Kirby Kurtain Kall

Though August is over and it’s now Sept. 1st, I have an estab­lished tra­di­tion of tak­ing all my Kir­by Trib­ute Month images and putting them togeth­er into one big poster image. This year is no different.

Though I drew them all and know each image well by this point, I get a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive when I com­bine them after the fact like this, apprais­ing the work I did from an over­all view.

This is now the fourth year that I’ve done Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, and it’s inter­est­ing to see how much more detailed and involved these small illus­tra­tions have become each year. That’s noth­ing to do with the prompts them­selves (though those can cre­ate their own chal­lenges). It’s more to do with feel­ing the need to move beyond just straight por­traits, to come up with some­thing that feels like there’s a sto­ry to it.

That’s about all there is to say. I always learn some­thing when I do these, so hope­ful­ly you’ve enjoyed this year’s journey.

Oh My Goodness!

We’ve now reached Day 23 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, and today’s prompt is Granny Goodness.

Granny first appeared in Mis­ter Mir­a­cle #2. She runs the Orphan­age on Apokolips; the twist­ed, iron insti­tu­tion where the young were pro­gres­sive­ly beat­en down (men­tal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly) to shape them into troop­ers who always sought Granny’s “love” and were more than will­ing to sac­ri­fice them­selves for Dark­seid. The walls of the Orphan­age were cov­ered with 1984-esque slo­gans like “You’re not a liar–if you lie for Darkseid!”

Dur­ing Jack­’s Mis­ter Mir­a­cle run, we got occa­sion­al flash­back glimpses of the bru­tal for­ma­tive expe­ri­ences the young Scott Free expe­ri­enced on Apokolips in Granny’s Orphan­age. Those events went a long way towards build­ing his need to escape, to find a bet­ter world.

Inter­est­ing­ly, when Warn­er Bros decid­ed to intro­duce Granny Good­ness in Super­man: The Ani­mat­ed Series, they chose to cast Ed Asner as her voice. You’d think that would be a strange choice, but some­how it worked!

That’s Granny. You’ll have to come back again tomor­row to see who’s up next, if you’re curious.