It’s now Day 23 of Howard Simpson’s month-long Jack Kirby Tribute. Any creatives are free to play along, and you can find their posts on your favorite social media platforms with the hashtag #KirbyArtTributes.
Today’s prompt is “Draw a character or scene from Jack Kirby’s Sandman series. (Garrett Sanford).” That last part threw me slightly. So far as I knew, the character never had a name. But I discovered it was something added by others later on.
Once I got past my slight confusion over the other name, I knew which Sandman was being talked about. Jack and Joe Simon had done their take on Sandman for DC earlier, in the Golden Age (I drew him earlier here). Late in Jack’s time at DC in the ’70s, the concept was revisited and reinvented from the ground up. The script for the first issue was by Joe Simon, which (unless I’m mistaken) was the first time Joe and Jack had been teamed together on a comic since they dissolved their partnership back in the ’50s.
This book is a bit of an odd one. It had no connection to any of the other titles Jack was doing for DC then, and was tonally different from all of them, seeming to skew more towards younger readers. Though that first issue managed some creepy scenes with the Werblink dolls.
I recall reading Carmine Infantino saying that Sandman sold really well for DC. I guess they were caught off-guard, because there’s a gap of a year between issue #1 and #2! And while Kirby did all the covers, he wasn’t back doing the interiors until issue #4. They only got six issues out total. Issue #6 had Wally Wood inking!
Anyway, in addition to Sandman himself, I drew his sidekicks Brute and Glob. I kind of wavered on the silliness of having Glob give him rabbit ears, but felt ultimately like it would be right for that book and these characters, tonally.
Hope you like it, and please feel free to tune back in tomorrow!