What a Revoltin’ Development!”

It’s now Day Three of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, focused on Fan­tas­tic Four-relat­ed char­ac­ters. And today’s prompt is none oth­er than the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing himself!

It’s been said that every super­hero group needs a super-strong char­ac­ter. And Ben Grimm def­i­nite­ly fills that bill. But he’s more than that. His pow­ers came with an obvi­ous cost, and there’s a sad­ness and regret that peri­od­i­cal­ly come out (some­thing that some lat­er writ­ers have tend­ed to for­get or neglect over the years). He’s got a rough exte­ri­or (lit­er­al­ly!), but a big heart. Strong as he is, some­times the Thing would be in sit­u­a­tions where he was beyond his lim­its. But he nev­er would stop try­ing. And in a tough sit­u­a­tion, he’s def­i­nite­ly the sort of per­son you would want back­ing you up.

One more mem­ber of the group to go tomorrow!

…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.