Tag: The Mole Man

“Mole!”

Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025, Day 20, and the theme all month has been the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is the Mole Man! The Mole Man was there at the very begin­ning, both of the Fan­tas­tic Four (issue #1), and the Mar­vel Comics universe.

As men­tioned yes­ter­day, those ear­ly issues of FF were kind of tran­si­tion­al. They still read and felt a lot like the mon­ster sto­ries Atlas/Marvel had been doing pre­vi­ous­ly. FF #1 gave us a char­ac­ter in Mole Man who had con­trol of a whole army of mon­sters, hid­ing in his under­ground realm. Today, we would prob­a­bly call him a “kai­ju mas­ter,” as some of these mon­sters were quite sizable.

Mole Man’s debut seemed to be root­ed not only in Mar­vel’s pre­vi­ous mon­ster comics, but also in kai­ju films like Godzil­la, and a tra­di­tion of “under­ground world” sto­ries (such as Jules Verne’s Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of the Earth, or the Bur­roughs Pel­lu­ci­dar stories).

For extra inter­est here, I added one of the mon­sters from that first sto­ry which caught my eye. It appeared to be made out of some kind of dark, liv­ing rock! It was­n’t giv­en a name in that sto­ry; no idea whether lat­er cre­ators might have giv­en it a name or not.

I also did the Mole Man for last year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. You can find it here.

…And an Encore!

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.

I Can Dig It

It’s now the 10th day of the sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, devised by Howard Simp­son to hon­or the cre­ative genius of the King. Howard intro­duced a fun new wrin­kle this year, of themed weeks. This week’s theme has been the Fan­tas­tic Four, and on this last day of the week, the final prompt is the Mole Man.

The Mole Man may not be con­sid­ered the FF’s arch­en­e­my, but he has the dis­tinc­tion of being the very first antag­o­nist they faced in their ori­gin sto­ry. Like many of the FF vil­lains, he had more com­plex­i­ty to him than your aver­age com­ic book vil­lain. He com­mand­ed an army of Moloids (which I’ve includ­ed some of here, free of charge) as well as var­i­ous giant under­ground mon­sters. He was bit­ter, yet not entire­ly unsym­pa­thet­ic, hav­ing been shunned and basi­cal­ly dri­ven away by most of the rest of mankind.

While I have (on rare occa­sion) pre­vi­ous­ly attempt­ed to draw some of the oth­er FF char­ac­ters I’ve drawn this week, this is the first time I’ve ever tried to draw the Mole Man. It was fun!

And that wraps up Fan­tas­tic Four week. Tomor­row’s a new week, and a new theme!