Like a New God, he creates them as perfect Adams and Eves, cloned best bits, without Original Sin, innocent and free, “…they are their own experience and follow it where it leads them. Their minds are fresh and new, clean slates unmarked by rigid hardening, conflicting indoctrinations….they fear nothing, they hate nothing, worship nothing but their own compatibility with the rest of Creation.”
Hippy hairy outsiders are like children, in the words of a contemporary writer, the counter-culture “…rediscovered a childlike quality that it supremely treasures, to which it gives its ultimate sign of reverence, vulnerability and innocence.”* And from Joni Mitchell’s 1969 song Woodstock, “….we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden…..” (of Eden), before hate, before hierarchy, away from the competitive Apokolipitical Anti-Life of parental capitalism.
Views like this were met with cynical dismissal at the time
from the Establishment, parents, civic leaders who had a different
understanding of human nature and remembered their own youthful innocence
before it was swept away by the inevitable compromises of middle age. Yet the
idealism, the hopes, the desire for something different, to be left alone when
you are different to others, to see the best in them and be Good are universal,
present in all religions, all secular philosophies. They are also at the heart
of comics fandom.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in full flight in 1970, from Johnny Rogan's book, Crosby Stills Nash & Young while Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and the nephews curse Gladstone Gander's luck, again!
I got into hippie music about the same time as I started
reading comics, as a young child in the early 1970s. We sang Joni Mitchell’s
Big Yellow Taxi as five-year old new entrants at school and I went home to read
about Duckburg’s greatest loser, Donald Duck. I liked the high harmonies of
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the soaring notes and the lifting vision of
what and who it was possible to be in this world. Choosing to be a hippy in
1970 was a bit like being a comics fan in the same or any era, it puts you on
the outside. People don’t understand you and some are even hostile.
Kirby continues about the Hairies: “That is their challenge – to find a way of living with what is around them without the mindless, merciless, prerogative of inflicting destruction. Of course, this makes the Hairies perfect targets for all of us! We’ve got to kill them! Wipe them out!! They are not like us!”
If you retain the innocence of your youth in some way, if
you still like superheroes, if you are quiet and gentle, if you want to live in
harmony, you will attract conflict, judgement. Anything outside the norm, your
hair, sexuality, philosophy, paper pamphlet habits gets you whomped on, laughed
at during high school. So where do you go to be accepted, to a place where
people “…exert no pressures on their fellows. They strive to give to each other
what they can – and that can be quite a bit….each Hairie considers the other a
most valuable and miraculous organism…”?
Comics fandom is the Woodstock of outsider culture. It has a long history of bringing together all those who don’t fit in, of treating people well who have been cast out by society, the shy, the sensitive, the artistic, the autistic. No community is perfect and it would be easy to point to people and groups in fandom who aren’t like this but overall in its relative powerlessness, in its unknownness, in its stubborn belief that there is a place for you if you like comics no matter who you are, fandom provides a Hairy Hippy Haven.
The famous-in-comics image from the 1969 Comic Art Convention in New York
Kirby’s 4th World comics continue to be about far
more than a battle between good and evil with great-looking machinery. He
connects with youth culture in a way that his former Marvel counterparts at the
time could only dream about. His heart, his hope, his hippy idealism resonate
strongly, 50 years later.
‘Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning.’
(from the lyrics to Woodstock, by Joni Mitchell, 1969).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRjQCvfcXn0
* Charles A Reich, from his book The Greening of America, as quoted in Time Magazine, November 2, 1970, pg. 13
Research this article:
-Time Magazine, November 2, 1970, 'Fuzzy Welcome to Cons. Ill, pg. 12-13
-The indispensable Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows)
-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)
-Crosby Stills Nash & Young (Johnny Rogan, Omnibus Press, 1996)
-Sense of Wonder - My Life in Comics Fandom - the Whole Story (Bill Schelly, North Atlantic Books, 2018)
-The Golden Age of Comics Fandom (Bill Schelly, Hamster Press, 2003)
-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website.
Michael Mead is a 54 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 50th anniversary of publication of each issue of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, Forever People, New Gods and Mister Miracle, he will publish 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!
The unforgettable fire of Jack Kirby and his Fourth World booms back in his fight to the finish between father and son, Darkseid and Ori...
