. They all were pret­ty much “one and done.” In the real Action Comics #13, they made their first attempt at intro­duc­ing a recur­ring vil­lain, the Ultra-Human­ite (though he was not yet in the lat­er albi­no goril­la form most fans are famil­iar with). At that point, he was just a very smart old bald guy in a wheel­chair. I think they were going for a char­ac­ter who might serve as Super­man’s Mori­ar­ty, his brains against Super­man’s brawn.

I’m not sure why Siegel and Shus­ter had­n’t yet put Super­man up against a super-vil­lain at this point. I guess they were still feel­ing their way, fig­ur­ing out the rules as they went along. After all, Super­man was the first of his super­pow­ered kind, blaz­ing the trail for a host of oth­er heroes. Messrs. S&S did take a crack at that kind of weird cos­mic hor­ror in one of their ear­li­er strips, Dr. Occult, and Siegel made use of it also in the Spec­tre. Clear­ly they were aware of that pulp genre, and were even fans of it to some extent. So maybe in anoth­er world, they might have thought to pit Super­man against Cthulhu.

Also in the real world, Action #13 was­n’t pub­lished with an Octo­ber 1939 cov­er date. It came out ear­li­er. I just liked the con­ceit of the 13th issue com­ing out in Octo­ber. Call it artis­tic license.

You might find the ver­sion of Cthul­hu here a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from what you’re used to. I elect­ed to ignore any lat­er (post-1930’s) depic­tions, and stuck with a cou­ple of sketch­es I found done by H.P. Love­craft him­self in 1934. I fig­ure some­thing like that is most like­ly what Shus­ter would’ve had access to. A lot of mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tions like to give Cthul­hu two eyes and brow ridges, but I liked how the six eyes Love­craft drew him with made him weird­er and less human-looking.

Hope you enjoyed it, and thanks for stop­ping by!

High Octane Stuff

Long­time vis­i­tors to my site might know that I did some work for Gary Carl­son and Chris Eck­er’s Big Bang Comics back in the ’90s. I got to do a whole bunch of things: design char­ac­ters, logos, draw sto­ries, sug­gest sto­ry ideas… Though no one was going to get rich off of Big Bang, it was a blast. (Hmm; as I guess work­ing for an imprint called “Big Bang” should be!) I real­ly enjoyed the whole “comics his­to­ry through a fun­house mir­ror” aspect of it, and con­tributed a bunch of fake cov­ers to a cou­ple issues pub­lished under the blan­ket title, “The Big Bang His­to­ry of Comics,” mod­eled after Ster­anko’s two comics his­to­ry volumes.

Fast for­ward to recent­ly. Gary’s putting out new Big Bang issues via Indy­Plan­et these days, and on occa­sion will reach out and run stuff past me (as a sec­ond pair of eyes). I vol­un­teered to help him out with some things on the cur­rent issue, spot­light­ing Ulti­man. In the course of help­ing to assem­ble and col­or some of the fake cov­ers from the old His­to­ry issues (which will be seen large and in col­or for the first time in this new issue), an idea popped into my head for a new cov­er. Gary encour­aged me to go for it, and this is the result!

I specif­i­cal­ly want­ed this new cov­er to look like Wayne Bor­ing’s work, as I’ve always kind of liked the bar­rel-chest­ed pro­por­tions and quirk­i­ness of what he did. This (along with one oth­er thing I did for the issue) hap­pens to be the first new art I’ve drawn for Big Bang in a long time! It was a lot of fun.

I did a whole bunch of fake cov­ers for the His­to­ry issues back when those orig­i­nal­ly came out, and it’s sur­pris­ing to me now to real­ize that I did­n’t gen­er­ate any Ulti­man cov­ers for them. As a kid, Super­man was a favorite (see at right, done back then), along­side Bat­man and the orig­i­nal Capt. Mar­vel. Well, that omis­sion’s been rec­ti­fied now!

Wars out there, in the Stars

You all know today is May the Fourth, right? All kinds of Star Wars stuff going on, online and else­where. And I remem­bered I had some­thing I could post rel­e­vant to that. Strange­ly, some­how I nev­er got around to post­ing this before!

Almost 10 years back now, one of the hosts of a pod­cast that was going to be called “Unmis­tak­ably Star Wars,” Devin, had reached out to me and asked if I might be will­ing to design the type and illus­trate a logo for their pro­posed pod­cast. It sound­ed like fun, so I did it.

In the process, I even wound up cre­at­ing a mas­cot for them. He’s a Tusken Raider, but a bit of an odd­ball among his fel­low Raiders, as he likes to dress up and be sophis­ti­cat­ed. Mak­ing him the one and only Tux­en Raider!

-Ahem- Any­way, before any­one asks, I don’t know the cur­rent sta­tus of the pod­cast. Doing some cur­so­ry Googling, it looks like their most recent episodes are from around five years ago. In any event, I had fun doing the logo, and it was neat to see them using it on their show, as well as apply­ing it to var­i­ous items.

May the Fourth be with you!

It’s Transducin’ Time!

I just did a piece of pin­up art of Frank Squil­lace’s Trans­duc­er Man! ‘Nuff said!…

…No? Guess not. Okay; here’s more. Years ago, on my first day in ani­ma­tion (work­ing on X‑Men: The Ani­mat­ed Series) , the very first per­son I met was Frank Squil­lace. My friend Frank has always been one of those artists whom you could describe as an “idea engine.” For exam­ple, Jack Kir­by was clear­ly that kind of artist. Frank has always been com­ing up with ideas for dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters and sto­ries, as if it were the eas­i­est thing in the world. He’s got so many of them! I must con­fess to being a bit jeal­ous of Frank’s abil­i­ty to do that, because I’ve nev­er been wired quite that way.

Frank’s had his Trans­duc­er Man char­ac­ter for a good, long while, prob­a­bly since well before we ever met. The char­ac­ter’s gone through sev­er­al iter­a­tions over the years, as he peri­od­i­cal­ly played with the con­cept, hon­ing and shap­ing it. Back when we were work­ing togeth­er on X‑Men, I even did a few draw­ings of his char­ac­ter (as he was at that point) myself. I’ve includ­ed one here, below.

Frank and I have been talk­ing recent­ly, and he’s been real­ly fired up to do some­thing with Trans­duc­er Man again. Specif­i­cal­ly as a com­ic. As often hap­pens with Frank, the con­cept has been expand­ed and altered again. Cur­rent­ly, Trans­duc­er Man’s more in the vein of a clas­sic Gold­en Age com­ic char­ac­ter (while not entire­ly aban­don­ing his orig­i­nal more pulp-based roots). Hear­ing what Frank intends on doing with his com­ic, I could­n’t help but get the itch to take a crack at draw­ing the cur­rent iter­a­tion myself!

Mean­while, Frank is cur­rent­ly furi­ous­ly work­ing on his Trans­duc­er Man book, hop­ing to get it out. Stay tuned; I’ll let you know when it hap­pens! It will include my pinup…along with oth­er guest pieces of art!

Trans­duc­er Man is ™ & © Frank Squillace.

Do I Know You? Who Are You Again?

I’ve been wait­ing a year to do this! After I gen­er­at­ed last year’s Christ­mas offer­ing, this idea popped into my head. Though it’s a vari­a­tion on a theme, I had to final­ly get it out of my brain!

I have a big soft spot for DC’s Sil­ver Age 80 Pg. Giants, and the 100 Pg. Super Spec­tac­u­lars. The 80 Pg. Giants in par­tic­u­lar col­lect­ed a lot of fun, some­times strange, sto­ries. It occurred to me that it would be fun if there were one fea­tur­ing a bunch of odd­ball dif­fer­ent San­ta Claus­es, play­ing on some of the old comics tropes in think­ing them up. For some rea­son, they always had these “future men” with giant heads, pre­sum­ably to hold their enlarged brains! And of course there had to be a goril­la too!

Hope you enjoy! I’m not going to lie; if this were a real com­ic, I’d absolute­ly buy it. That’s about all there is to say, except to wish all my site vis­i­tors a Mer­ry Christ­mas, and a Hap­py New Year!

“It’s the Red Tomato!…Er, Tornado!”

This is anoth­er one of those things where I was look­ing at some­thing, and an idea popped into my head that I had to do in order to get it out of my brain. A fake cov­er, sort of a “What if DC gave Shel­don May­er a ded­i­cat­ed Red Tor­na­do com­ic back in the Gold­en Age?”

This hap­pened as I was re-read­ing DC’s JSA All-Stars Archives (Vol­ume 1), fea­tur­ing solo sto­ries of sec­ondary and ter­tiary char­ac­ters who showed up with the Jus­tice Soci­ety in All-Star Comics at one point or anoth­er. And part of that col­lec­tion was a batch of sto­ries fea­tur­ing Shel­don May­er’s Scrib­bly, the Boy Car­toon­ist, where the Red Tor­na­do debuted.

Ini­tial­ly, the first Red Tor­na­do char­ac­ter I encoun­tered in comics as a kid was a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter! He was an android, and had become part of the Sil­ver Age Jus­tice League. When not in his hero­ic iden­ti­ty, this Sil­ver Age ver­sion of the Red Tor­na­do was in the midst of learn­ing how to be more human (a bit like Mar­vel’s the Vision). After a lit­tle while, I learned of the pri­or exis­tence of the orig­i­nal Red Tor­na­do, a hero­ic iden­ti­ty adopt­ed by Ma Hun­kel in Shel­don May­er’s Scrib­bly the Boy Car­toon­ist install­ment for All-Amer­i­can Comics #20.

The Red Tor­na­do was played for fun and laughs, in that ear­ly era when super­heroes were still some­times called “mys­tery men.” And as mod­ern super­hero comics seem deter­mined to take them­selves ever more death­ly seri­ous, I find myself becom­ing ever more appre­cia­tive of comics that are fun. After all, I think “fun” is a big part of why most of us got into read­ing comics in the first place!

I should talk a bit about Shel­don May­er, cre­ator of the Red Tor­na­do. May­er was a rar­i­ty for the Gold­en Age: an artist, writer and edi­tor all in one. He worked briefly as an edi­tor for the McClure Syn­di­cate (for M.C. Gaines), where he came across Siegel and Shus­ter’s unsold Super­man strip, which he “fell in love with.” He talked it up so much to any­one who would lis­ten, he even­tu­al­ly con­vinced Gaines to take it up to Har­ry Donen­feld, who was look­ing for orig­i­nal strips to run in a new com­ic they were going to call Action Comics. To use a cliché phrase (one appro­pri­ate in this case), “the rest is history.”

A num­ber of Gold­en Age artists cred­it­ed May­er as being very help­ful to them as an edi­tor. Being a writer and artist, he had a per­spec­tive that oth­er edi­tors did­n’t. May­er on his own as a writer and artist did a lot of fun, cre­ative comics! I recent­ly dis­cov­ered that the Scrib­bly strip he did for All-Amer­i­can Comics (where he cre­at­ed the Red Tor­na­do) even­tu­al­ly got its own title for awhile post-WWII. Prob­a­bly his best-known and longest-run­ning title would be Sug­ar and Spike, about two babies who com­mu­ni­cat­ed in baby talk that adults were unable to under­stand. In the ear­ly ’70s, he also wrote and drew a num­ber of large for­mat Col­lec­tors’ Edi­tion comics fea­tur­ing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein­deer for DC. I kind of feel like I need to see if I can get some more of May­er’s work in my collection!

DC nev­er did a ded­i­cat­ed Red Tor­na­do title, but when I was read­ing that mate­r­i­al in the Archive Edi­tion I men­tioned up top, I came across the splash pan­el that kicked off the Scrib­bly install­ment for All-Amer­i­can Comics #23, and real­ized that it would work great as a cov­er. Hence the attri­bu­tion (though I put my own lit­tle spin on the idea).

Hope you like this, and that you’re enjoy­ing the hol­i­day season!

Funky Frankie

It’s that time of year when I have a tra­di­tion of doing some kind of Franken­stein imagery. Right after I fin­ished the one I did for last year, this one came to me in a fore­head-slap­ping “D’oh!” moment.

Unlike last year’s image, this is a real song, as some of you will know. The Edgar Win­ter Group’s “Franken­stein” is one of the coolest rock instru­men­tals of the ’70s. I’ll give you moment to check it out here, if you haven’t heard it before.

…Okay, you’re back now? “Franken­stein” was a big hit and actu­al­ly made it to #1 on the charts. My under­stand­ing is that in record­ing and fig­ur­ing out the song, the band end­ed up hav­ing to do a lot of phys­i­cal edit­ing of the song parts. Today, that’s just a mat­ter of hit­ting a but­ton or two. Back then, you had to lit­er­al­ly take a razor blade to the record­ing tape to cut it apart, then tape it back togeth­er again. With all the var­i­ous tape pieces lying around the stu­dio wait­ing to be pieced back togeth­er, the band’s drum­mer observed that the song had become “like Franken­stein.” The name stuck.

I knew what I kind of want­ed the illus­tra­tion to look like, but think­ing about col­or was anoth­er thing. Then I remem­bered that for awhile now, I’d been intrigued by the idea of try­ing some­thing with flu­o­res­cent col­ors, like a black­light poster. It struck me that this was the per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to try that out, so here you go!

Hap­py Halloween!

Getting Blitzed

Ear­li­er this year, I was post­ing a num­ber of fake comics cov­ers I’d done for Big Bang Comics’ “His­to­ry Issues” (#24 and #27) that I had new­ly col­ored. Since then, some oth­ers turned up that I did­n’t pre­vi­ous­ly have copies of the fin­ished inks for, which gave me the oppor­tu­ni­ty to final­ly col­or them too. And giv­en that they’re doing #Big­Bang­To­ber again this year, and today’s prompt is Big Bang’s speed­ster, the Blitz, it seemed a good time to post this (final­ly) col­ored ver­sion of the cov­er I drew for All-Blitz #21. It’s a twofer, in that you also get the intro­duc­tion of Speed Queen!

This orig­i­nal­ly appeared (small, in black and white) on pg. 27 of Big Bang Comics #27, AKA “The Big Bang His­to­ry of Comics 2.” The pen­cils, let­ter­ing (and now col­or­ing) are mine. Because of how the con­trib­u­tors were list­ed (and how many years lat­er this is), I’m not entire­ly sure who inked this. Per­haps it was Ed Quin­by? I know he inked one or two oth­er fake cov­ers I did for this project.

As I think I men­tioned before, to do these His­to­ry issues, Gary Carl­son need­ed a WHOLE bunch of cov­ers gen­er­at­ed, so all of us artists had a lot of lat­i­tude to cre­ate stuff. On this one, I was think­ing of how much fun some of those old com­ic cov­ers were when they debuted a new super­heroine, and the name “Speed Queen” popped into my head for a char­ac­ter. Seemed like some­thing they would’ve done back then.

I had also pen­ciled a cou­ple oth­er Gold­en Age Blitz cov­ers, and if good copies of the fin­ished inks for those ever turn up, I’ll prob­a­bly col­or them too. For now: hope you enjoyed this one!

…And an Encore!

Well, we just com­plet­ed anoth­er Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month (curat­ed and cre­at­ed by Howard Simp­son). I guess you could call this the bonus round. Like last year, I decid­ed to try to assem­ble all of these into one, big image. With the excep­tion of yes­ter­day’s “wild card” round, which was not a Jack Kir­by cre­ation, so it does­n’t belong here. Plus 30 images just group togeth­er a lot eas­i­er than 31!

See­ing all of these togeth­er, I’m struck by how busy the end result is! There’s a lot going on. I guess that’s a result of my try­ing to give each pan­el a sense of nar­ra­tive, as if they were each ran­dom­ly plucked from the midst of larg­er stories.

A lot­ta work there! See­ing them all togeth­er makes me real­ize that. But it’s cool see­ing them all in this context.

Will I do this again next year? We’ll see. I may tweak my process a lit­tle bit. I did this year, by adding the nar­ra­tive aspect.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip with me, found it fun and inspirational.

Knights That Do Justice‑y Type Things

Well, we’ve made it to the 31st here, the final day of Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month (the brain­child of Howard Simp­son). And the prompt for the final day of the month, like last year, is a bit of a wild card. As Howard put it last year, “Draw your own orig­i­nal char­ac­ter. The King would want you to cre­ate char­ac­ters you own.”

I dug pret­ty deep for this one. Pre­sent­ing a super­hero group I co-cre­at­ed with my broth­er Andy when we were kids: the Knights of Jus­tice! From left to right you have Mol­e­cule Man, Sledge­ham­mer, Boomerang King, the Wiz­ard (descend­ing from above), and final­ly… er, sor­ry; I don’t remem­ber the pur­ple guy’s name any­more! I could only come up with a vague rec­ol­lec­tion that he was the speed­ster of the group. My broth­er does­n’t remem­ber either.

I drew the orig­i­nal draw­ing when I was around 15, I fig­ure. And I admit to cring­ing a lit­tle bit at the draw­ing (those lol­lipop calves!) and some of those cos­tume designs. All I can say in my defense is it was the ’70s, and I guess I was influ­enced a bit too much by some of the trendi­er super­hero cos­tumes of the time. And why so many full face masks? Though I do think the Wiz­ard design is actu­al­ly kind of cool still, even all these years lat­er. Kind of brave to just go full black and white like that.

And that’s an offi­cial wrap for Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month this year, but I have one more thing I want to post tomor­row. Oh, and for what it’s worth, the Knight of Jus­tice are ™ & © Andy and Mark Lewis.

It’s “Harriet,” not “Hatter”

We’ve made it to day 30 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month! I was­n’t sure I would make it this far, but here we go. It’s still Granny Good­ness’ Orphan­age week, fea­tur­ing char­ac­ters who grew up in that insti­tu­tion on Apokolips. And today’s prompt is Mad Har­ri­et of the Female Furies!

Like all the Furies, her first appear­ance was in Mis­ter Mir­a­cle #6 (the infa­mous “Funky Flash­man” sto­ry). And she shows evi­dence there of liv­ing up to her name!

She’s a chal­lenge to draw, because while visu­al­ly mem­o­rable, once you get beyond her face and hair, her metal­lic clawed gaunt­let and pow­er spikes, it was like the remain­der of her out­fit did­n’t seem to be quite ful­ly nailed down. Fig­ur­ing out what the rest of her looks like was a chal­lenge, so I took what cues I could from var­i­ous pan­els scat­tered across sev­er­al stories.

I was also unsure what col­or to make her lips, as the col­orist back then kind of did­n’t both­er to give them a col­or. But going with kind of a blue-black for the high­lights seemed fit­ting to me.

One more day left in this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month! What’s up next? You’ll have to come back tomor­row to see!