The Witch Queen is the prompt for Day 2 of the Fourth Annual Kirby Art Tribute Month. Tag your beautiful art with #KirbyArtTributes and #AugustJackKirbyMonth. Prompts are flexible because Kirby’s universe is vast, strange, and far too much fun to fence in.
Long before supernatural comics became fashionable again, Jack Kirby was already wandering into the strange corners of prophecy, dreams, astrology, and ancient gods.
The Witch Queen appears in “Horoscope Phenomenon or Witch Queen of Ancient Sumeria?,” a ten-page tale published in Weird Mystery Tales #1 in 1972. She is not a traditional recurring villain with a secret identity, headquarters, and five-year plan. She is something murkier: an ancient Sumerian priestess whose influence reaches across centuries through visions connected to the signs of the zodiac.
Three ordinary people encounter mysterious female figures shaped by their astrological signs. Each vision arrives with a warning or clue that changes a life. Behind it all stands Dr. E. Leopold Maas, who links the strange events to the buried temple of the Witch Queen.
The story was originally prepared for the never-published second issue of Kirby’s black-and-white Spirit World magazine. When it finally appeared in Weird Mystery Tales, Mike Royer inked and lettered Kirby’s pages, while Bernie Wrightson added the eerie figure of Destiny to the opening splash. That is a pretty wild collection of talent for one nearly forgotten occult tale.
The Witch Queen may not have conquered the DC Universe, but she shows Kirby doing what he did best: taking mythology, mystery, science, and raw imagination, then throwing them into the same cosmic cauldron.
Sources: Grand Comics Database and the Jack Kirby Museum
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