Tag: Dr. Doom

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!

…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.

You’re All Doomed!

Today makes Day Nine of the sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, cre­at­ed by Howard Simp­son to hon­or the cre­ative genius of Jack Kir­by dur­ing his birth month. We’re in the first full week of the month, and the theme for this week is the Fan­tas­tic Four. Today’s prompt is Dr. Doom.

Vic­tor Von Doom views him­self as being above oth­er men. And yet (though he’d deny it), he’s clear­ly threat­ened by Reed Richards’ genius. He’s a bit more com­plex of a char­ac­ter than your aver­age supervil­lain. Kir­by has been quot­ed as say­ing he was inspired in part by The Man in the Iron Mask, and was try­ing to make him “the clas­sic con­cep­tion of Death,” with­out a hint of mer­cy, by mask­ing him in cold, unmer­ci­ful steel. He viewed Doom as being para­noid, and Doom’s per­fec­tion­ism was what ulti­mate­ly tripped him up and bent his mind.

Dr. Doom’s mask is kind of tricky to draw! It sort of morphs a bit between pan­els and appear­ances, so hope­ful­ly I’ve done it jus­tice here.

Tune in tomor­row for the finale of Fan­tas­tic Four week!