Tag Archives: Sif

…And an Encore!

10 Replies

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.

Milady

4 Replies

This makes Day 21 now of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. And we’re work­ing our way through Asgard week, fea­tur­ing char­ac­ters who appeared dur­ing Jack­’s Jour­ney into Mystery/Thor run. Today’s prompt is the Lady Sif!

Ini­tial­ly, the Thor strip in Jour­ney into Mys­tery had a run­ning sub­plot that Thor loved the mor­tal Nurse Jane Fos­ter, who worked for him in his human iden­ti­ty of Dr. Don Blake. Thor’s father Odin had trou­ble with this idea, and Jack and Stan got a lot of “soap opera” style mileage out of this rela­tion­ship for a long time. But some­thing like this could only be car­ried on for so long, with­out it becom­ing tiresome.

So they found a sat­is­fy­ing way to resolve this sto­ry­line in Thor #136, “To Become an Immor­tal!” I don’t want to spoil the sto­ry for those who haven’t read it for them­selves yet, but at the end, Sif shows up. And from that point on, she became a reg­u­lar sup­port­ing char­ac­ter in the book, as the sto­ries became more epic.

An inter­est­ing thing is that Sif’s look kind of fluc­tu­ates a bit more than you’d think. She looks dif­fer­ent­ly on the splash page of issue #137 than she did at the end of #136. Her cos­tume had a lot more detail. She starts off in #137 with a full hel­met sur­round­ing her head (with orna­men­tal wings, no less!), which over time morphs into more of a small hel­met pro­tect­ing just the top of her head, before van­ish­ing entire­ly. Her cos­tume becomes very sim­pli­fied over time too. For my ver­sion, I brought in a lit­tle bit of the orig­i­nal detail, just to make it more interesting.

Tune in tomor­row to see who’s next for Asgard Week!