Captain's Call

‘O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;…’¹

A major anniversary looms, a President survives an assassination attempt, economic turmoil threatens livelihoods and mind-waves of hate spread across the nation, turning friend against friend. Into a world like this, steps Jack Kirby, contract done at DC and turning in his first work for Marvel in five years on new terms, I get proper credit and edit my own stuff, thanks Stan, Captain America # 193 (January, 1976), published 50 years ago today, 14 October, 1975.

Captain America has always been a ‘political’ comic, not party political (thank God!) but given its titular character it has attempted to say something primarily about America the country, America the people, not simply focus on the party-political State. Jack Kirby closely followed Steve Englehart’s famed run on Cap, a run which expressed Englehart’s and many readers’ disillusionment with our elected leaders at the time of Watergate, culminating in the unmasking and suicide of chief conspiracist, Number One, a thinly disguised Richard Nixon, in Captain America # 176 (August, 1974).

Cap threw away his identity as he felt that ‘…there was no way I could keep calling myself Captain America because the others who acted in America's name were every bit as bad as the Red Skull...’² He became Nomad, a man without a country until he realised that he must return to being America’s champion, ‘"....my naivete is my problem, not America's. The country didn't let me down, I let her down by not being all I could be...there has to be somebody who'll fight for the dream...."³

Like the Walt Whitman poem, written about losing Lincoln to an assassin’s bullet, Kirby’s Cap picks up Englehart’s theme and delivers the best of America right at us as we face the conspiracy crisis of the Madbomb. We, the ‘swaying mass’, want a Captain, someone who will lead us away from the shouting, away from the judgement, away from voices that promise light but deliver hate, we want ‘…somebody who’ll fight for the dream.’

When hate comes, it seems to come suddenly, as Cap and Falcon sit at table about to drink soup and then the ‘mindwave’ strikes! Cap: ‘I’ll break you Falcon!’ Falcon: ‘Try it whitey!...’ The wave comes from the outside, yet this hate clearly sits just beneath the surface, it comes from within.

A recovered Cap and Falc run into the streets and find…chaos, ‘….the madbomb at work. Unseen and undiscovered, its invisible waves are screaming in a sea of minds…creating a force against which even super-heroes are helpless.’ Violence and conflict, there were two attempts on the life of President Ford in 1975, were still a big part of American life.⁴

Cap recalls his World War II past, when he fought right wing fascist dictators, intent on dividing nations, spreading racial hate, all to seize and maintain power. After destroying a small version of the madbomb, he laments ‘I feel as though I’ve been sitting though reruns of old nightmares….’ He stands over strewn streets as a man crouches down next to him and seems to speak for the reader: ‘Where am I? How did I get here?'                  

Cap and Falc get closer to the mystery of the madbomb as they make contact with government agents, ‘…the news media will report your incident as a riot. But we know that we’re faced with a fearful conspiracy.’ Then deep in the government agency fighting the madbomb, they meet its leader, Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger (!) who confirms they are facing a ‘national emergency.’

The scale of that emergency is soon upon them, not just a challenge to the individual, a community, the biggest madbomb of them all, ‘Big Daddy’, a giant size disembodied brain bomb, is set to go off and release hate that will destroy America in its bicentennial year.

Kirby’s best work has always been multi-levelled. In Cap # 193, he is not simply asking who Captain America is but as the country remembers its past in the present, who is America, what is America, what are its values, what does it stand for? The Captain America comic has always been about individual and collective, national, identity. As big moments are marked, 200, 250, 300, who is the best of us, what can we aspire to, who are we together?

Jack Kirby’s America, his Captain, was about decency, honour, ingenuity, creativity, racial equality, friendship, kindness, welcome, community, democracy, strength. He fought for those things, he lived those things, for him, those qualities weren’t things that other people had long ago, they were values, ways of living that would last. Kirby drew from his past but as the last words on Cap # 193’s letter page note, ‘….Marvelous Marv Wolfman assures us that Jack is thinking not of the past but of the future.’  There’s no time to lose in responding to the Captain’s call.

‘Time is truly wastin'
There's no guarantee
Smile's in the makin'
You gotta fight the powers that be’

….

I got knocked on the ground
By all this bullshit going down
Time is truly wastin'
There's no guarantee’

Fight the Power, Isley Brothers. The song hit # 4 on the Billboard top 100 in the week of 30 August 1975 and went to number # 1 on the Rhythm and Blues chart in 1975.

Footnotes

¹ O Captain! O Captain! Poem by Walt Whitman, published in the collection, Sequel to Drum Taps, 1865.

² Captain America # 183 (March, 1975).

³ Ibid.

⁴ The first attempt was by Manson Family member, Squeaky Fromme on September 5, 1975, in Sacremento. The second was by Sara Jane Moore on 22 September, 1975. Ford subsequently wore a bulletproof trench coat, beginning in October, 1975.

Research this issue -

Comics:

-According to Jack Kirby (Michael Hill, Lulu, 2021)

-Comics Journal # 134, February 1990 (Jack Kirby interview by Gary Groth)

-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website

- Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows)

Popular culture:

-Chronicle of the 20^th Century, Editor in Chief John Ross, Viking, 1999.

-Helter Skelter, the True Story of the Manson Murders (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, W.W. Norton, 1994)

-The Games People Play (Eric Berne, Penguin, 1964)

-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)

-The Vietnam War: The Definitive Illustrated History (Penguin Random House, 2017)

-Uncovering the Sixties (Abe Peck, Pantheon, 1985) 

-Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War (Max Hastings, William Collins, 2019)

Michael Mead is a 59-year-old New Zealand comic book collector, who likes to think he can do "contextual" commentary reviews of old comics, asking: "where does this story come from?", looking at the social, political, cultural times it came from, the state of the comics industry, the personal and creative journey of the writer or artist, the personal journey of the reader as a child and as an adult. 

As part of this, he is vain enough to think he can bring new insights into Jack Kirby’s comics, primarily Kirby's Fourth World comics and so, on the 50^th (or 40^th) anniversary of publication of each issue of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, Forever People, New Gods and Mister Miracle, he published a contextual commentary. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

 

Shout, shout, let it all out

“Is not oblivion forever a dark red line which leads the mighty to the sewers of the contemptible silent?”₁

A dictator rules, demanding his populace give him total obedience, fighting ‘a new kind of war for a new age’₂ by remote control with deadly toxins, poison sprays, ravaging life-forms, with an ultimate weapon, a piece of mobile technology that you can hold in your hand, at its heart  ‘a fearsome pygmy’₂₃, a little electronic mark that enslaves millions, poor ignorant Hunger Dogs controlled by ‘push button babes.’₄

Jack Kirby’s prophetic voice rings clear in the Hunger Dogs, his final word on the Fourth World, which came out 40 years ago today, 21 March, 1985. Following on from the events of ‘Armagetto’ in New Gods # 6 (Baxter series, August, 1984), we return to Apokolips with Darkseid triumphant, overseeing new methods of domination, Orion dead, and the beginnings of an underclass rebellion from the lowest of the Apokoliptian low, the Hunger Dogs.

It doesn’t take long for Kirby to bring a revelation. Orion lives! Resurrected by Himon on Apokolips, a legend cannot die. The Hunger Dogs are repulsed, they distrust what they see, ‘poor, ignorant Hunger Dogs, eternally used, eternally abused, lie for Darkseid! Die for Steppenwolf…try each road to futility.’₅

Darkseid’s corrosive influence is felt beyond Apokolips as his boom tubes ‘pour their hideous bounty of carrion and toxic rot upon New Genesis’.₆ The Anti-Life equation now transformed, replaced by technology and transported instantly anywhere, micro-marks spreading hate planet-wide, a crowd-control device that is ‘cheap, swift and unfailing’₇ and ‘could destroy a continent.’ ₈ Micro Mark, ‘the fearsome pygmy’, ‘….shall labor for Darkseid with the swiftness and ease of his notable sensitivity.’₉

Technology, in service of a dictator can destroy our communities, our way of life, its narcissistic efficiency takes no account of human relationships, tradition, our shared values, the good we have built. In the hands of young zealots ‘…the cosmos lies open to button-pushing babes…’,₁₀ success is measured purely in numbers. Technology frees the evil in our own hearts.

Who can stand against this insidious force, that creeps into the cracks in every conversation? None but heroes, Himon, Lightray, Orion, Bekka (Himon’s daughter). Orion leads a revolt of the Hunger Dogs, against Darkseid and his chief advisor, shockingly revealed as the formerly innocent New Genesis child, Esak: ‘For what is power now but cheap techno-plumbing and an aging, quaking Darkseid.’₁₁ Esak, once protégé of Metron, untethered from his guide, his faith in technology leading him to ‘….revelation! Revolution! Then…pain.’ ₁₂ Darkseid pegs him, ‘By the dark infinite! Is there no end to the casual arrogance of your wonders?’₁₃

Orion easily defeats Esak and in a touching scene, Kirby continues Orion’s character development as he does not judge Esak but instead empathises with him. Orion rejects his own dog-solider cynicism and intercedes for Esak with the Source, ‘Judge him as he was, and not what he became.’₁₄ Orion could easily be talking about himself.

Kirby believes in the power of personal transformation to meet great challenges, in the power of love to overcome hate, in the strength of someone’s heart not in the way they look. Orion reveals his true from, sans motherbox,  to Bekka after the battle against Esak, saying ‘There can be no love Bekka…unless it can live with truth.’₁₅ He turns to Bekka and she says ‘Can one resist the face…after she’s seen the heart?’₁₆

The irony of the Hunger Dogs is that the story is more about these moments than the Hunger Dogs rebellion which opens and  closes out the book. Darkseid is deposed as New Genesis explodes and Apokolips collapses in paranoid chaos. Orion outsmarts Darkseid by rescuing his mother Tigra, completing the mission he started in New Gods # 6 Baxter series.

Darkseid is left alone to rebuild his empire. Defeated, friendless, betrayed by those he once dominated, a colossus reduced to a speck on a disappearing horizon.

Highfather and his New Gods escape on their floating city towards ‘a planet called hope.’ ‘The world we seek must find us – we are the ones who are lost.’ ₁₇ The haughty New Gods, who made an idol of beauty, who elevated themselves skywards above others, are now humbled, they must remake themselves ‘without arrogance or desperation.’ ₁₈ Highfather had earlier realised that ‘…this problem is our own…it has risen among us.’₁₉ Good cannot continue to battle evil in the same way it did in the past, it must be born again, it must go back to the Source.

Even as their world is destroyed, as they oppose overwhelming forces, as many of those around them give up and lay down, Orion, Lightray, Bekka, Highfather, Himon, Lonar, stand up. They live their values and shout to be heard against the evil in the world because love, community, family, forgiveness, history, truth, matter more to them than power and control. There can be no love unless it can live with truth.

‘Shout
Shout
Let it all out
These are the things I can do without
Come on
I'm talking to you
Come on’

Shout by Tears For Fears (# 10 on the Billboard charts for 21 March, 1985)

Footnotes

₁ Hunger Dogs, pg. 12, The Elder Gods.

₂ Ibid, pg. 5, Darkseid.

₃ Ibid, pg. 13, Darkseid.

₄ Ibid, pg. 17, Darkseid.

₅ Ibid, pg. 8, Himon.

₆ Ibid, pg. 21, Highfather.

₇ Ibid, pg. 5, Darkseid underling.

₈ Ibid, pg. 13, Darkseid underling.

₉ Ibid, pg. 13, Darkseid.

₁₀ Ibid, pg. 17, Darkseid.

₁₁ Ibid, pg. 42, Esak.

₁₂ Ibid, pg. 43, Esak.

₁₃ Ibid, pg. 37, Darkseid.

₁₄ Ibid, pg. 46, Orion.

₁₅ Ibid, pg. 49, Orion.

₁₆ Ibid, pg. 50, Bekka.

₁₇ Ibid, pg. 60, Highfather.

₁₈ Ibid, pg. 61, Highfather.

₁₉ Ibid, pg. 24, Highfather.

Research this issue -

Comics:

-According to Jack Kirby (Michael Hill, Lulu, 2021)

-Comics Journal # 134, February 1990 (Jack Kirby interview by Gary Groth)

-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website

- Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows)

- Old Gods, New Gods (Jack Kirby Collector # 80: TwoMorrows)

Popular culture:

-Chronicle of the 20^th Century, Editor in Chief John Ross, Viking, 1999.

-Helter Skelter, the True Story of the Manson Murders (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, W.W. Norton, 1994)

-The Games People Play (Eric Berne, Penguin, 1964)

-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)

-The Vietnam War: The Definitive Illustrated History (Penguin Random House, 2017)

-Uncovering the Sixties (Abe Peck, Pantheon, 1985) 

-Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War (Max Hastings, William Collins, 2019)

Michael Mead is a 58-year-old New Zealand comic book collector, who likes to think he can do "contextual" commentary reviews of old comics, asking: "where does this story come from?", looking at the social, political, cultural times it came from, the state of the comics industry, the personal and creative journey of the writer or artist, the personal journey of the reader as a child and as an adult. 

As part of this, he is vain enough to think he can bring new insights into Kirby's Fourth World comics and so, on the 50^th (or 40^th) anniversary of publication of each issue of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, Forever People, New Gods and Mister Miracle, he published a contextual commentary. This is his 48th of a projected 50 Fourth World commentaries. He will also do commentaries on  the Absolute Jack Kirby volume two story, ‘Road to Armagetto’ and a final commentary/overview of the Fourth World. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kirby plays for keeps

 

The unforgettable fire of Jack Kirby and his Fourth World  booms back in his fight to the finish between father and son, Darkseid and Orion, in ‘Armagetto’, New Gods # 6 (Baxter reprint series), published 40 years ago today, 9 August, 1984.₁ The Kirby series is resurrected after a long period away but still bursts with the same, insurgent, big picture confidence as it lands punches like an Olympic comics champion, still burning with ‘ultimate ferocity’.₂

Much has changed since we last saw the Kirby New Gods, both for characters and creator, in New Gods # 11 (November, 1972). America’s creative, revolutionary, transformative Sixties have vanished. Sunk low by Watergate, inflation, two oil crises, economic recession, a botched hostage rescue, the culture is gripped by failure. Kirby has left comics, working in animation  after his 1975 to 1978₃ return to Marvel where his former readers turned pros, undermined him.₄

Like a heavyweight boxer, down for the count in the 14^th round, America and Kirby are never out of it. The regenerative power of both country and man to remake themselves lives and breathes life into the fight for survival, ’tigers in the night’.₅ Reagan’s ‘it's morning again in America’ unleashes a new wave of pride and prosperity for those lucky enough to benefit from it. Reagan is running for a second term, slap bang in the middle of the 1981-87 greed is good share market bull market and during the  July to August 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (no Commies). The Games are the showpiece centrepiece of American political, military, physical, confidence and exceptionalism.

Into this world, Kirby comes flying, back with the Real Thing, a primal, physical and mental struggle against the Evil Empire, son versus father. The shadow boxing of the previous 12 years is finished. Orion ‘pulls up his guts’₆ and goes in for the kill. Kirby’s opening pages of Armagetto are all big picture moments, double-page spreads, victory follows dominant victory…..until Orion has to be rescued by children.

The voices of marginalised people are always heard in Kirby’s comics. The youthful Newsboy Legion, the counter-cultural Forever People, the Black Racer, Big Barda. Kirby is interested in crossing the boundaries that separate us, discovering how difference can unite not divide as we face the challenges of our age. Like the mechanization/computerization he explores in Armagetto, a tool for the ‘….great, monumental cobra…’ Darkseid who is ‘…eager to swallow us….into his push button paradise.’₇

Darkseid is never a one dimensional villain in Kirby’s world. Jarringly, he needs things like we do, he is lonely, he needs friends. Unlike us he doesn’t make friends naturally, with vulnerability, he reforms past enemies, oozing them back into existence like  reanimated corpses, grotesque slow motion twists and turns of death played backwards in time. His first friend is the one who betrayed him, Desaad. Darkseid knows he is evil, so he can trust him.

Orion also needs a companion. Lightray, Richie Cunningham with super-powers, the idealistic, brainier, wordy, flower-child to Orion’s tunnel-visioned, realist, dog-soldier, Vietnam vet. As the last time we saw them, Orion takes time to see the wisdom in the ‘fool ’Lightray’s arguments. For the ‘amateur warrior’ has appeared to talk Orion out of his death mission: ‘’The confrontation between father and son is wrong! It bodes ill for you and Darkseid!’

This time it is Lightray who is humbled. Orion tells him that he isn’t here on Apokolips to kill his father but to rescue his mother: ‘When I was given to New Genesis in my youth as a lifelong war hostage…there was one on all Apokolips who fought Darkseid’s deal. That’s why I’ve returned. To fight for her. My mother Tigra is still alive….and Darkseid’s prisoner.’ It wouldn’t be a Kirby Fourth World comic without a revelation.

Suddenly the reader’s expectations are confounded. Armagetto becomes a story not about revenge but about rescue. Not about a son and a father but about a son and a mother. A child saving the one who gave him life not a victory over a parent who brings death. Kirby’s characters and stories are never simply about physical action, as good as he is at showing it, they’re about the people within those perfect, idealised, forms: ‘Darkseid, Highfather, and the rest of the cast have always been sincere expressions of my feelings, reactions to all the things I knew were out there in the night….’₈

Kirby warms us up for the fight as Darkseid resurrects multiple villains from the past, Steppenwolf, Kalibak, Mantis but these ‘animated…shells without identity’ are no match for the Mother’s Son. The prophesised  fight between father and son is on! Yet it is not a classic 15 rounds, it is a dance of deceit and cowardice by the Lord of Apokolips who fakes defeat and has his son murdered by anonymous others.₉ Orion’s bullet-ridden body drifts in space, crucifixion pose.

Orion’s eyes are as ‘black as coal’’₁₀. He has failed in his quest. Darkseid has won. Or has he? Orion has transcended his own hate, his own pain, his own desire for revenge. He has sacrificed everything so that that the Lifegiver might be free. Orion has rejected Darkseid’s will as ‘….he seeps into our hatreds and prejudices, and nurtures our biases until they become time bombs – primed and ready to activate the worst in us.’₁₁ He has walked ‘ til you run and don’t look back’ ₁₂and discovered the love within himself, ‘for here I am.’ ₁₃ Darkseid will live on in doubt, Orion will live forever in the certainty of redemption.

‘Ice, your only rivers run cold

These city lights, they shine as silver and gold
Dug from the night, your eyes as black as coal

Walk on by, walk on through
Walk 'til you run and don't look back
For here I am’

Unforgettable Fire by U2 recorded between May and August 1984

Footnotes

₁I’m aware of the 1976 New Gods revival by Conway et al and Kirby’s own New Godsesque ending in Captain Victor for Pacific (1981). My focus in these commentaries is the continuation of Kirby’s official New Gods story with DC characters in the order the reader of the time would have read them. So New Gods # 6 (Baxter reprint series), Hunger Dogs, Road to Armagetto (most recently published in the deluxe second volume of Absolute Jack Kirby and for the first time in colour).

₂A reference to Orion’s utterance in the closing moments of New Gods # 11 (November, 1972. See my commentary).

₃Old Gods, New Gods, pg. 130.

₄In his comments on a blog by Daniel Best, Steve Bissette, who often visited  the Marvel offices in the late Seventies, observed  the mocking treatment of Kirby’s work by younger Marvel staff.

₅From Kirby’s endpaper comments in New Gods # 6 (Baxter series).

₆Ibid.

₇Ibid.

₈ Ibid.

₉Just before Darkseid has Orion killed, there is a moment when Orion stands over his father and indicates his intention to deal with him. My interpretation of this moment is that Orion would not have killed Darkseid if he had had the chance based on what Orion has said previously to Lightray when Lightray challenged him to not fight his father. Orion’s mission is to rescue his mother. During the fight with Darkseid, he even says if his mother can be freed, he will never return to Apokolips. There is no mention anywhere in the fight that he intends to kill Darkseid.

₁₀From the lyrics to Unforgettable Fire by U2 recorded between May and August 1984. U2 were channelling the atomic bombing of Japan when they wrote this song.

₁₁From Kirby’s endpaper comments in New Gods # 6 (Baxter series).

₁₂ Unforgettable Fire, op.cit.

₁₃ Ibid.

Research this issue -

Comics:

-According to Jack Kirby (Michael Hill, Lulu, 2021)

-Comics Journal # 134, February 1990 (Jack Kirby interview by Gary Groth)

-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website

- Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows)

- Old Gods, New Gods (Jack Kirby Collector # 80: TwoMorrows)

Popular culture:

-Chronicle of the 20^th Century, Editor in Chief John Ross, Viking, 1999.

-Helter Skelter, the True Story of the Manson Murders (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, W.W. Norton, 1994)

-The Games People Play (Eric Berne, Penguin, 1964)

-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)

-The Vietnam War: The Definitive Illustrated History (Penguin Random House, 2017)

-Uncovering the Sixties (Abe Peck, Pantheon, 1985) 

-Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War (Max Hastings, William Collins, 2019)

Michael Mead is a 58-year-old New Zealand comic book collector, who likes to think he can do "contextual" commentary reviews of old comics, asking: "where does this story come from?", looking at the social, political, cultural times it came from, the state of the comics industry, the personal and creative journey of the writer or artist, the personal journey of the reader as a child and as an adult. 

As part of this, he is vain enough to think he can bring new insights into Kirby's Fourth World comics and so, on the 50^th (or 40^th) anniversary of publication of each issue of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, Forever People, New Gods and Mister Miracle, he published a contextual commentary. This is his 47th of a projected 50 Fourth World commentaries. He will also do commentaries on  the graphic novel Hunger Dogs (1985), the Absolute Jack Kirby volume two story, ‘Road to Armagetto’ and a final commentary/overview of the Fourth World. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!