Tag Archives: Big Barda

…And an Encore!

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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.

No, Not Barbara!

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Still doing Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, we’re in the midst of Granny Good­ness’ Orphan­age Week, fea­tur­ing char­ac­ters who grew up in that insti­tu­tion on Apokolips. Today’s prompt is the one and only Big Bar­da, erst­while com­man­der of the Female Furies!

There’s some­thing real­ly neat about her bat­tle armor that makes it a fun chal­lenge to wrap your head around and try to draw it. I took a shot at it last year too.

Appar­ent­ly at one point, Jack had want­ed to star Bar­da and the oth­er Furies in their own book, but I gath­er by that point, DC felt sales on the Fourth World books weren’t enough to jus­ti­fy doing it, sadly.

Hope you like my take on Bar­da here, and please feel free to come back by here tomor­row to see who’s next from the Orphanage!

Just Don’t Get on Her Bad Side!

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It’s now Day 17 of Howard SImp­son’s month-long trib­ute to Jack Kir­by! Can you believe it? If you’d like to see what oth­ers are post­ing in order to par­tic­i­pate, you can find that work on your favorite social media plat­forms by the hash­tag #Kir­b­yArt­Trib­ut­es.

Today’s prompt is Big Bar­da. Part of Kir­by’s Fourth World saga at DC, she was a key sup­port­ing char­ac­ter in Mis­ter Mir­a­cle, first appear­ing in issue #4. Raised on Apokolips to be part of a group of war­riors called the Female Furies, she lat­er met Scott Free (Mis­ter Mir­a­cle) and fell in love with him. Even­tu­al­ly, she fol­lowed Scott to Earth.

Bar­da’s bat­tle armor is one of those Kir­by cos­tumes with a lot of detail. It’s con­sis­tent in the broad strokes, but has a ten­den­cy to morph a bit from page to page or pan­el to pan­el as far as the spe­cif­ic details go. I like how it looks, and thought a straight-ahead pre­sen­ta­tion from the front would be the best way to show it.

Hope you like it, and please come back again tomorrow.