Tag Archives: Thor

…And an Encore!

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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.

Some Enchantress Evening

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If you’ve been fol­low­ing along, you know I’ve been doing Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. This has been Asgard Week, fea­tur­ing char­ac­ters from Jack­’s Jour­ney into Mystery/Thor run. And our final vis­i­tor from Asgard this week is the Enchantress!

Her first appear­ance (in Jour­ney into Mys­tery #103) was a fun sto­ry, team­ing her with the Exe­cu­tion­er. Chic Stone’s inks worked well there, espe­cial­ly with a char­ac­ter like the Enchantress. Only a cou­ple years lat­er, it was reprint­ed in the Thor King-Size Spe­cial #1 (AKA Thor Annu­al #2).

The Enchantress’ col­or scheme was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent in her first appear­ance. Instead of the over­all green scheme, her cos­tume includ­ed bright magen­ta! Also, they made her a plat­inum blonde. I liked that idea; it was kind of a unique touch that got lost when they lat­er went with a more con­ven­tion­al blonde col­or. So I made her a plat­inum blonde again here.

Tomor­row’s a new week and a new theme! Tune in tomor­row to see.

“Cross the Rainbow Bridge of Asgaaaard,…”

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Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, and we’re in the back end of Asgard Week. You knew it was inevitable that at some point, the prompt would have to be Thor!

Many of the char­ac­ters I’ve been draw­ing here, I’ve nev­er attempt­ed before. I can’t say that about Thor, though. I’ve drawn him a few times.

Way back when I was try­ing to break into comics, I remem­ber work­ing up a sam­ple page fea­tur­ing Thor. One of the pan­els fea­tured a close-up of an angry Thor, yelling just pri­or to leap­ing on his foe while swing­ing his ham­mer. I had heard that com­ic artists some­times shot pho­to ref­er­ence, so I shot a Polaroid of myself mak­ing the face I want­ed, try­ing to get it just right. The end result was a Thor face that looked a lit­tle too much like me! The les­son as an artist is that using pho­to ref­er­ence, you have to be real­ly care­ful that it does­n’t take over.

I’ve gath­ered that some Sil­ver Age fans back when Thor was first com­ing out made the con­nec­tion that he was kind of Mar­vel’s equiv­a­lent to Super­man: being able to fly, hav­ing super-strength and vir­tu­al invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. There’s also the aspect of him hav­ing been sent to Earth by his father. A less obvi­ous cor­re­la­tion might be between Thor and the orig­i­nal Cap­tain Mar­vel, as both char­ac­ters make a big mag­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion to get from their civil­ian iden­ti­ties to their hero­ic ones.

Tomor­row’s the finale of Asgard Week. Who’s it going to be? You’ll have to come back to find out!

Three Is a Magic Number

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Here on the 19th day of Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, we’ve moved into Asgard week, fea­tur­ing char­ac­ters from Jack­’s Thor run. Today’s prompt is the War­riors Three! In front from left, we have Hogun the Grim and Fan­dral the Dash­ing. Behind them is Volstagg.

As seen in Thor Annu­al #2 from 1966, the War­riors were good friends of Thor. They would often end up going into bat­tle togeth­er. Fan­dral had a dev­il-may-care atti­tude, smil­ing and jok­ing as he bat­tled, seem­ing­ly mod­eled after Errol Fly­nn (per­haps with Fly­n­n’s ver­sion of Robin Hood in mind). Hogun came by his appel­la­tion “the Grim” hon­est­ly, as he rarely smiled or said much in bat­tle (he appeared to be some­thing of a mash-up of Charles Bron­son and Genghis Khan, odd­ly enough). Vol­stagg at this ear­ly point in time was often more of a com­ic relief fig­ure, though lat­er he was shown to be as brave and respect­ed as the rest. He appears to have been inspired by Shake­speare’s Falstaff.

I’d nev­er attempt­ed to draw these char­ac­ters, so it was fun to take a crack at them! Hope you enjoy, and tune in again tomor­row if you’re curi­ous to see who in the Thor cast shows up next!

Kirby 100, Part 3

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Wel­come back to anoth­er install­ment, cel­e­brat­ing Jack Kir­by’s 100th birth­day this month!

This time out is Thor. Again, the pen­cil draw­ing came my way years back in the form of a pho­to­copy, and I believe the orig­i­nal source was a sketch­book Jack did for his wife Roz, which ulti­mate­ly saw print as a book enti­tled Jack Kir­by’s Heroes and Vil­lains. It was yet anoth­er Kir­by draw­ing that caught my eye, and looked like it would be fun to try ink­ing. Fresh­ly col­ored for show­ing here.

When I first got to a point where I had suf­fi­cient funds to begin attempt­ing to col­lect more back issues of Kir­by’s Mar­vel work, I tend­ed to not seek out Jour­ney into Mys­tery (where Thor first appeared) or Thor issues. I just did­n’t like the inks as much as I did the inks over Kir­by on his oth­er strips. How­ev­er, as I read more about Kir­by’s work (and espe­cial­ly his Thor work), I real­ized that I was miss­ing out.

Kir­by’s Thor work is sig­nif­i­cant, because in it you see not only a bril­liant comics artist and sto­ry­teller doing a great job. You also see some­thing of Kir­by the man, and his inter­ests. Just as in Fan­tas­tic Four you can see Kir­by’s fas­ci­na­tion with the unknown, what’s out there, in Thor you see Kir­by’s fas­ci­na­tion with myth and leg­end (a touch­stone through­out his career). I feel that while all of Kir­by’s Mar­vel work is great, both Fan­tas­tic Four and Thor are the two main tent posts of his work dur­ing that peri­od which can’t be disregarded.

I tried in col­or­ing this to evoke the kind of col­or palette you see in those old Thor comics. It was fun!

Hap­py Kir­by 100! One more to go, if I can man­age it.

The Mighty…Motor Scooter??

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Thor on Pink ScooterNot long ago, I received an email from my friend and men­tor, Lar­ry Hous­ton. He’d stum­bled across the exis­tence of this toy motor scoot­er from the ’60s that had a fig­ure of Thor rid­ing it. Marx Toys had appar­ent­ly licensed the rights from Mar­vel Comics to man­u­fac­ture and sell these.

Oh, and I should­n’t for­get to men­tion that they made the motor scoot­er pink. Why Thor would even need to be tool­ing around on a motor scoot­er in the first place is one ques­tion. But why some­one at the toy com­pa­ny made the con­scious deci­sion that Thor’s scoot­er ought to be pink is one of those big ques­tions in life that I just don’t think we’ll ever have an answer to.

I had been aware of the exis­tence of this toy pre­vi­ous­ly, but had kind of for­got­ten about it until Lar­ry’s email remind­ed me. In response, I was able to show him evi­dence that not only had they done this with Thor, they’d sold toys of Cap­tain Amer­i­ca and Spi­der-Man on motor scoot­ers too. Spi­der-Man’s was also pink, but for some rea­son they allowed Cap to have a yel­low scoot­er. You can see all three toys here, if you’re curious.

Any­way, the men­tal image of Mar­vel’s god of thun­der on a pink motor scoot­er stuck with me. Some­times these things just have to come out, so there you go! Per­haps this could even start an inter­net meme, of peo­ple draw­ing Mar­vel super­heroes on pink motor scoot­ers! I mean, why not?