GRANNY GOODNESS: LOVE, APOKOLIPS STYLE

My art of Granny Goodness

Jack Kirby introduced Granny in Mister Miracle #2 in 1971, placing her right at the center of Scott Free’s nightmare childhood. She runs the “Orphanage” on Apokolips, where children aren’t nurtured so much as hammered into obedient servants of Darkseid. Scott was one of her pupils. The problem for Granny is that he learned the one lesson she never intended to teach him: how to escape.

That makes her more than another supervillain waiting around to throw a punch. Granny weaponizes affection, discipline, guilt and fear. She calls herself a mother figure while treating cruelty as love. It’s funny in that warped Kirby way, until you think about it for more than five seconds.

By Mister Miracle #6, Kirby had unleashed the Female Furies, Granny’s terrifying graduates. Barda’s rebellion makes the insult even worse. First Scott escapes Granny’s control, then one of her finest warriors follows him.

Visually, Granny is pure Kirby contradiction: grandmotherly name, broad grin, old-fashioned dress... and the presence of somebody who could turn detention into a combat sport.

Granny Goodness is one of Kirby’s nastiest jokes. On Apokolips, even “love” comes with shackles.

Granny Goodness is the prompt for Day 23 of The Fourth Annual Kirby Art Tribute Month.

To join in, tag your art with #KirbyArtTributes and #AugustJackKirbyMonth. Prompts are flexible because Kirby’s universe is much too wild to stay inside the lines. 

Alicia Masters: The Woman Who Saw Ben Grimm

My Alicia Masters art

 

Alicia Masters is the prompt for Day 10 of The Fourth Annual Kirby Art Tribute Month.

To join in, tag your art with #KirbyArtTributes and #AugustJackKirbyMonth. Prompts are flexible because Kirby’s universe is much too wild to stay inside the lines.

Alicia Masters enters the Marvel Universe in Fantastic Four #8 in 1962, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. She arrives surrounded by trouble. Her stepfather is Philip Masters, the Puppet Master, a man who can control people through radioactive clay figures. Alicia, thankfully, wants no part of that nonsense.

Blind since an accident, Alicia is a gifted sculptor who works through touch. That detail could have been handled as a gimmick. Instead, Kirby and Lee make it part of what separates her from nearly everyone around Ben Grimm.

Most people see the Thing first. Alicia meets the man.

Their relationship becomes one of the emotional anchors of the early Fantastic Four. Ben may be able to trade punches with monsters, aliens, and Doctor Doom, but Alicia gets past the orange rock without throwing a single punch.

Then Kirby drops her into one of Marvel’s biggest stories.

During the Galactus Trilogy in Fantastic Four #48–50, the injured Silver Surfer crashes into Alicia’s apartment. While Galactus prepares to eat the planet, Alicia does something the Fantastic Four cannot accomplish with raw power. She talks to the Surfer. Her compassion helps him recognize humanity as something worth saving, and he turns against Galactus.

That is Alicia Masters at her best. No costume. No cosmic rays. No battle cry. Just an artist whose empathy can reach the humanity inside a monster and the conscience inside a space god.

Pretty good superpower, if you ask me. Artists rule!

GALAXY GREEN is the prompt for Day 1 of The Fourth Annual Kirby Art Tribute Month

 

art by Howard Simpson

To join in, tag your beautiful ladies with #KirbyArtTributes and #AugustJackKirbyMonth. Prompts are flexible; Kirby’s universe is vast and wild.

Two pages do not sound like much, but with Kirby, two pages may contain enough ideas to keep other creators busy for decades.

In 2007 and 2008, French writer Jean Depelley and artist Reed Man brought Galaxy Green back in the revived French comics magazine Strange. Reed Man colored Kirby’s original pages, then he and Depelley continued the story, turning Kirby’s abandoned cosmic tease into something closer to a full-fledged series.

The women later returned in Kirby: Genesis, the Dynamite Entertainment series developed by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross from Kirby’s unpublished characters and concepts. There, Galaxy Green crossed paths with creations such as Captain Victory, Silver Star and the Glory Knights, finally joining the larger Kirby universe they had been orbiting for years.

Galaxy Green may be a footnote in Kirby’s career, but it is a very Kirby footnote. Beneath the jokes, beauty-pageant poses and interplanetary matchmaking sits a surprisingly modern bundle of anxieties about gender, reproduction, extinction and who gets to decide the future of a species.

It also reminds us that Kirby rarely threw away an idea. Even his unfinished experiments seem to keep moving, waiting for another artist, another generation or another galaxy to pick up the signal.

The Difference Between a Job and a Career (And Why Artists Confuse the Two)

 What is the difference between a job and a career?

A job is something you do because you have to. You need to eat, pay rent, keep the lights on, and baby needs a new pair of shoes. A job serves those purposes, and there is no shame in it.

A career is something that feeds your soul. It's the thing you would do for free if you had to (and most of us have, at some point). A career is what sustains you beyond the paycheck.

Here's the thing. Most artists have careers yet treat them like jobs. They price like employees. They negotiate like people who are afraid of getting fired. They defer to the client on value because somewhere deep down, they feel lucky to be doing what they love for money at all.

Such gratitude is real. I feel it too. I have felt it since the seventh grade, when a classmate offered to buy my art. My first sale, and I wasn't even trying. But gratitude should not be confused with submission. You can love the work and still be paid properly for it. In fact, the love is exactly why you should.

Because if you don't protect the economics of your career, the career eventually becomes a job. And the job eventually becomes the thing that drains the joy out of the thing you loved most. I’ve heard of burnout, yet I’ve never felt it.

Do the math. Know your number. State it clearly. Protect your “Precious” because that feeds your soul.

Just create.™

The 0 to 10 Skill Scale: Why Most Artists Overrate Their Talent

 I have a scale I use when I look at an artist's work. It runs from 0 to 10. Most artists rate themselves higher than they are, because the people around them have been generous with compliments. My first impulse was to write “blowing smoke up your skirts.” But what does that really mean?

Here's the uncomfortable version:

0 means no talent.

1 means you have talent.

2 means you draw like a twelve-year-old because you are twelve years old.

3 means you draw like a twelve-year-old and you're 30. You got stuck. You never expanded your knowledge, never took life drawing classes, never studied anatomy from the masters.

And so on up the scale, each number representing a real threshold of skill, knowledge, and professional readiness.

Most people who show me their work are somewhere between 3 and 6. They think they're a 7 or an 8 because someone at a family dinner or on social media told them they should draw for Marvel. Even worse, has told them, “You should start selling your art or do commissions.” Reddit is rampant with these types of comments.

I'm not being cruel. I'm being honest. Honestly, the artists who improve the fastest are the ones who can look at their own work without the pat on the back. The ones who can say, "I'm a 5 and I need to be a 7 before I go pro," and then put in the reps to get there.

Self-assessment is a skill. Most art schools don't teach it. Critique Day was my favorite in college. Your friends and family are not equipped to give it to you. The mirror is the only reliable tool.

Can you honestly look at yourself?

Just create.™

AI Can Generate Images, But It Can’t Make Art: Why Human Judgment Always Wins

Generative AI can produce an image in seconds. It can mimic styles, combine references, and generate visual output at a scale no human can match on speed alone.

It cannot decide what to draw. It needs a human to prompt it.

It cannot look at a written scene and translate it into a sequence of panels that control pacing, emotion, and the reader’s eye movement across a comic book page. It cannot choose the camera angle that makes a moment dramatic or poetic. It cannot use negative space as a storytelling device. It cannot place a figure in the lower third of a panel because the emptiness above them is the point or waiting for lettering.

These are not technical skills. They are judgment calls. And judgment is the product of decades of drawing, reading, observing, failing, and drawing again.

I've watched this debate closely for the last two years. I've written about the legal cases (Bartz v. Anthropic, Thomson Reuters v. Ross, the Disney/Midjourney fallout). The law is slowly catching up to the technology. But the more important argument is not legal. It's creative.

The value of an illustrator was never the labor of moving a tool across paper, canvas, or a screen. The value was always in knowing where to put the lines and why. That is not something a prompt can do. Not because the technology isn't good enough yet, but because it requires a human being who has lived inside the creative world long enough to make decisions that a model trained on scraped images simply cannot mimic.

I'm not betting on the tool. I'm believing in the artist who knows how to use it.

Just create.™