Tag: Galactus

Art Vs. Artist Again

It’s appar­ent­ly that time of year, when artists look back and post a sam­pling of the work they’ve done the pre­vi­ous year in this for­mat on social media. I’ve been see­ing some of these pop­ping up on LinkedIn the last few weeks or so, with the #ArtVsArtist hash­tag. Look­ing back, it’s been awhile since I did one (2020!), so I thought maybe I’d do it again, join in on the fun.

Any reg­u­lar vis­i­tors here will prob­a­bly rec­og­nize sev­er­al of these from posts I’ve made this year. I debat­ed using a more cur­rent image of myself in the cen­ter, but ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to stick with the same one I used last time. It’s a 12-year-old me, and if you saw the whole pho­to, you’d see I was attempt­ing to do a paint­ing (in oils, no less!) of the USS Enter­prise from Star Trek (the Orig­i­nal series, of course). We all have to start some­where (though the truth is I had been draw­ing for years even before this).

Any­way, thanks for stop­ping by, and a Hap­py New Year to you!

“Where’d You Get That Cool Helmet From?”

As you know, it’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025 (curat­ed by Howard Simp­son), and the theme is the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. We’ve moved into the rogues’ gallery, and today is the biggest of them all (lit­er­al­ly): Galactus!

Galac­tus as a char­ac­ter was like noth­ing no one had ever seen before in a super­hero com­ic when he showed up in Fan­tas­tic Four #48 (part one of what would come to be known as the clas­sic “Galac­tus Trilogy”).

He comes to Earth to con­sume our world and the ener­gy it con­tains, with no thought to any of the liv­ing beings on our plan­et. When the FF try to stop him, they quick­ly real­ize that they might as well be insects! Seem­ing­ly there is noth­ing they can do. In fact, if not for the Watch­er step­ping in to give them some assis­tance, the Earth would have met its end!

You might look at my depic­tion of Galac­tus here and feel like some­thing is a lit­tle odd com­pared to what you’re used to. That’s because (as I men­tioned in an ear­li­er post) I’ve set myself a rule to stick to how these char­ac­ters were depict­ed dur­ing Jack and Stan’s FF run. And in this case, I felt like stick­ing with Galac­tus’ por­tray­al in his first appear­ance, “The Galac­tus Trilogy.”

They were still fig­ur­ing out the Big G’s col­or scheme dur­ing the Tril­o­gy. Each issue, it’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. In fact, in the first issue (#48), he was red and dark green! It was­n’t until #50 when they got some­thing fair­ly close to what would become his stan­dard col­or scheme (though they weren’t yet using the blue-vio­let). For com­par­i­son, you can see my depic­tion of Galac­tus done for the first Kir­by Trib­ute Month here.

Hope you enjoyed this, and feel free to tune in again tomor­row to see which vil­lain comes up next!

Larger Than Life

It’s now Day 10 of Howard Simp­son’s month-long cel­e­bra­tion of Jack Kir­by! Open to all cre­atives, you should be able to find the work being gen­er­at­ed on your favorite social media plat­forms by the hash­tag #Kir­b­yArt­Trib­ut­es.

Today’s prompt is Galac­tus. He first appeared in the pages of Fan­tas­tic Four, in prob­a­bly one of the best-loved and remem­bered sto­ries of that book, known by most fans as the Galac­tus trilogy.

The Fan­tas­tic Four car­ried the tag “The World’s Great­est Com­ic Mag­a­zine” on its cov­ers. While it was most­ly Stan Lee play­ful­ly doing pro­mo­tion­al hype, more often than not dur­ing the book’s ini­tial run  by Kir­by and Lee, it was truth in adver­tis­ing. Galac­tus as a char­ac­ter was some­thing very dif­fer­ent. I don’t think any­thing like him had ever been seen before in a super­hero com­ic. Not just a street thug or a reg­u­lar human guy in a super suit, he was more a force of nature, vir­tu­al­ly god­like. He pre­sent­ed a real chal­lenge to the sto­ry­tellers. How can you defeat an antag­o­nist like that?

Sur­pris­ing­ly, I real­ized this is the first time I’ve ever attempt­ed to draw Galac­tus! I’m not gonna lie; it was a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing to tack­le him. His visu­al, while there are cer­tain con­sis­ten­cies, also fluc­tu­ates a great deal from com­ic to com­ic. Even his col­or­ing seems to change over his appearances!

Any­way, I felt like he came out okay, to my relief. Hope you enjoy it, and hope­ful­ly you might stop in here again tomorrow!