Another one of the Female Furies.
For Lashina, I felt I had a tight edge to walk – I wanted to keep what is, quite honestly, the BDSM flavor of her outfit, but de-objectify it a bit. Those rings around the tits were cute, Jack, but kinda blatant. I took it down to one simple signifier: she’s got a collar with a ring on it. Also she whips people with the steel ribbons she’s tied up in but that’s nothing new.
Big Barda: looks like Lanie Kazan, acts like Roz Kirby. And kicks all the ass. As with my previous redesign of Orion, I tried to take Jack Kirby’s original design and strip it down to an essential. Barda’s fish-scaled armor has turned into hex-scaled armor, and the hexagon theme of her belt in some of Jack’s drawings has been extended to the red bands on her limbs. The panties-over-leggings look is gone because the ‘circus strong man’ resonance it conjured up in the fifties is long since gone for modern people like me.
The floating bits on her powered-up Power Rod are held there by gravity manipulation, and can be extended very rapidly. Not that she needs it to kick your ass. But it comes in handy when she’s beating apocalypse-sized gods down to size.
This morning, I dreamed I was reading a book. It was full of gorgeous full-bleed illustrations of techno-mesoamerican-hindu architecture floating in the sky. Everything was rendered in a palette of deep, saturated brown, an intense turquoise, and a golden yellow. It was all supposedly drawn by Jack Kirby, but didn’t have any of his signature handling of black – it was all flat color without lines. Each illustration had a small bit of text laid over it Like a quarter of the page, I think.
Then I was interrupted by a small dark-skinned child, who asked me what I was reading. I started to explain it, then decided to show it to him, but as I flipped through the book all I got were pages full of text. They were in the same colors, with the page in the blue, and the text in the brown, with occasional use of the yellow in bold for emphasis.
It very much felt like a glimpse into Kirby’s version of Vallhalla, to be honest.
Edit. I decided to spend some time drawing that. I kinda got lost in filling in the text instead of drawing the city; I may come back and add more to the city. The composition is straight out of my dream; the text is me basically googling a bunch of Aztec randomness and asking myself “What would Kirby do with these elements?”.
I am not going to start writing this as an illustrated story. I hope.
I will however note that I figure “Ixtab” totally dresses like a superhero. And is ultimately possessed of some sort of reality-bending power that makes the whole story vanish up its own asshole. Seems about right for something I half-remember from a dream.
My site was down for a couple of days due to some complications with it moving to a faster server. Those happened to be days I doodled in.
A friend’s scruffy dragon lady character.
Twin, getting really stoned, on a day when all I seemed to be able to do was to get stoned and doodle my characters. I fucked around a lot with my collection of art brushes here.
Yesterday was Jack Kirby’s birthday. I saw a LOT of fan-art of his characters that day. Me, I just did a blatant style rip doodle. Probably needs some metallic leg bands to be honest but whatever, this was like ten minutes.
Continuing style test for that vampire thing I’ve been kicking around. Yeah, I think it works. Someday I’ll actually do a short story about her. Someday. In my copious free time.
Also I finally spent some time fixing the style for Five Glasses of Absinthe. Now it’s using my horizontally-oriented comics theme, with different css to make it, um, not horizontal and stuff. There’s still some stuff that needs tweaking but it looks a hell of a lot better than it did for a while.