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| My art of Granny Goodness |
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| My Alicia Masters art |
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!
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| art by Howard Simpson |
Kirby only did two pages of Galaxy Green. That may not sound like much, but with Kirby, two pages can 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later returned in Kirby: Genesis, the Dynamite Entertainment series Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross developed from Kirby’s unpublished characters and concepts.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.
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.™
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.™
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.™
The books by George Bridgman, Burne Hogarth, and Andrew Loomis are the gold standard for anatomy, and having them as your go-to resources builds a strong foundation. If you are serious about building your technical skills, here are some equally highly-regarded, industry-standard books for the other core disciplines to round out my recommendation list.
Color Theory and Light
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney. This is universally considered the modern bible to understand light and color. Gurney breaks down and analyzes complex optical phenomena (like subsurface scattering, atmospheric perspective, and reflected light) into highly accessible, practical lessons. It’s essential for anyone working in color, whether traditional or digital.
Interaction of Color by Josef Albers. For a more academic, foundational dive into how colors affect one another, this is a classic. It’s less about painting techniques and more about training the eye to understand color relativity, making it a great recommendation for students who want to deeply understand color theory.
Perspective
How to Draw: Drawing and Sketching Objects and Environments from Your Imagination by Scott Robertson and Thomas Bertling. This is the definitive text for technical perspective. It is dense and challenging, making it perfect for students who really want to master spatial construction, grids, and rendering objects accurately in 3D space.
Framed Perspective (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2) by Marcos Mateu-Mestre. If you are leaning more toward dynamic illustration, storyboarding, or sequential art, these books are incredible. They focus on how to use perspective to create dramatic, compelling shots and place characters convincingly within environments.
Perspective Made Easy by Ernest R. Norling. For absolute beginners who might be intimidated by Robertson’s technical depth, this is the best starting point. It simplifies the core concepts of horizon lines and vanishing points without becoming overwhelming.
Composition and Visual Storytelling
Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers by Marcos Mateu-Mestre. This is a masterclass in composition, focusing heavily on how to use light, shadow, and framing to direct the viewer’s eye and evoke emotion. It’s particularly useful for anyone interested in comic art, illustration, or visual development, showing how to compose shots with real impact and energy.
Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang. This is a deceptively simple book that uses cut-out shapes to explain the emotional psychology behind composition. It’s a brilliant resource to recommend for understanding why certain compositions feel balanced, tense, or calm on a fundamental, abstract level.
A Modern Addition for Anatomy
Figure Drawing: Design and Invention by Michael Hampton. Since I’ve already recommended the classics, this is a fantastic modern supplement to keep in your back pocket. It bridges the gap between Loomis’s constructive approach and Bridgman’s focus on interlocking masses. It’s for teaching students how to simplify the figure into dynamic, easily understandable volumes.
These should give you a well-rounded curriculum.
I’ve spent my adult life illustrating; the mechanics have become pure muscle memory. Translating my teenage instinct into an organized framework is the pivot from student to educator. What seemed like "just copying" to my teenage brain was actually a highly effective, intuitive form of reverse-engineering.
For beginners, unstructured copying often leads to mindless tracing where they capture the final lines but miss the underlying forms. When someone asks how to get the most out of these dense books, they are really asking for a repeatable learning framework.
Here is a structured, step-by-step method, often called the “Iterative Study” or "Read-Recall-Apply” method.
1. Read for the 'Why', Not Just the 'How':Keep the pencil down at first.
Read a single chapter or section without drawing anything. If you are looking at Loomis’s head construction, you need to understand the logic of the cranium sphere and the jaw plane before you try to replicate the lines.
2. The Analytical Copy (Master Study): Copying to understand, not to produce a pretty picture.
Now you pick up the pencil and copy the drawings directly from the book. The goal isn’t a perfect replica, but to recreate the artist’s process. If Bridgman shows interlocking wedges for the torso, the student should be actively thinking about those 3D volumes as they draw, rather than just copying 2D outlines.
3. The Memory Test: This is where actual learning happens.
This is the most key step beginners miss: close the book. Then try to draw the exact same concept or diagram from memory. You will inevitably get stuck or make a mistake. Then open the book, compare your memory drawing to the original, and use a red pen (or a different digital color) to correct your structural mistakes.
4. Application to Original Work: Proving the concept is internalized.
Finally, you need to take the principle you just learned and apply it to a completely original drawing without looking at the reference. If you just learned Hogarth’s foreshortened arms, you should try drawing a character of your own design throwing a punch toward the camera.
A key piece of advice: Art books are reference manuals, not novels. You don’t read them front to back once and graduate. You study a specific mechanism (like the mechanics of the knee), practice it until it sticks, and then put the book back on the shelf until you hit your next plateau.
I get a piece of the action if you buy a book from my links.
Just create.™
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| art by Howard Simpson |
I did not start drawing to make money. I didn't start drawing to have a career or support a family. Drawing is like breathing to me. I would die without it.
Most people have jobs to pay the bills. I have a career, not a job. I draw whether I am paid or not. Getting paid is icing on the cake. I never understand the question "How do you stay motivated?" because I have never needed motivation. This is a passion that burns deep down inside me and has never gone away.
Which is precisely why the business side matters so much.
When you love something this deeply, you owe it to yourself to protect it with structure. With math. With clear limits around what your work is worth. Because the alternative is letting clients set your value for you. And they will almost always set it lower than you deserve, not because they are bad people (well, some of them are) but because you let them.
Here's where I feel schools fail art students. Basic business courses are not a requirement as part of the curriculum and they should be.
The art is sacred. The business protects the art.
Just create.™
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On my first Hollywood feature film job, I was hired to design a set. A talk show set for one of the characters. Real production. Real budget. Real stakes.
They asked me for my fee.
I had been freelancing for quite a few years at that point. I had the portfolio. I had the client list. I had done the work for agencies, publishers, and entertainment companies. I was not new.
I quoted them a few hundred dollars.
There was a long pause on the phone. Then the producer (I think he was tired) said they would give me $5,000.
Five thousand dollars. For a job I had priced at a few hundred.
I did not feel happy. I felt humiliated. Not because they lowballed me, but because I had lowballed MYSELF. I had been doing it for years and didn't even know. Every quote I had ever given was a guess dressed up as confidence. And clients could feel it, which is probably why the producer sounded exhausted when he corrected me.
That moment permanently changed how I think about pricing. The problem was never confidence. The problem was math. I had never sat down and worked through the actual economics of a deal. The time, the costs, the rights, the usage, the territory, the exclusivity. None of it. I was pricing feelings, not deals.
I spent the next several years building a system to make sure I would never guess again. That system eventually became The Pricing Verdict.
You don't have a pricing problem. You have a math problem.
Just create.™
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| Commission in progress |
It’s free.
You can use it here:
https://www.abbadabba.com/freebies.html
It contains all the information in this blog and stuff in my brain. It's an easy resource to use.
That’s where much of my thinking lives. The coach I created just lets you ask questions instead of digging through posts, pages, and years of material. I used AI to make this interactive.
For anyone who has an immediate reaction to AI, I understand the hesitancy.
I’m using it to organize my own knowledge into a searchable tool. That’s the kind of thing I could not have afforded to build with custom programming. This is practical.
And it solves a real problem. People ask me if I’d talk to aspiring artists they know. I say yes. I give them my contact info. Almost nobody reaches out. I don’t think they’re lazy. I think they’re nervous. I was nervous too. So now they can ask the awkward question without the awkward email or phone call.
Try it.
If you stump it, tell me what you asked.
That helps me make it better.
Just create.™
art copyright 2026 Howard Simpson
Artists being afraid of new technology isn’t new. We’ve been here more times than people want to admit.
When paint was literally pulled from the earth, that was considered the “real” way to work; then oil painting arrived. It looked like cheating. If you didn’t grind your own pigment and get clay under your fingernails, were you even an artist? It took centuries for people to stop arguing and use the tool.
Industrial paint production hit next. Synthetic pigments flooded the market. The traditionalists called them vulgar. Sound familiar?
Then came the collapsible paint tube. Nobody hated the tube itself. They hated what came inside it. Artists complained the paint wasn’t “pure” or “handmade” enough. The pattern keeps repeating.
Photography showed up in the 1800s and shook the whole foundation of painting. A device could capture reality faster and cleaner than any painter. Critics called it “the mortal enemy of art.” Painters either adapted or became historical footnotes. The ones who stayed around did it by changing how they painted, not by trying to beat the camera at its own game.
Duchamp dropped a urinal in a gallery in 1917 and forced the entire field to admit that ideas matter just as much as execution. People hated him for it. Conceptual art exists today because one guy said, “What if art isn’t what you think it is?”
Acrylic paint was considered cheap and plastic. Today it’s standard.
Digital took even more heat. Early computer graphics were mocked. “Cold.” “Sterile.” “Not real art.” The minute artists got tablets and styluses, we turned the whole thing on its head again. But not before years of resistance, accusations of cheating, and a lot of hand-wringing about what’s “real.”
And even now, people still yell, “If it’s digital, it doesn’t count.” Some folks act like using a mouse or code erases the artist’s hand.
Every wave follows the same script. The new tool arrives. Artists complain. Artists adapt. Artists create something new. The field expands. Then something else shows up.
AI is our latest version of this same anxiety.
And yes, we have a legitimate grievance this time. AI scraped from artists without consent or compensation. I’m angry right along with you. But pretending we can shove AI back in the bottle isn’t realistic. The horse didn’t just leave the barn. It galloped across three counties.
I’m working on something that may help, but even that will be a bandage, not a cure. The damage is done. So the real question becomes: what now?
When you look at the history of every single art upheaval, we adapt. We create something that didn’t exist before. That’s our actual superpower, not the brush, tablet, or software. Us.
So when I hear “AI is going to take my job,” I can’t accept that.
AI isn’t going to take your job. A person who learns how to use AI will take your job.
If you sit in your puddle of fear and hate, someone else will make the leap you refused to make. That’s the part artists don’t want to hear, but it’s the truth.
We’ve always thrived when we stop guarding the old gate and start building new doors.
In the 1990s, the artists who were on the bleeding edge hijacked the only software available and bent it to their will. That software was “Ye Olde Photoshoppe.” Photoshop was created for photographers to retouch photos, but look what we artists did! We perverted its Prime Directive to suit our own needs.
From here on out, I want to show you how to use AI as an ally instead of a rival, how to let it handle the boring work so you can get back to the real work. The creative work. The part only we can do.
If you’re open to it, stick around. I’ll walk you through how artists can use AI in ways that strengthen, not replace, what we do. Leave your comments and questions. We’ll navigate this together.
Just create™
Note* I used AI for this infographic because I was never good at putting these together. Let’s let it do something I don’t want to do. No one’s paying me for it.
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| With apologies to Charles Schulz copyright 2026 H. Simpson |
Disney isn’t trying to stop generative AI. It’s using lawsuits and licensing deals to redraw who gets to control it.
The real question isn’t whether AI can learn from art, but whether independent artists will be allowed inside the system once the corporations finish drawing the borders.
The Disney and Universal v. Midjourney lawsuit is not just another AI copyright dispute. It is a power struggle over who gets to set the rules for generative AI going forward.
Unlike earlier cases brought by individual artists, this one involves two of the largest IP holders on the planet. That matters. Disney and Universal are not more morally right; however, they have the leverage to force outcomes that smaller creators never could.
In June 2025, Disney (including Marvel and Lucasfilm) and Universal (including DreamWorks) filed suit against Midjourney in federal court. Their claim was blunt: Midjourney operates as a bottomless pit of plagiarism, producing near-perfect replicas of protected characters on demand.
Not “inspired by.” Not “loosely reminiscent.” Functionally interchangeable copies.
The core allegations are straightforward.
Midjourney trained its models by scraping millions of copyrighted images and countless hours of film without licenses. The resulting system can generate Elsa, Yoda, Shrek, or Minions with minimal prompting. And by marketing that capability, the studios argue Midjourney is inducing users to infringe on copyright at scale.
This is not about a single image. It is about industrialized replication.
Midjourney’s response follows the now-familiar AI defense playbook. Training is transformative. Learning from images is how human artists learn. And, in a counterpunch, Midjourney accused Disney and Universal of “unclean hands,” claiming their own employees and vendors use Midjourney internally for ideation.
That last point is interesting, but legally fragile. Hypocrisy is not permission.
On the surface, this looks like billion-dollar companies fighting over territory. Underneath it, artists should be paying attention.
If the courts decide that AI training requires permission or licensing, that principle does not belong exclusively to Disney. It applies to everyone who holds copyright.
Individual artists do not have the resources to litigate that fight. Disney and Universal do. They are effectively spending billions to establish rules that will govern the entire ecosystem.
A ruling in their favor could force AI companies to adopt licensing models rather than scraping. That opens the door, at least in theory, to opt-in datasets and new revenue streams for creators.
More importantly, this case directly challenges the idea that “style” is fair game. The lawsuit targets the ability to reproduce the look and feel of protected characters. If that argument holds, it could strengthen protections against tools that generate work “in the style of” living artists.
As of January 2026, the case is still in discovery. No ruling yet. But the pressure has already reshaped activities across the industry.
Companies like Adobe and Getty Images have doubled down on “commercially safe” models trained only on licensed or public-domain content. That is not altruism. It is risk management.
Then there is the move that changes how this lawsuit should be read.
In December 2025, Disney announced a three-year, $1 billion deal with OpenAI. Disney became the first major studio to license its characters to OpenAI’s tools, including Sora and ChatGPT, under strict guardrails. No actor likenesses. No voice replication. Tight controls.
Disney did not sue OpenAI. That was a choice.
Look at the sequence.
June 2025: Disney and Universal sue Midjourney. December 11, 2025: Disney announces a $1 billion deal with OpenAI. Same day: Disney sends a massive cease-and-desist letter to Google, alleging copyright violations across Gemini and YouTube.
This reads less like a coincidence and more like a strategy. Litigation is the stick. Licensing as the carrot.
The message to AI companies is clear. You can fight us in court for a decade, or you can write a very large check and play inside our walls.
The OpenAI deal is not about stopping AI. It is about controlling it.
Disney didn’t just license content. They took an equity stake. They provided a clean, high-fidelity dataset that lets AI generate character-consistent output without legal risk. And they explicitly excluded actor likenesses to avoid union backlash and exposure to deepfakes.
From a corporate perspective, it is a smart move. From an artist's perspective, it raises an uncomfortable question. What happens after Disney and Universal “get their bag”?
If Disney and Universal win, they will establish a precedent. Training requires permission. That sounds like a win for artists.
But precedent without access can cut both ways.
A pay-to-play licensing world favors those who already control massive catalogs. Smaller artists may find themselves excluded, not compensated. AI companies could simply stop training on unlicensed individual work altogether, consolidating cultural output around a handful of corporate datasets.
That creates a two-tier system.
An elite tier where major studios license and profit. An open tier where individual creators are left outside the walls.
This is the real tension of the AI copyright wars. Not whether AI exists, but who gets to decide what it is allowed to learn from.
Disney is not trying to kill generative AI. They are trying to own the map. And once the roads are built, everyone else has to decide whether they can travel on them.
Warner Bros. Discovery v. Midjourney (2:25-cv-08376): Filed in September 2025
copyright 2026 Howard Simpson
