"It's fascinating to me that two artists with fundamentally different styles could make almost exactly the same decisions in posing a scene like this."

Well, not so much. Kirby's pose is of course slightly different from both, but that has to do with Kirby's style, the bulk of Thor's frame and characterization of Odin. In the Pieta, the face of the person holding the dead is turned upwards towards God as master of life and death. Odin is that God in norse mythology, and as such would not turn his face heavenwards.

So, in the Perez and Byrne poses, the face turned upwards is a trait of the pieta, the expression of grief is obvious. The male figure standing denotes masculine power, as opposed to sitting figures. Female figures generally sit in the Pieta. The body is being held up, "shown to God" in an expression of "why?" in this position the body of the dead woman must be held under the knees and shoulderblades for the best possible grip. Being dead, the body is limp, hence the arm and head dangling.

Each choice is natural and in character, within the styles of both men and showing an understanding of anatomy and characterization that both artists have shown before these works. There are also not very many other ways of showing a standing Pieta.

The resemblance between the two pieces isn't that strange, and the pose is so well suited to the characters and the situation that it seems strange that one would even think of it as a swipe. Add to this the fact that Pietas are (in fine art) a type of stock poses, which as I've argued previously are exempt from "swiping" descriptions.

Ooops. long winded again.

"That's not by any means a rule. Take a look at the links Matt Hawes
provided, and you'll see a pretty even split between heads held down, heads
tilted up, and heads looking somewhere else. "

You're right. I was too insistent that it was the way to express the Pieta, There are different ways to show it, with different ways to interpret it. The downward gaze is one of grief and acceptance, one might say "this is what happened", while the upward pose that Perez and Byrne use is one of grief, anger or denial "why did this happen".

I'm over-interpreting, I know.

That's the link I posted, Flavio.

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You can never enough of those links...

Working on the STAR TREK books for IDW, I am finding myself unable to completely avoid occasional likenesses. Fortunately, Paramount is good about letting me go "generic" on some characters, as with young "Number One" and Christopher Pike in CREW, but when it comes to, say, Shatner, I have to be closer to the mark. Fortunately, TREKCore.com provides almost frame by frame shots from every TOS episode, making it possible to find exactly the shot I need.