King Kirby Day 2012

Today would have been Jack Kirby's ninety-fifth birthday.

As I have for the past couple of years, I spent a little time today copying a panel drawn by Kirby that lodged in my visual imagination when I was a kid and never completely got dislodged.

Don't look at it too closely. My work really suffered from a combination of scale and tool choice: I was drawing this way too small for it to get inked well with my ready-to-hand combo of brush pen and medium-fine Rapidograph. The colors are pretty nice, though.

Why do I do this? The pictures still, after all these years, have an eerie power for me, most of which comes (I think) from the seriousness with which I studied them when I was little.

Suppose you're walking in a ruined theater, where no one has set foot for twenty years. There's a little old upright piano in the dusty backstage wings, and out of curiosity you plink out a chord. The notes are hollow, weak, and a little sour, but you have to be impressed that they still play.

That's the way it is for me with these pictures. I think I would recognize that "organic director" in any context, even though Kirby only drew it once. (Lightray refashions it into something less horrible before we get another clear look at it.)

This year, I invited a few of my friends to join me in my observances.

Scott Koblish drew a panel from Kirby's run on Captain America.

Check out Ben Towle's Lockjaw pinup.

And dig Damien's Mark Moonrider.

I didn't have to invite Bully to commemorate the occasion, of course. He did it all on his own.

Ditto, Adam Koford, natch.

And Evan Dorkin? Nuff said.

Alphabooksbeasts: L is for Lockjaw and Lockheed

This week's non-Donjon Alphabooks entry comes from some of my favorite books when I was a kid and a teenager. That is, if you're willing to count them as books.*

I think it will surprise no one to learn that I read a few Marvel Comics between the ages of four or five and fifteen or twenty. I was pretty into The X-Men during the Byrne-Smith-Romita years, but nowadays I'd toss those books on the pyre in favor of some old-school Stan-and-Jack Fantastic Four. That's the real stuff.

So let's say L is for Lockjaw and Lockheed.

Can you tell from my inking which of these characters I'm more fond of?

This is another drawing that didn't get much time to develop (owing to the fact that I only finished "K" yesterday and had three ideas for entries today). In fact, I used my preliminary doodle as pencils, taping it into my notebook and tracing with a brush through the flimsy Moleskine paper. Here's the doodle:

Do you recognize the pose, or the background I swiped for the finished drawing? Identify the source (of both; it's the same source) in the comments section below, and I will happily send you a couple of alphabet minicomics or some other suitable back-issue prize.

Next week: things get deep (and briny).

*I know I'm stretching the definition of "books" for the second week in a row. All I can say is (a.) comics, even superhero comics, are fair game, (b.) these guys are definitely in some "books" now if they weren't then, and (c.) if you're anxious about it I have another post for you.

Alphabeasts: F is for Four-Dimensional Space Whale

The winner of last week's poll was "Moby-Dick analogue," so this week's entry for Alphabeasts is "F is for Four-Dimensional Space Whale."



These aren't the only space whales out there, of course. Like, remember, O Nerd-as-a-Kid, those ones who healed Storm when she had a Brood larva in her? Too late to draw them for this alphabet. Then there's the critter that nursed itself on the engines of the Enterprise-D after Captain Picard killed its mom. And it's been ages since I read this other book, and maybe those whales were off in the distant future, not in space, but they do start with W if you want them.

Anyway, to get my faux-Kirby space whale up against my faux-Kirby background, I had to put a lot of my linework right against flat black; if you want to see the drawing itself, it's here:



I actually hadn't yet seen the Futurama episode ("Möbius Dick") that features this creature until this weekend. And I'm not sure how I feel about these latter seasons of Futurama, to tell you the truth, though it's nice to see the characters (and the cast) back in action. We don't learn a whole lot about the four-dimensional space whale in that episode, anyway, except that it feeds on obsession (not the fragrance) and only "breaches" into three-dimensional space to fill its lungs with vacuum.

(There's a pretty cool sequence starting about 11:55 into the episode where the Planet Express ship gets dragged into the fourth dimension on a "sleigh ride" behind the harpooned whale. It reminded me of an interesting old post I wrote about violations of the two-dimensional page by three-dimensional creatures.)

(Also, at 10:30 into the episode, the space whale blows out a breath in the form of a fractal, which is a nice math joke I guess.)

Anyway, all this talk about "four-dimensional this" and "three-dimensional that" made me want to work up a 3-D version of my 4-D Space Whale, so I tinkered with the method I'd used on Ben Towle's Kirby ukulele way back in the day. If you can do the "magic eye" method, you should be able to relax your eyes and see a 3-D space whale between these two images.



Or, if that method never works for you, you can whip out some 3-D glasses and try to see it here. I had trouble with the hues, though, so there's some "ghosting." Maybe that's just the four-dimensionality coming through.



UPDATE: better 3-D versions are in my next post.

Next week, I have a couple of different ideas for creatures to draw. What would you like to see me do?



You have until Friday evening to tell me.

King Kirby Day 2011

Today would have been Jack Kirby's ninety-fourth birthday, and I wanted to celebrate the day as I did last year: by swiping one of the panels drawn by Kirby that was burned into my visual memory at an early age and lives there to this day.

I don't have much time to explain why I chose this particular panel—that'll be a post for another day, soon. But if you've seen the Favorites zine, this is a panel from the comic I wrote about.



Other people (and little stuffed bulls) will surely honor Kirby better. But I wanted to make sure I didn't let the anniversary of his birth pass without peering again into the mysterious power his images have over me.

Happy King Kirby Day

Today would have been Jack Kirby's ninety-third birthday.

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.

The One-Panel Critics: Lots Going On in Mister Miracle

So a week or so ago, Ed Piskor put together an interesting collection of comics panels in which "cause" and "effect" both appear in the same image. (I first heard about Piskor's collection a few days back from noted trendspotter Mike Sterling. By now, though, even that old fogey Scott McCloud has jumped on the bandwagon, so I'm probably about two days from being tragically unhip here.)

I think what Piskor has in mind is that the originator of an action and its results seem to exist in slightly different time-frames in the same panel: for example, Andy is at the end of the follow-through of a throw, and the thing he's thrown is already shattering a faraway window.

To be precise, this isn't just a matter of causes being visible alongside their effects, but being visible in different temporal frames of reference within the same panel. It's as if the motion line were a sort of time-distortion device, guiding the reader from a slightly-past "present" to a somewhat-more-present "present," all within the panel.

In order to add my own two cents to the discussion, here's my favorite example of this weird feature of the way comics represent time:



Go on and click to enlarge it. Take the time to read it. That's a splash panel from Mister Miracle #15 (Sept. 1973), written and drawn by Jack Kirby.

What's going on in that panel? I detect at least three, and maybe four, temporal frames of reference swirling around each other there.



Okay, some stuff happens before the panel actually begins. This includes everything leading up to ...



(A.) the tossing of a grenade.



Shilo (B1.) sees the grenade, (B2.) calls out a warning, and (maybe not simultaneously—so B3? or C?) trips Mr. Miracle.



(C? D?) Mr. Miracle falls to the ground.

Of course it's weird that all these different causes and effects are visible simultaneously. I think it's extra-weird that they don't simply "read" from right to left, but follow the actions around the page counter-clockwise from twelve o'clock, like so.



I can't tell whether this panel is a muddled mess or a masterpiece of compression and efficiency. I've looked at this comic so many times since I was a tot that I can't imagine what it would be like to read it without already having read it.



What do you think? Does this panel work to convey its complicated chain of cause-and-effect clearly, or is it confusing?

What We Have Been Reading #1: Kirby's Eternals

A few days ago, I posted an odd mostly-magenta panel that Mike quickly pegged as a Kirby swipe. Now it's time to tip my hand and reveal what I have been reading this week.

I'm actually still making my way slowly through this, but it's a collection of the first eleven issues of Kirby's mid-'70s von-Däniken-influenced post-Fourth-World return-to-Marvel Eternals.

Who are the Eternals? Well, you see, in the time before human history, a cadre of titanic aliens (the Celestials) visited Earth and, from a single common ancestor, derived three races. The humans, you're already familiar with. The Deviants, whose genes are so unstable that every one of them is grotesquely different, have lived on the bottom of the ocean for centuries, since the destruction of Lemuria. And the Eternals are a bunch of undying and beautiful humanoids who meditate on the top of mountains, perfecting their superhuman mental gifts.

It's kind of high-concept.

When the series begins, the only human record of the Eternals, the Deviants, or the Celestials is in our ancient mythology. And then, just as a human archaeologist discovers an Inca ruin that depicts their presence, the Celestials return. The archaeologist's guide and assistant, Ike Harris, reveals himself to be in fact the Eternal master of flight, Ikaris, and suddenly massive wheels are in motion. The Celestials will observe the planet for fifty years, then judge it.

To Kirby's credit, the Eternals that we meet really do have the personalities of immortal semi-gods. They're either prone to pranks and hijinks, bored with their interminable lives, or pompous and portentous in their over-seriousness. (Ikaris tends toward the latter disposition, but Sersi, Makkari, and Sprite are all rascals.) And not even the most sober of them is incapable of irony.



Please click to enlarge and read that dialogue. The "raiment" that Ikaris has assumed is really anything but simple: it's a phantasmagoria of Kirbyesque design, and it's hard to imagine drawing this a hundred times...



Ikaris isn't the only sartorially complex Eternal. Consider the haberdasher who cooked this up:



Once the Deviants find out that the Celestials have arrived, they decide they need to provoke humanity to attack the space gods. (The Deviants fought the Celestials before, and that's why they live under the ocean now.)

So a bunch of Deviants dress up like "Space Devils"—I told you this was high-concept—and attack Manhattan.





There's Kro, the Deviants' general, dressed up as Space Satan. He's the guy I was drawing in my teaser panel.

It turns out that humanity is pretty easy to convince, on this score...



...and this is something I'd like to return to in a moment.

Eternals is fun because it gives Kirby room to imagine a new mythology, and because it gives him a chance to draw some incredibly crazy things. The Celestials are mountainous in size, and one of them (Arishem) carries the formula for world decimation on his brobdignagian thumb:



Yes, click to enlarge there. Arishem wouldn't fit on my scanner.

It seems pretty clear from the first five issues that Eternals doesn't happen in the regular Marvel universe. The story wouldn't make any sense there. Humanity is totally unaware of beings with superhuman powers living among them. The Eternals, not the various pantheons of gods, are the source of mankind's myths. Margo Damian panics when Ikaris, dressed in his bold-colored togs, jumps out of her plane and flies. When weird-looking guys in spacesuits start burning up New York, everyone assumes that it's the Devil, not the Skrulls. This can't be the world where The Fantastic Four fended off Galactus.

And yet, in the sixth issue, a skeptic named Arnold Radisch becomes the victim of an odd prank...



... and on the very next page, three well-equipped field agents are identified as "Nick Fury's men." From this point forward, the Eternals are in the same continuity as the Inhumans, Starfox can join the Avengers, Kro's kids can hobnob with Iron Fist, and Ajak can shoot pool with Beta Ray Bill or something.

I'd like to know what brought the Eternals into the Marvel universe. I wonder whether this was Kirby's decision, or something that came from Archie Goodwin, the book's editor. Anyone out there know more about this?

What Have We Been Reading? #1

I have an idea for a new feature for the blog here. I haven't even discussed this with Mike.

I thought it would be fun to post, occasionally (maybe weekly), sketchy or doodly "covers" of just a panel or two from something one of us has been reading (in the rare, precious moments of leisure between work and sleep).


(Oh, please click to enlarge.)

And what is that, that I've been reading? That's for you, Dear Reader, to guess in the comments section. As I'm imagining this feature, that's part of the fun! (Get it right, and maybe we'll figure out a prize of some sort.)

I'll come back in a few days to give an answer and a little capsule review.

Doodle Penance: "make your own kirby character"

Today's "Doodle Penance" asks a question similar to one we've answered before. This time, the google query we missed was "make your own kirby character."

I said before that Ed Emberley is probably the first place to stop for these "how to draw" questions, but there's a big gap between Emberley's design sense and Jack Kirby's, so let's try to approach the question of Kirby's character design. It's a huge topic, actually, and looking at Kirby's monster comics will certainly give you a different set of examples from the ones you'd see in The Eternals or The Demon.

But let's try to generalize, working mainly with Kirby's best-known work, in the superhero genre.

Even here, there's more than one type of Kirby character:

(Not pictured: alien legionnaires, terrified bystanders, buxom dames with faces like dinner plates, crusty old guys, eldritch freakouts, etc.)

Let's suppose you're thinking about a heroic character, someone on the periphery of your main tale, but a fellow you could trust with interstellar patrol duty. You're going to need some headgear, and here you have plenty of options.





In general, I try to think of kachina designs when I'm thinking about Kirbyesque design elements.




Good design motifs include raised discs, sunbursts with triangular teeth, branching horns or forks, rectangles the shape of a Pink Pearl eraser, and shiny parts. As ever, spot blacks sell the drawing. Don't be afraid to lay down the ink.



It's tempting to put just as much design insanity into the rest of the costume as you see in the hat. But I think that simplicity is a good rule here. Remember that when you start drawing this guy, there's going to be a lot of bending and folding, and a lot of distortion due to perspective. A simple bodysuit, maybe with a few bold patterns, is what you want here.

So your next step is to start assembling the various parts. Try to keep a design "theme" going: if there are dots or circles in one place, bring them back again elsewhere.



Here's a fellow I came up with, and a hastily colored version of him in a more Kirby-style pose. Anyone have a name for this guy?



Mike, what do you have this week?

—Why, I have my own Kirby character, of course. Like you, I was puzzled at first by the sheer variety of Kirby designs available, but I decided to stick with what I know best, which is Kirby art from the first hundred issues of Fantastic Four as reproduced in cheap black-and-white editions, so here's my quick black-and-white drawing of a would-be Inhuman named Handy:



I worked from a few typical Kirby design principles:

1) Avoid drawing ears where possible.
2) Put the character's initial on the costume, even if character is from outer space or otherwise unlikely to use the Roman alphabet.
3) Hunch 'em up.
4) Shady characters have wide mouths.
5) Squared-off digits.

And since I was thinking of the Inhumans:

6) Exaggerate one trait or physical feature.

The only problem with my choice of exaggerated feature, Handy's hands, is that it's easily mistaken for the extreme foreshortening also typical of Kirby poses. But I assure you that his hands are not meant to be that close to you, the viewer: they're just big-ass hands.

Our Contribution to "Covered"

If you're clicking over to our blog from the "Covered" project, I hope you'll stick around to check out our big summer back-issue sale and maybe some of our ridiculous "Doodle Penance" posts.

(And if you haven't heard of "Covered," I highly recommend it as a cool place to see people manipulating and laying claim to the powerful imagery of other people's comics covers.)

You might be curious to know how we chose our contribution, and why our image looks so little like the original Walt Simonson cover for Batman #366. We actually worked up two submissions for "Covered," and the one they ran was our version of the cover of the first comic book Mike ever bought.

The way we did these was typically peculiar and unnecessarily difficult.

The main thing is that each of us was, sort of like Pierre Menard, duplicating an image he had never really seen. First, we both picked covers that the other guy hadn't seen. Mike drew a set of pencils from the original cover of Batman #366...



(All of the images in this post will enlarge if you click on them.)


... and I then inked his pencils without consulting the original image:



... and then, still without consulting the original, I colored my version digitally:



I was trying to stick pretty close to the flat colors of the Superfriends cartoon there. I wanted to stay pretty cartoony in my inks as well, figuring that would be a good way to "own" the image and make it look more like our work than the original.

Have a look at the original, by comparison:



Simonson's image has a little more kinetic energy in it—a subtle change in the position of Batman's right leg makes a lot of difference in the balance of his figure, I think—and my Joker is a little bit chunky. And of course I didn't quite figure out the light and shadow on that weird building. But I think our version gains in legibility what it loses in energy.

(Mike would like me to point out, here, that the cover of Batman #366 is unique in the many-decades-long run of Batman in having a never-repeated logo for the book's title, integrated into the drawing almost in the manner of one of Will Eisner's Spirit titles. Mike has also heard that this cover existed before the story it illustrates—that the drawing by Walt Simonson was so cool that the editor ordered a story created to back it up.)

Our other cover-of-a-cover, which you'll see only here on the blog, started with drawings of Jack Kirby's Forever People #6. That's not the first comic I ever owned—my childhood copy was part of a big pile of Fourth-World comics given to me by one of my dad's friends when I was about six years old. But out of that Kirby-at-DC stash that had such a powerful effect on me as a kid, I thought this one had one of the coolest covers.

I started with a quick thumbnail, to see whether the image would work in my simplified style:



Then I did a set of pencils in my notebook and sent them over to Mike, who had never seen the original image:



(Already I am losing some of the energy and drama in the thumbnail.)

Then Mike did an admirable job inking my simple scribbles:



... and then he put some colors on them:



What's strange—and I still can't really believe we can say this—is that the original Jack Kirby cover of Forever People #6 seems more subdued.



I'm not sure how successful either of these "covers" is—I mean, I don't think either of us should consider quitting his day job in an effort to unseat James Jean or whoever—but I have to say it was a ton of fun to put some time and effort into aping Simonson and Kirby. I won't say it has been a long time since I last copied drawings by Kirby, but this is probably the most careful I've been about it, and as an exercise I certainly recommend it.

Stereoscopic Cosmic Ukulele

I was so taken with our friend Ben Towle's Kirby-style ukulele (in turn inspired by our own post on Kirbytech) that I wanted to fiddle with the image a little bit myself.

What I've done here is turned it into another stereoscopic 3-D image. If you stare at the picture below and let your eyes relax -- or look at it as if you're looking at something farther away -- the two halves of the image should swim together to assemble a third composite image, which will be in 3-D.



Some people have an easier time seeing the small version of this image, but depending on your screen size or screen resolution, you may also be able to get the full-size image to assemble. It'll be pretty dramatic, I think. Click on it and give it a try.

You may also find it more dramatic if it looks like it's toppling towards you:



The hardest part of creating this image was getting all of the fiddly extra parts of the uke outlined with my "angle-lasso" tool, so I could cut it free from the background. If you've got any questions on how I did this, please post 'em in the comments. I'm happy to offer preliminary tips, for what they're worth.

Update: I wanted to make sure Ben could see what I'd done, so I goofed around with the "Selective Color" feature long enough to figure out how to make a proper red-green 3-D image. Ben, if you've got some spare 3-D glasses, click to enlarge this one!

Doodle Penance: "shriveled folks in a comics kingdom"

Okay, maybe I didn't put as much thought into this week's "Doodle Penance" as I should have. I'm not sure.

Someone came to our site looking for "shriveled folks in a comics kingdom," and that googler didn't stay put, because it's a matter we haven't really addressed up to this point.

And so we set about to address it. My own thought process went something like this:

"A comics kingdom? Where could that be? I'm pretty sure Papa Smurf isn't the king of the Smurfs. Babar is a king, but are those books really comics? And Doom is definitely the monarch of Latveria, I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to Latveria as a kingdom. Maybe Wakanda, then?"



I'm sure you'll recognize Ulysses Klaw, there, all Ahab-like, getting his arm shriveled or withered by whatever's glowing in the foreground. (My guess? Radioactive vibranium. That stuff will eff you up.) Later on, of course, he'd transform himself into a bright-red, anosmic being of living sound. This is sort of his origin moment. But you knew that.

Mike? I'm guessing you won't have drawn the same thing as me this time...

—Indeed not. But may I say DAMN? That's a fine doodle! I bow to you!

No, I haven't drawn the same thing as you. When I first saw the prompt, I thought of notably shriveled cartoon characters I've seen: Superman post-nuke in The Dark Knight Returns, a Kurt Wolfgang doodle in my sketchbook, the California Raisins...but none of these was sufficiently kingly. In the end, I did opt for at least one non-royal figure in homage to the Raisins, but mostly I took some beloved cartoon kings and shrank the (occasionally ample) flesh off their bones:
From left to right, that's Otto Soglow's Little King (the fabric of whose robe is gathered in folds on the floor since he no longer puffs it out with his customary girth); Walt Wallet from Gasoline Alley (shoehorned in here as the creation of cartoonist Frank King); Jack Kent's King Aroo, whose hair itself has shriveled (generating an uncanny family resemblance to the Hawaiian Punch mascot); and Grape Ape after too much exposure to the sun (my Raisin homage for bona fide shriveling).