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Chrissie

The Blog Is Back

Oh, no, really?!

Worse than that, I am slowly reviving all the old archives going back to December 2000. It will take a while, updating & adding categories & tags, checking old links, adding or upgrading images where possible, etc. But yeah. I wanted the history back in place.
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Paul Gravett’s Brum Visit

A very good day, today, as I caught up with old comics pal Paul Gravett for the first time in aeons.

After meeting up at New Street (sorry, Grand Central, the station’s been a New York Wannabe since 2015 now!!), we went to the new-ish Wetherspoons there for a long lunch. We had fish & chips, and I had two or three of those refillable coffees (Paul stuck with tea! Very English!).

This was a great opportunity to pose for an awkward selfie with me squinting at the camera screen…

Paul Gravett’s Brum Visit

Note my Darkseid badge! I brought Paul one too. After eating, I had a “commission” to do…
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Blog Offline: Coming Back Soon?

Well, seeing as how I haven’t posted since October 2024 (backdated posts notwithstanding)! I’m deciding what to do with it. It occurred to me that as of December, it’ll be TWENTY-FIVE YEARS since I started doing this “blogging” thing… obviously, I’ve had a number of extended breaks and a handful of reboots (and the complete archive of posts hasn’t been online for a number of years), but it’s been on the same URL since the spring of 2003!!
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Jack Kirby Draws Arnold Schwarzenegger

(Images via comiclink.com)

As many of you will know, comics legend Jack Kirby worked for the Ruby-Spears animation studio from 1980 to 1987. This commenced with production design for Steve Gerber’s Thundarr the Barbarian (1980-81), after initial design man Alex Toth left the project.

As well as generating original ideas such as Thundarr, R-S also dabbled in licensed properties—Kirby worked on conceptual art for possible comics-related shows involving Thor (1981), Wonder Woman and Hawkman (both 1983), amongst others. None of these went into production, alas. In 1988, just after Kirby left the studio, they did do a quite well-done Superman show, which sadly lasted only one season, but boasted Marv Wolfman as script editor and Gil Kane as production designer. Kirby may have worked on this if he’d stayed a while longer.

R-S also licensed a series of shows which used real-life celebrity likenesses—Mister T (1983-86), Rambo: The Force of Freedom and Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos (both 1986). Kirby did indeed draw production art on all three.

Sad to say, in the last couple of years he worked for R-S, Kirby’s work was in serious decline—several years of struggling with essential tremors had taken a heavy toll on his ability to work, and his art had become quite rudimentary, even crude at times. One reason Gil Kane was brought on board was to develop and refine Kirby’s designs, which frequently were deemed unsuitable at this point… Kane gave the ideas, as he put it himself, a better “representational” value.

Towards the end of Kirby’s R-S stint in 1987, it appears that they were trying to get an idea off the ground involving Arnold Schwarzenegger! It makes sense, after doing Rambo and Chuck Norris—Arnie was one of the biggest action guys of the era. The show never happened, but there’s some interesting Kirby art in support of it to peruse…

Jack Kirby Draws Arnold Schwarzenegger
Let’s overlook the fact that Jack didn’t know how to spell Schwarzenegger…

What can we gather from this? Arnie is a good guy (natch), and he sports some interesting gadgets—his badge has a “time wheel” powered by his belt, which presumably enables him to teleport across space and time.

More Arnie art below!
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