Tag Archives: Dingbats of Danger Street

…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.

Buncha Dingbats!

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We’re at day three of the sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, cre­at­ed by Howard Simp­son! The week’s theme (at least for the three days that fall into August) has been char­ac­ters cre­at­ed by Jack who appeared in DC’s 1st Issue Spe­cial. Today’s prompt is the Ding­bats of Dan­ger Street! From left to right up top are Good Looks, Krunch, and Bananas. At low­er right is Non-Fat.

As men­tioned pre­vi­ous­ly, I nev­er saw any copies of 1st Issue Spe­cial on the spin­ner rack when it was first pub­lished, but lay­ing hands on copies years lat­er did­n’t prove to be too cost­ly. Appear­ing in 1st Issue Spe­cial #6, the Ding­bats is kind of a quirky strip. You get to see Jack­’s sense of humor, but there’s also a bit of an edge to it too, the sense things are dangerous.

Jack and Joe Simon were the pio­neers of the “kid gang” genre in the Gold­en Age, find­ing fun and dra­ma in pulling togeth­er dis­parate per­son­al­i­ties who might rub each oth­er the wrong way on occa­sion, but ulti­mate­ly had each oth­er’s backs. They came up with the Young Allies, Boy Com­man­dos, the News­boy Legion, the Boy Explor­ers, and Boys’ Ranch (maybe oth­ers that I’m not think­ing of at the moment). So this was Jack­’s lat­er attempt at anoth­er group in that vein. Maybe there’s a bit of the Bow­ery Boys in there, or maybe it’s just Jack­’s own expe­ri­ence of grow­ing up in a tough neighborhood.

Though DC only pub­lished the one sto­ry, there were at least two more issues of Ding­bats Jack drew, which were ulti­mate­ly “writ­ten off.” If you want to see those (in col­or, no less!), I high­ly rec­om­mend get­ting your­self a copy of TwoM­or­rows’ Ding­bat Love, which final­ly brings to light a lot of mate­r­i­al Jack did for DC in those days that pre­vi­ous­ly nev­er got to see the light of day.

If you’ve seen the one pub­lished issue, you might at first think, “He col­ored Non-Fat wrong!” Nope! DC got it wrong in the orig­i­nal com­ic! Jack intend­ed that Non-Fat be African-Amer­i­can. There’s even a draw­ing he did of the cast where there are brief descrip­tive notes for each char­ac­ter, and next to Non-Fat, Jack wrote, “Non-Fat is an eager beaver Black kid.” Appar­ent­ly the col­orist who han­dled that issue of 1st Issue Spe­cial did­n’t get that memo!

Like with the oth­er 1st Issue Spe­cial char­ac­ters, this is the first time I ever tried to draw these guys. Hope you enjoy! Stay tuned for tomor­row, and a new theme!