Hear me!: Jack Kirby’s 4th World rebellion

By 1970 Jack Kirby was angry and so was the world. The dissolution, distrust and despair of youth politics in the US with the Movement to End the War in Vietnam cowed by the Kent State and Jackson State killings, Charles Manson on trial in Los Angeles, the secret bombing of Cambodia, the break-up of the Beatles, the Weathermen (Weather Underground) ‘bringing the war home’ through domestic terrorism. If ever there was a year of modern American revolution and ferment, it was 1970. Into this turbulence stepped Jack Kirby with a rebellion of his own, the Fourth World, beginning in Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen # 133 (October 1970, on sale date, 25 August, 1970).

Kirby had been stewing at Marvel for sometime before his 1970 move to National. He grew increasingly irritated with the way Stan Lee misrepresented his creative contributions, took too much credit and then took away characters that Kirby really cared about, most tellingly the Silver Surfer in 1967. Lee’s straight ahead drive to create a commercial juggernaut jibed against Kirby’s unrestrained urge to explore the outermost limits of his imagination.

Almost gone in 1966 with a similarly dissatisfied Steve Ditko, Kirby conceived the Fourth World but withheld it from Marvel. He, like the world around him, wanted to escape into a place which he could call his own and where he could find freedom, recognition, reward, response. The Fourth World of New Genesis for Kirby was a new birth. When National’s publisher Carmine Infantino asked Kirby at a face-to-face meeting in 1969 in California to ‘save Superman’ Kirby had been ready to jump at something for a long time.

What is striking about Jimmy Olsen # 133 is the multiple shocks that it generates. Jack Kirby leaving Marvel?! Coming to National??!! Superman’s Ex-Pal???!!! Jimmy in a motorcycle gang running over Superman????!!!!! It can’t be! When I read this story as a child I’d been used to Jimmy as a foppish, dependent, Weisinger dilettante. Now, here he is as a rebellious, muscular, fighter, an independent leader. Where was patrician parent Superman’s protégé pal? Where did all this come from?

Suddenly I saw someone else. I saw me. When a character or a reader separates themselves from their parents, when they choose their own way outside the establishment, they become themselves. Kirby was clearing space, not just for Superman, for Jimmy but for the reader and for himself. This is the moment when a work of art becomes real, all the energy bursting in Kirby’s head doesn’t exist until it is experienced by someone else. Until a reader responds.

Kirby’s exploration of the waning youth counter-culture of 1970 is key to this. His own concern to be creatively ‘relevant’ is more about writing and drawing things he cares about than political relevance but as a 53 -year old man he still understands what being young feels like. It’s a big part of his own story. Jacob Kurtzberg was an outsider in WASPish America, a Jewish man doing outsider art in comic books, held down by larger forces. In the cultural period of what we call the Sixties, 1965 – 1973, where so much was questioned and tossed aside, Jack Kirby wanted to run something over but he also wanted to get to someplace better.

His world in Jimmy Olsen # 133 is not the nihilistic world of those who wanted to tear down everything in society and replace it with anarchy, it is the world of someone who wants people to just hear his voice. It is a world where younger voices matter, where readers can imagine being ‘free to do their own thing’, with the technology, the power of the WhizWagon to go anywhere they please, even to a Wild Area Woodstock which their parents don’t understand.

At a time when hope seemed in short supply, when the power of the parent State seemed to know no limits, Kirby offered us a vision of what could be different. In his own way, he drew from his own pain, gave it his best Sunday punch and took us to another world.

This is the first of a series of commentaries/reviews on Jack Kirby’s 4^th World comics (Jimmy Olsen, Forever People, New Gods, Mister Miracle). Each blog will come out on the 50^th anniversary of an issue’s publication e.g. Jimmy Olsen # 133 (publication date 25 August 1970) will be live on 25 August 2020.

Research this article: the indispensable Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows), There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007) and Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website.   

Michael Mead is a 54 year old New Zealand comic book collector, one year older than Jack Kirby when he unleashed the 4th world. This fact is no doubt the first of many terrifically humbling facts that will become apparent in these commentaries/reviews of Jack Kirby's comics.