Tag: Avengers

Kirby Kurtain Kall

Though August is over and it’s now Sept. 1st, I have an estab­lished tra­di­tion of tak­ing all my Kir­by Trib­ute Month images and putting them togeth­er into one big poster image. This year is no different.

Though I drew them all and know each image well by this point, I get a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive when I com­bine them after the fact like this, apprais­ing the work I did from an over­all view.

This is now the fourth year that I’ve done Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, and it’s inter­est­ing to see how much more detailed and involved these small illus­tra­tions have become each year. That’s noth­ing to do with the prompts them­selves (though those can cre­ate their own chal­lenges). It’s more to do with feel­ing the need to move beyond just straight por­traits, to come up with some­thing that feels like there’s a sto­ry to it.

That’s about all there is to say. I always learn some­thing when I do these, so hope­ful­ly you’ve enjoyed this year’s journey.

A Study of the Scarlet Witch

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.

“What’s This Buzzing around Me?”

This is now day 11 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, curat­ed by Howard Simp­son. The prompt for today is Janet van Dyne, AKA the Wasp!

She first showed up Tales to Aston­ish #44, as part of the Ant-Man strip. Hen­ry Pym sets her up with the same shrink­ing pow­ers and the like that he had been using as Ant-Man. Pym’s first appear­ance in Tales to Aston­ish #27 was more like a holdover from the ear­li­er mon­ster sto­ries Marvel/Atlas had been doing in the ’50s. But in issue #35, they brought him back, appar­ent­ly think­ing it was time to turn him into a superhero.

A lit­tle while after Janet van Dyne part­ners up with him as the Wasp, Pym dis­cov­ers he can use his tech not just to shrink, but to also go the oth­er direc­tion and become large. He renames him­self Giant Man in Tales to Aston­ish #49.

Since the Wasp and Giant Man were around from very ear­ly days, when the time came for Mar­vel to team up their char­ac­ters as The Avengers (more or less Mar­vel’s equiv­a­lent of the Jus­tice League), they were in on that team from the start. In fact, the Wasp is the one who comes up with the new team’s name!

Janet van Dyne as a char­ac­ter was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from most of the Mar­vel women of that peri­od. She had a bit of a play­ful­ness and a sense of fun to her that most of them did­n’t usu­al­ly dis­play. Which prob­a­bly also served to light­en up Hank Pym a lit­tle bit.

You get a twofer here. I want­ed to show a reduced-size Wasp in flight, and thought it might also be fun to show a bit of Giant Man in the back­ground, since they’re a team.

It should be said that while this is her orig­i­nal out­fit, she became known over the years for chang­ing her cos­tume often, out of a sense of style and fash­ion. Though if I’m not mis­tak­en, this was the only uni­form Kir­by ever drew her in.

That’s my take on the Wasp! I hope you enjoyed it, and that you’re inter­est­ed enough to swing by tomor­row to see who’s next!