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!