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.