Tag: Princess Zanda

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.

Make Way for the Princess!

Here’s Day 26 now of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. Today’s prompt is Princess Zan­da, from Jack­’s Black Pan­ther run.

I snuck her in as part of a pre­vi­ous piece for Jack Kir­by Month here. When Jack returned to Mar­vel in the mid-’70s, the land­scape there had changed quite a bit while he was away. And Jack now pre­ferred to have his own lit­tle cor­ner sort of away from every­one else, where he wrote and drew his own books, not hav­ing to track the con­ti­nu­ity of what was going on with the rest of the Mar­vel universe.

Fan recep­tion to these books at the time was kind of mixed. When it was announced that Jack was going to do a new run of Black Pan­ther sto­ries, many fans expect­ed that he would tie in to what had been done by oth­er cre­ators pre­vi­ous­ly. But they did­n’t get that. Jack had his own take on Black Pan­ther, seem­ing­ly more informed by the sort of sto­ries writ­ten by H. Rid­er Hag­gard (like King Solomon’s Mines and She). Dis­ap­point­ing maybe to those who had pri­or expec­ta­tions, but inter­est­ing to those who were will­ing to accept Jack­’s new take on its own terms.

Princess Zan­da was one of the new cast of char­ac­ters Jack came up with for this book. She was part of a group called the Col­lec­tors, who sought out rare, arcane arche­o­log­i­cal items. Often these items would grant rare pow­ers and abil­i­ties. And some­times Black Pan­ther end­ed up in the way of some of the Col­lec­tors in their search­es. When he would get in Zan­da’s way, she could be dangerous.

Here, she’s seen hold­ing King Solomon’s Frog, an item she and the rest of the Col­lec­tors were hunt­ing for right off in the first issue of Jack­’s Black Pan­ther run.

I don’t know whether you’ve seen the list of prompts, but if you have, you may be in for a sur­prise tomor­row. By all means, feel free to come by and see who’s next!