Tag Archives: Sandman

Mr. Sandman…Again

It’s now Day 23 of Howard Simp­son’s month-long Jack Kir­by Trib­ute. Any cre­atives are free to play along, and you can find their posts on your favorite social media plat­forms with the hash­tag #Kir­b­yArt­Trib­ut­es.

Today’s prompt is “Draw a char­ac­ter or scene from Jack Kir­by’s Sand­man series. (Gar­rett San­ford).” That last part threw me slight­ly. So far as I knew, the char­ac­ter nev­er had a name. But I dis­cov­ered it was some­thing added by oth­ers lat­er on.

Once I got past my slight con­fu­sion over the oth­er name, I knew which Sand­man was being talked about. Jack and Joe Simon had done their take on Sand­man for DC ear­li­er, in the Gold­en Age (I drew him ear­li­er here). Late in Jack­’s time at DC in the ’70s, the con­cept was revis­it­ed and rein­vent­ed from the ground up. The script for the first issue was by Joe Simon, which (unless I’m mis­tak­en) was the first time Joe and Jack had been teamed togeth­er on a com­ic since they dis­solved their part­ner­ship back in the ’50s.

This book is a bit of an odd one. It had no con­nec­tion to any of the oth­er titles Jack was doing for DC then, and was tonal­ly dif­fer­ent from all of them, seem­ing to skew more towards younger read­ers. Though that first issue man­aged some creepy scenes with the Werblink dolls.

I recall read­ing Carmine Infan­ti­no say­ing that Sand­man sold real­ly well for DC. I guess they were caught off-guard, because there’s a gap of a year between issue #1 and #2! And while Kir­by did all the cov­ers, he was­n’t back doing the inte­ri­ors until issue #4. They only got six issues out total. Issue #6 had Wal­ly Wood inking!

Any­way, in addi­tion to Sand­man him­self, I drew his side­kicks Brute and Glob. I kind of wavered on the silli­ness of hav­ing Glob give him rab­bit ears, but felt ulti­mate­ly like it would be right for that book and these char­ac­ters, tonally.

Hope you like it, and please feel free to tune back in tomorrow!

Mr. Sandman…

We’re at Day 6 of Howard Simp­son’s month-long Jack Kir­by cel­e­bra­tion online, in hon­or of Jack­’s birth­day. It’s open to all cre­atives, and you should be able to find any posts on your favorite social media plat­form via the hash­tag #Kir­b­yArt­Trib­ut­es.

Today’s prompt is Sand­man and Sandy. Sand­man was actu­al­ly not a Simon and Kir­by cre­ation! Orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed by writer Gard­ner Fox and artist Bert Christ­man for DC back in the Gold­en Age, he had more of a pulp char­ac­ter appear­ance, run­ning around in a suit and hat, wear­ing a gas mask and gassing crooks with his gas gun. He pre-dat­ed many oth­er super­heroes, first appear­ing in 1939 in Adven­ture Comics #40 and The New York World’s Fair Comics #1.

By 1941, it was appar­ent­ly felt he was out of step with what was going on with DC’s oth­er char­ac­ters, so Mort Weisinger and artist Paul Nor­ris gave him his new pur­ple and yel­low super­hero togs, and added Sandy as a side­kick. Simon and Kir­by picked up the baton from Weisinger and Nor­ris lat­er that year, most def­i­nite­ly putting their stamp on the char­ac­ter! They dumped the cape that Nor­ris had ini­tial­ly giv­en him (mak­ing him look more like an S&K cre­ation), and played around with sto­ries about sleep and dreaming.

Hope you liked my lit­tle trib­ute to the Simon and Kir­by ver­sion of Sand­man and Sandy, and tune in again tomorrow!