Tag: Jane Foster

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, Nurse?”

On Day Five of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, the prompt is Jane Foster.

I’ve drawn oth­er char­ac­ters from Jour­ney into Mystery/Thor for pre­vi­ous Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Months, but this is the first time I had a prompt to draw Jane Fos­ter. She was a key char­ac­ter from the ear­li­est days of the strip in Jour­ney into Mys­tery, work­ing as Dr. Don Blake’s nurse. Oh, and Thor fell in love with her.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this did not make Odin a hap­py pap­py. It cre­at­ed lots of sto­ry fod­der for a long while, Odin get­ting angry with Thor and pun­ish­ing him in var­i­ous ways over time because he refused to stop lov­ing Jane. It’s kind of a soap opera device, but it played well for a long time. It was just the kind of sto­ry device Stan Lee loved to work with.

Even­tu­al­ly though, I think they real­ized that they had played that ele­ment out for as long as they pos­si­bly could, and it was time to move on. That’s when Thor #136 came about. Odin final­ly gives in, brings Jane Fos­ter to Asgard and gives her god­like pow­ers, so she and Thor can be togeth­er. But things don’t work out the way Thor would’ve hoped.

In pick­ing a moment to illus­trate Jane Fos­ter, I decid­ed I want­ed to show her in the cos­tume she was giv­en for this sto­ry. Plus it’s just a real­ly good, piv­otal sto­ry, where they resolve that long-run­ning plot thread.

Though a ver­sion of Sif had pre­vi­ous­ly appeared in a “Tales of Asgard” back­up in Jour­ney into Mys­tery #102, Thor #136 was Sif’s first appear­ance in the main tales. Her visu­al had been reworked into some­thing clos­er to what most read­ers rec­og­nize as Mar­vel’s Sif.

Any­way, this was Jane Fos­ter, at a piv­otal moment in her sto­ry­line. Who’s up tomor­row? Tune in and see!