Tag Archives: Odin

…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.

Big Daddio

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We’ve made it to day 20 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month (cre­at­ed by Howard Simp­son). The theme has been Asgard this week: char­ac­ters who appeared dur­ing Jack Kir­by’s run on Jour­ney into Mystery/Thor. And today’s prompt is none oth­er than Odin!

Fans will know that Odin is the ruler of all Asgard, and Thor’s father. If you’ve read a lot of the Lee/Kirby sto­ries, you’re aware that their rela­tion­ship is com­pli­cat­ed, to say the least.

An inter­est­ing aspect to Odin is that visu­al­ly, apart from hav­ing a sol­id frame and the white hair and beard, he has no fixed look! Pret­ty much every time you see him, his attire is dif­fer­ent. And more often than not, it’s quite ornate! In comics, this is very unusu­al. But appar­ent­ly Jack liked the chal­lenge of com­ing up with some­thing dif­fer­ent for Odin each time you saw him. It was­n’t just from issue to issue; some­times his appar­el would change from scene to scene in the same story!

As a result, what I’ve drawn here is inspired by, but not based off of, any one spe­cif­ic out­fit worn by Odin. I pulled my col­or cues from how he was col­ored too (crazy things some­times like the green shad­ows on the blue gloves!). I don’t know that Jack ever hid a face any­where in his designs, but that felt right to me to do that (as kind of a tip of the hat to Walt Simon­son and his Thor run, sec­ond best only to the orig­i­nal. Simon­son would do things like that).

Hope you like my take on Odin, and tune in tomor­row for our next vis­i­tor from Asgard!