In the past, I've posted brief essays on Kirby's kinetic page composition, and on his design sense, both for characters and for machines, and I've frequently posted doodles and swipes of Kirby's drawings, from Etrigan to Kro and Ikaris, from Ulysses Klaw to Scott Free.
Today, I thought I'd celebrate the King's visual legacy by "covering" a panel from an issue of Kamandi that got lodged in my imagination (and my memory) when I was something like six or seven years old.
It still gives me the shivers. Morticoccus, the Living Germ, released from his prison of decades by the misbegotten Misfit, ready to destroy every living thing he encounters, until the world itself is dead.
I don't intend this as a memorial to Kirby. Other people (and little stuffed bulls) will do a better job with that. I just wanted to spend a little time this morning reworking an image that I'll never forget. It's personal, I guess. But it was good to get that into my notebook.
Something about that panel, isolated as it is, puts me in mind of Fletcher Hanks as much as Jack Kirby.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, I think it has a lot to do with the quality of the pale blue background color...
Getting the pale blue and the other colors (and the halftone patterns that make them) "right" was important for me. I figured out how to borrow them directly from parts of the original image. That's one more step in my Photoshop skill accumulation. Being able to use seven-year-old graphics software could come in handy if this whole professor thing doesn't pay off.
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