Tag: Mad Harriet

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.

Don’t Let Her Sink Her Claws in You!

Here on Day 20 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, today’s prompt is Mad Har­ri­et of the Female Furies. Like all the Furies (except Big Bar­da), she first appeared in Mis­ter Mir­a­cle #6. I drew her for a pre­vi­ous Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month here.

A thing I’ve real­ized over the course of doing these Jack Kir­by Trib­utes is that Jack would some­times take what could be termed an “impres­sion­is­tic” approach to his cos­tume designs. While they would look con­sis­tent to read­ers, often the details could shift from issue to issue, and some­times even pan­el to pan­el! The aver­age read­er would­n’t notice this or be both­ered by it, but you only start to see it when you have to ana­lyze these designs to draw them for yourself.

Mad Har­ri­et is par­tic­u­lar­ly tricky. Once you get beyond her face and hair, things fluc­tu­ate and change quite a bit. Adding to this is the fact that the col­orist (or col­orists, for all I know) would change things around too! So you have to make a num­ber of deci­sions when draw­ing her.

Any­way, that’s Har­ri­et! Hope you enjoyed this take. Who’s next? swing by tomor­row to see!

…And an Encore!

Well, we just com­plet­ed anoth­er Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month (curat­ed and cre­at­ed by Howard Simp­son). I guess you could call this the bonus round. Like last year, I decid­ed to try to assem­ble all of these into one, big image. With the excep­tion of yes­ter­day’s “wild card” round, which was not a Jack Kir­by cre­ation, so it does­n’t belong here. Plus 30 images just group togeth­er a lot eas­i­er than 31!

See­ing all of these togeth­er, I’m struck by how busy the end result is! There’s a lot going on. I guess that’s a result of my try­ing to give each pan­el a sense of nar­ra­tive, as if they were each ran­dom­ly plucked from the midst of larg­er stories.

A lot­ta work there! See­ing them all togeth­er makes me real­ize that. But it’s cool see­ing them all in this context.

Will I do this again next year? We’ll see. I may tweak my process a lit­tle bit. I did this year, by adding the nar­ra­tive aspect.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip with me, found it fun and inspirational.

It’s “Harriet,” not “Hatter”

We’ve made it to day 30 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month! I was­n’t sure I would make it this far, but here we go. It’s still Granny Good­ness’ Orphan­age week, fea­tur­ing char­ac­ters who grew up in that insti­tu­tion on Apokolips. And today’s prompt is Mad Har­ri­et of the Female Furies!

Like all the Furies, her first appear­ance was in Mis­ter Mir­a­cle #6 (the infa­mous “Funky Flash­man” sto­ry). And she shows evi­dence there of liv­ing up to her name!

She’s a chal­lenge to draw, because while visu­al­ly mem­o­rable, once you get beyond her face and hair, her metal­lic clawed gaunt­let and pow­er spikes, it was like the remain­der of her out­fit did­n’t seem to be quite ful­ly nailed down. Fig­ur­ing out what the rest of her looks like was a chal­lenge, so I took what cues I could from var­i­ous pan­els scat­tered across sev­er­al stories.

I was also unsure what col­or to make her lips, as the col­orist back then kind of did­n’t both­er to give them a col­or. But going with kind of a blue-black for the high­lights seemed fit­ting to me.

One more day left in this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month! What’s up next? You’ll have to come back tomor­row to see!