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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later returned in Kirby: Genesis, the Dynamite Entertainment series Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross developed from Kirby’s unpublished characters and concepts.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.
