At a time when God was dying, Jack Kirby gave us New Gods.
Three days before Christmas 1970, Kirby’s kinetic creativity exploded in the pages of New Gods # 1, 50 years ago today, 22 December, 1970. At the time, America and the Western World, the Christian West, was in ferment with theologians, philosophers, atheists proclaiming the Death of God by which they meant the death of the theist God, God as a separate being who would intervene in human affairs. God, who was inside and outside the Universe, immanent and transcendent, had been given His (second wave feminist theologians hadn’t quite achieved widespread use of female terms for God) marching orders.
The Death of God wasn’t just a subject confined to the coteries of religious institutions. It was front cover news in popular culture (Time Magazine, 8 April 1966) right around the time Kirby was creating the Fourth World but not giving it to Marvel.
The ideas of German theologians Rudolf Bultmann, the Bible’s demythologiser who distinguished between history and heilsgeschichte (‘holy history’) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘’God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along without Him….”, (Letters and Papers from Prison, London, 1959,pg. 95) formed during World War II, reflecting the experience of Christians at a time of great crisis, were beginning to filter down to the wider Western populace, both sacred and secular, as the insurgent Sixties challenged, threw out and remade the culture. It became less and less possible to believe in a theist God when the evil of the Nazi death camps or racism or sexism or the war in Vietnam seemed to draw no response from an omnipotent God.
Into this context stepped Jacob Kurtzberg, Jewish champion of the Outsider Art, filled with the stories of the Torah, Kirby makes his biggest Fourth World statement yet with New Gods # 1, a cosmological epic in 23 pages introducing Darkseid scion Orion, New Genesis, Lightray, Metron, Highfather (the Fourth World’s Moses), Kalibak, and the central conflict of the whole Fourth World, the pursuit of the Anti-Life equation. Whew! The New Gods have arrived in stunning, mind-expanding, world-building fashion! ‘An Epic for Our Times!’
On the face of it, Kirby seems merely to be telling a familiar story, another series of God beings with a dualist dynamic. It’s an irony of our times that in 2020, with Christian belief in the Western World much lower than in 1970*, that a largely secular audience is still hugely attracted to stories about Gods, superhumans. Even when our God practice has fallen by the wayside, the conventional many given way to the intentional few, our imagination is still engaged, our desire to be told conventional God stories is still strong, in the sense of another reality beyond this one about people with cosmic power.
Kirby’s story is not so straightforward as it first appears. He wants to tell a story about the moment he is in: “I feel that whatever story there is to this ‘gods’ business, the ‘new’ gods or the ‘old’ gods, I feel that there is a story to them. I feel that there was an actual replacement of the ‘old’ gods by new ones which are relevant to what we see and hear….This is a whole new interpretation and cannot be told with shields and swords; it must be done with what we know and deal with what we worry about.” (Comic and Crypt interview with Kirby on 31 January, 1971, published November, 1971).
And what do we know and deal with and worry about? The 'Life Equation’. When Highfather seeks counsel he turns to the Source (Wall) and the moving hand writes words which prophesy the future war with Apokolips. Orion calls the eternal advice ‘irrevocable’ but Highfather corrects his stepson’s still developing theology, ‘’But it does not decide. The right of choice is ours! That is the Life Equation!” Free Will is at the centre of New Genesis’ world, not (pre) Destiny. The Divine can advise but does not interfere. We make the difference by doing good or evil to each other. The Source is more like Lutheran Protestant theologian Paul Tillich’s (1886 – 1965) ‘Ground of All Being’, not a theist, separate, outside force who created the Universe but the Universe itself.
And what of the Anti-Life Equation? Kirby gives an answer which ties straight into the times. Metron says, “The Anti-Life Equation was undiscovered until these days! It means the outside control of all living thought.” Kirby doesn’t settle for a simple explanation of evil. He defines it like a totalitarian State, an Orwellian, Fascist, all encompassing effort to get people to think and act in only one way, controlled by an outside force, sort of like a certain kind of politics in 2020.
The Sixties, that short 1965 to 1973 period brought to popular consciousness many ways to see truth, it threw out the monocultural, (mono) theist, patriarchal, hetero-normative, narrow, stifling view and opened the doors to an undiscovered country of popular thought, a new consciousness, a Teilhard de Chardin type ‘noosphere’, a new sphere, where the evolution of thought of the noosphere would be a new birth, a ‘noogenesis’, New Genesis.
The Life Equation, what we all engage with in our lives, isn’t an unchanging theist God, it is the human, everlasting journey of thought, freedom, creativity that we all add to with each breath and expand noogenesis. Modern Christians see this as an expression of the Divine, Christianity is not set, it is dynamic, tending non-theist, it evolves with the times.
Beyond all its theological, philosophical content, New Gods # 1 is just so damn exciting! It feels so alive, so here. The momentum that builds carries you forward so powerfully it becomes difficult not to exclaim out loud. It is impossible to take in all the concepts, the implications, the sweep of the story in one reading. Marv Wolfman in the endpiece writes, “…you watch raw energy strained to its utmost. The imagination of Jack Kirby has no boundaries, no limits…nothing is too incredible to be conceived. A wise man once said that when man eventually reaches the far end of the universe, he will undoubtedly find the name Jack Kirby signed on the lower right-hand corner.”
From New Gods to the God of comics, our ever-expanding universe of knowledge and the stars keeps us looking ‘just over yonder’ to where Kirby takes us. It is a journey that will never end, a Christmas gift that keeps on giving.
Research this
article:
Comics:
-Comics Journal #
134, February 1990 (Jack Kirby interview by Gary Groth)
-Mike’s Amazing
World of Comics website
-The Indispensable
Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows)
Popular culture:
-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007).
Theology:
-A History of
Christianity (Diarmid McCulloch, Penguin, 2010)
-From the Big Bang
to God (Lloyd Geering, Steele Roberts, 2013)
- Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrick Bonhoeffer, London, 1959)
-Time Magazine, 8
April, 1966, ‘Toward a Hidden God’ pgs 82-87)
-Tomorrow’s God
(Lloyd Geering, Bridget Williams Books, 1994)
-Wrestling with
God: the Story of My Life (Lloyd Geering, Bridget Williams Books, 2006)
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!
