We’re at Day Eight of the sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, cre­at­ed by Howard Simp­son to hon­or the King in his birth month. A new ele­ment this year is each week hav­ing a theme, this week’s being the Fan­tas­tic Four. If you’ve been fol­low­ing along the pre­vi­ous days, you might be able to guess today’s prompt: Mr. Fantastic.

Reed Richards as Mr. Fan­tas­tic is the bril­liant scientist/inventor and leader of the FF. A fun aspect of the orig­i­nal Jack and Stan run on Fan­tas­tic Four were those scenes where Reed was inten­sive­ly work­ing in his lab over some wild Kir­by-designed piece of equip­ment. I kind of had that in mind when doing this drawing.

If you’ve seen the orig­i­nal run by Jack and Stan, you might rec­og­nize that the way Jack drew Reed kind of mor­phed over the time he was doing the book. Mr. Fan­tas­tic start­ed off a bit thin­ner in the face ini­tial­ly, but got a lit­tle more “robust” lat­er on. I ref­er­enced how Reed looked dur­ing the mid­dle issues of the run here, which many con­sid­er to be the prime peri­od for the book.

The week’s theme is not over! Hav­ing cov­ered the FF them­selves, tune in tomor­row to see who’s up next.

We’ve reached the sev­enth day of the sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, cre­at­ed by Howard Simp­son. A cool new aspect he’s intro­duced is themed weeks, where each day’s prompts fit with­in that theme.

If you’ve been fol­low­ing along, this week’s theme is the Fan­tas­tic Four. Today’s prompt is the Thing.

Ben Grimm as the Thing is a char­ac­ter who might appear fair­ly sim­ple and straight­for­ward on the sur­face, but if you’ve read the orig­i­nal run by Jack and Stan, you real­ize there’s more to him than meets the eye. He can be fun­ny, but there’s also under­ly­ing pain and regret, being stuck in this mon­strous form. Lat­er cre­ators have some­times lost that aspect, focus­ing more on the comedic elements.

The Thing is not an easy char­ac­ter to draw! I had a bit of a strug­gle here before I felt like I had it rea­son­ably correct.

Hope you approve. Tune in tomor­row to see who’s next!

It’s Day Six of the sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, we’re in the midst of Fan­tas­tic Four week, and today’s prompt is the Human Torch.

In his ini­tial appear­ances, he was per­haps a bit too form­less. Jack quick­ly fig­ured this out, and cod­i­fied what we now think of as his clas­sic look. From time to time, some sub­se­quent artists have tried to get cre­ative and find oth­er ways to draw him, but some­how he does­n’t look like him­self when you get too far removed from the tem­plate Jack set.

As men­tioned ear­li­er, I’m try­ing to get some sense of nar­ra­tive into these shots. Where exact­ly is he? Some­place unusu­al, no doubt. Feels like a sto­ry there.

Hope you like what I’ve done here. Tune in tomor­row if you’d like to see who’s up next!

By now you know I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in the sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, cre­at­ed by Howard Simp­son to mark the month of Jack­’s birth (he would turn 107 lat­er this month if he were still with us).

The new thing Howard’s intro­duced this year is weeks that have an over­all theme to each day’s prompts, and this week’s theme is the Fan­tas­tic Four. I did a group shot yes­ter­day, and today’s prompt (the first of the indi­vid­ual shots) is the Invis­i­ble Woman.

At first, her only pow­er was to turn invis­i­ble. But I think Jack and Stan real­ized pret­ty quick­ly that this did­n’t quite give her enough to ful­ly hold her own with the rest of the group. So they had her devel­op an addi­tion­al pow­er: the abil­i­ty to cre­ate force fields. That did the trick.

Sue Storm was orig­i­nal­ly known as the Invis­i­ble Girl, and it was­n’t until John Byrne’s run on Fan­tas­tic Four in the ’80s (sec­ond best in my opin­ion only to Jack and Stan’s orig­i­nal run!) that she was re-chris­tened the Invis­i­ble Woman. Byrne came up with some of the most cre­ative uses for her pow­ers that had ever been seen, and man­aged to show once and for all that she was a force to be reck­oned with!

Hope you like, and feel free to come back tomor­row to see who’s up next!

Here’s Day Four of the sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, and begin­ning the first full week of August means we also have a new theme this week: the Fan­tas­tic Four. And the first prompt is…the Fan­tas­tic Four?!

Since we also have sep­a­rate prompts for each indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter com­ing up, I thought I might do a “before and after” thing, today being the “before” part of the equa­tion. This was a moment with a lot of dra­ma in their ori­gin sto­ry, so I went with it. I always thought it was cool how Jack chose to ren­der the cos­mic rays as these sort of “lozenge” shapes. Kind of not all that threat­en­ing in them­selves indi­v­d­u­al­ly, but fear­ful because they’re an unknown, and there are so many of them!

I ful­ly admit to appro­pri­at­ing the col­or scheme used in the orig­i­nal ver­sion, because why not? I thought it looked great, and it also kind of reminds me of the almost “pop art” col­or­ing approach used in Alex Ross’ Fan­tas­tic Four: Full Cir­cle (which in my opin­ion is the best ver­sion of these char­ac­ters that I’ve seen in years!).

A note about the FF: while pret­ty much any Mar­vel book Jack had a hand in is worth a look, there are two absolute­ly essen­tial titles he did at Mar­vel that I feel are the tent­posts of his work there, which have to be tak­en into account when apprais­ing that body of work. In them, you see not just an artist and sto­ry­teller work­ing at the height of his craft, but you also get to see some­thing of the man him­self and his inter­ests. Fan­tas­tic Four is one of those books. In it, you get to see Jack­’s fas­ci­na­tion with sci fi, the unknown, and with what might be out there. It’s a theme that runs through much of his work, and we got to see a bit of it pre­vi­ous­ly in Chal­lengers of the Unknown at DC.

I did say two titles, so I’m not going to hold you in sus­pense wait­ing days to hear the sec­ond one. It’s Jour­ney into Mystery/Thor. That’s where you see Jack­’s ongo­ing fas­ci­na­tion with myths and leg­ends, which runs through­out his career.

So who’s first up when we move to the indi­vid­ual mem­bers tomor­row? I’m not going to spoil that. You’ll just have to check in and see!