Tag: Thena

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.

“…The Perfection of Thena–!”

This is now Day 29 of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. Not too many more to go! Today’s prompt is Thena of the Eternals.

I talked about The Eter­nals yes­ter­day in more detail. It was one of the new titles Jack came up with when he returned to Mar­vel in the mid-’70s. While on the sur­face it might have looked slight­ly sim­i­lar to some of what Jack had done with the New Gods in his Fourth World saga at DC, the inspi­ra­tion for this one came from a dif­fer­ent place.

Thena first shows up in The Eter­nals #5. She’s the daugh­ter of the Prime Eter­nal, Zuras. Thena is no shrink­ing vio­let. She has a strong per­son­al­i­ty, and a direct approach to prob­lems. When she finds out in her first appear­ance that the Deviants have resur­faced and are mak­ing trou­ble among the humans, her imme­di­ate response is, “…The Deviants must be taught to respect Eter­nals! You know that I intend to do the teach­ing!!” With that, she grabs the mes­sen­ger, Makar­ri, by the arm and strides quick­ly out of Zuras’ pres­ence to go take care of business.

But Thena also has a soft­er side. Includ­ed in my image here is Kro, the Deviant gen­er­al, with whom she once had a rela­tion­ship. Jack was appar­ent­ly ref­er­enc­ing the sto­ry of Perse­phone, daugh­ter of Zeus, who went down into the under­world. In The Eter­nals, Kro hopes to rekin­dle their old rela­tion­ship, yet there’s a lot between them that’s seem­ing­ly insurmountable.

As I said yes­ter­day, if you’ve only seen the MCU ver­sion, you don’t know the Eter­nals. You should read the com­ic, if you get the chance. Jack told some real­ly great sto­ries dur­ing his run.

That’s Thena. If you’re inter­est­ed, feel free to check in tomor­row to see who’s next.