Bet I don’t put the magazine back this time, either.
So I was talking with customer Brook on Wednesday about one of Jack Kirby’s unused creations that I remember reading about, but couldn’t come up with the name. I Googled terrible, terrible things trying to find the character, but nothin’ doin’. My memory was that it was brought up in an interview with cartoonist Jim Woodring, who had been employed by the same animation studio where Kirby was working at the time, and that the character was (I think) one of Jack’s many proposed but unused cartoon concepts.
I went directly to the issue of The Comics Journal where I thought this information was located — well, semi-directly, as I’d pulled that issue out a while back to research something else then threw it into the sort-stack instead of putting it back where it belonged — and, lo, that information wasn’t there.
The character was this, assuming I didn’t imagine it: a somewhat burly-ish woman, almost lumberjack-ian in appearance, wearing a helmet with a giant propeller attached. It seems to me that the mention of this character was accompanied by an illustration, either by Kirby or a recreation by the person discussing it (maybe Woodring, perhaps someone else). I also feel like there was a gallery of interpretations of this character by several cartoonists, either in the same publication or sometime later.
Anyway, the Googlings, they did nothing, so if any of you out there can point me in the right direction, or at least remind me of the character’s name, I would greatly appreciate it. The first person to come up with good info will win the very first Progressive Ruin Nope-Prize! (“Do I get a prize?” “NOPE.”)
At the very least, I’d like to tell customer Brook that this was a real thing, and that I’m not crazy. At least about this.
Could it be Roxie’s Raiders? There’s an image called “Roxie/Bad Guys” that has her wearing a Kirbytech helmet in one panel.
It’s “Heidi Hogan, Lady Lumberjack.” It was from a Jim Woodring interview, but not in TCJ, but the Peter Bagge-edited zine “I Like Comics.”
And there was a gallery of illustrations elsewhere in the zine: mostly cartoonist’s self-portraits, but Heidi Hogan crept into one or two of them; I know that Pat Moritarty did one.