Tag Archives: Manhunter

…And an Encore!

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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.

He Always Gets His Man…or at Least He Did that One Time

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This is day two of the online sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, cre­at­ed by artist Howard Simp­son. Like last year, I intend to try to par­tic­i­pate in the fun, and see if I can’t hit each day’s prompt.

As men­tioned yes­ter­day this (short) week’s theme is the three issues of DC’s 1st Issue Spe­cial that fea­tured cre­ations by Jack. Today’s prompt is the ver­sion of Man­hunter that appeared in 1st Issue Spe­cial #5.

This is a dif­fer­ent take on Man­hunter from what Jack and his part­ner Joe Simon had done back in the Gold­en Age, and was also dis­tinct from the crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed ver­sion Archie Good­win and Walt Simon­son had done a cou­ple years ear­li­er as a reg­u­lar back­up strip in Detec­tive Comics. I don’t want to spoil any­thing for those who haven’t yet had a chance to read Jack­’s ver­sion here by say­ing too much, even this many years removed. But I found this take to have sort of a clas­sic, pulpy inspi­ra­tion that I enjoyed. If this had gone on to a series, I would’ve been along for the ride, to see where Jack would’ve tak­en it.

Like I men­tioned yes­ter­day, though I nev­er saw this title on the spin­ner rack when it orig­i­nal­ly came out, I found it not too expen­sive when I went look­ing for it sev­er­al years later.

I’d nev­er tried to draw this ver­sion of Man­hunter, so it was fun to do that. I did­n’t men­tion this yes­ter­day, but some­thing I’m try­ing to do with all of these this time out is to cre­ate some sense of nar­ra­tive, the feel­ing that each of these might be a moment from the midst of a sto­ry. I did some of that last year, but I want to try to con­scious­ly do more of it this year.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s!

On the Hunt

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It’s now Day 7 of Howard Simp­son’s month-long online Kir­by Cel­e­bra­tion! It’s open to all cre­atives. You should be able to find the work on your favorite social media plat­forms by the hash­tag #Kir­b­yArt­Tribute.

Today’s prompt is comics’ orig­i­nal Man­hunter! Cre­at­ed by Joe Simon and Jack Kir­by for DC Comics back in the Gold­en Age. Though DC had Paul Kirk as a non-cos­tumed char­ac­ter pre­vi­ous­ly, Simon and Kir­by rein­vent­ed him as a super­hero. They had the char­ac­ter put his pre­vi­ous skills as a game hunter to work now hunt­ing crim­i­nals (many of which were cre­ative­ly ani­mal-themed). Start­ing in Adven­ture Comics #73 in 1942, S&K did a total of eight install­ments. It was pop­u­lar enough that it con­tin­ued beyond that in oth­er hands for quite awhile, but it was­n’t the same.

Kir­by took a shot at a revived ver­sion of Man­hunter when he returned to DC in the ear­ly ’70s, in a First Issue Spe­cial (Kir­by did a few of those, debut­ing new con­cepts that unfor­tu­nate­ly did­n’t go any further).

DC appar­ent­ly liked the Man­hunter name, because peri­od­i­cal­ly they dust­ed it off and did oth­er things with it. One of the more notable of them tied into Simon and Kir­by’s Paul Kirk Man­hunter: a strip cre­at­ed by Archie Good­win and Walt Simon­son (his first work that put him on the map with most fans). It ran as a back­up sto­ry in Detec­tive Comics, which Good­win was edit­ing at the time. Well worth check­ing out, it’s been col­lect­ed a num­ber of times if you haven’t seen it.

But this is about the S&K Gold­en Age orig­i­nal! Hope you enjoy it. Stay tuned!