Kirby's Kids refuse to be silent

 

By January 1971, Jack Kirby was writing and pencilling and editing all four, 4^th World titles. Even for an artist as prolific as Kirby (his 1970 deal with National/DC required a minimum of 15 pages a week*) ,that is a big load and something had to give. That something was Jimmy Olsen.

Jimmy Olsen # 136, on the stands 50 years ago today, 14 January 1971, came out on the same day as Mister Miracle # 1 (see my MM # 1 blog also out today). Jimmy Olsen is the most straightforward of all the 4th World titles. It starts with a bang as Kirby’s first auteur comic for DC and Jimmy Olsen # 133 and 134 are terrific, full of the kind of energy, connection to youth culture and revisioning of Jimmy and his relationship with Superman (see my earlier blogs on these issues). Their themes of identity, separation, innocence, dissolution, distrust, revolution resonate still.

Kirby was certainly working on the other three titles but the first two issues hit you between the eyes because he had time. By Jimmy Olsen # 136 the demands of creating an entire new universe of characters take their toll and Jimmy Olsen becomes the most traditional of the four titles as Giant Green Hulk Kryptonite-Coated Jimmy Clone goes a few rounds with the Big Red S/New Guardian and we learn about competing clone projects on Earth and Apokolips.

When Kirby met with National/DC they offered him Superman and asked him to revamp it but he declined and instead said to Infantino et al, ‘what’s your lowest-selling title?’**. The reply was Jimmy Olsen. Anything to do with Superman means you have to help bear the corporate burden of the company’s founding character and I think Kirby felt restrained with what was possible. He wasn’t at National/DC to do other people’s characters, he wanted to do his own.

When I look at the four 4^th World titles I think they all have a different function and perhaps target slightly different age groups. New Gods sits at the top of the Kirby universe, it literally tells the story about the World. Forever People, regarded as the centrepiece title by many commentators is about the People, the characters are the most closely tied to the counter-culture youth Kirby saw all around him in California. Jimmy Olsen is about the Kids. It’s about the fights, the camaraderie, the joie de vivre Kirby remembers growing up in the Lower East Side of New York. Mister Miracle is about the Individual, Scott Free on the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey we all need to define for ourselves.

In this company, Jimmy Olsen is the least sophisticated of the four titles because it is targeted at the youngest audience. But Kirby being Kirby, he managed to say something which caught my eye and got me thinking about a situation closer to our own time. Darkeseid’s Project minions, Mokkari and Simyan regroup after a call to Darkseid and help Kirby with his exposition as they talk about how their mission is to replace the Earth Project with theirs and bring chaos in the place of order, “…from that chaos will arise the new masters of earth – with the great Darkseid as their exalted leader.” They talk about how they will destroy the Earth Project and “….It shall become again as it once was ---empty! Silent!’’

Darkseid brings chaos and that chaos simply destroys, it delivers nothing in the place of what once was, only emptiness and silence. Evil isn’t creative in the sense it cannot build anything. It can only tear things down. Darkseid is a being of no principles, no morals, no ethics. Behind his words, there are no thoughts, behind the rage, there is no strength, only empty darkness. Kirby who landed on Omaha beach only 10 days after D-Day fought against the evil of a great darkness, Hitler and his Nazis***, the unrestrained Will of a narcissistic colossus. According to multiple commentators, Kirby had Hitler (and even Nixon) in mind when he created Darkseid.

Yet like all despots, like all demagogues, Darkseid will overreach himself. His empty words will ring hollow, his followers will melt away, their bravado replaced by cowardice. The appeal to force will always be attractive to many, to shut down free will with ‘the outside control of all living thought’**** an all-encompassing effort to get people to think and act in only one way, controlled by an outside force. We, the people, cannot be silent when our dark side speaks.

*Comic Book Resources website (interview with Mark Evanier, Kirby’s assistant)

** Comics Journal # 134, February 1990, pg.94

*** Comics Journal # 134, February 1990, pg. 68

**** New Gods # 1, pg. 9.

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)

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

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! 

 

 

 

 

 

A Miracle in Time

 

Scott Free got out. He escaped as an orphan from Grannie’s unkind goodness on the 4^th world hell of Apokolips but he didn’t escape scot-free. He was hit by Darkseid’s ricochet:

“Sweet Child in time you’ll see the line

The line that’s drawn between good and bad

See the blind man shooting at the world

Bullets taking their toll,

If you’ve been bad, Lord I bet you have

And you’ve not been hit by flying lead

You’d better close your eyes and bow your head

And wait for the ricochet.”

(Child in Time, Deep Purple, 1970)*

 

In Mr Miracle # 1, which came out 50 years ago today (14 January, 1971), Jack Kirby, as always, is writing and creating on multiple levels. On one level, he tells a story about a ‘super escape artist’, the ‘making of a legend’, a miraculous man who blends science and spirit to soar past the challenges of all traps, who puts his life on the line each time, a man who ‘cheats death.’ You could enjoy the story just for its own surface sake, like a comics Evel Knievel.

On another level, Kirby is interested in the journey of the human spirit and how it overcomes pain, particularly childhood pain. As Scott gets to know the original Mr Miracle, Thaddeus Brown, Brown tests him by chaining him and daring him to escape. The elder Miracle and assistant/Kirby avatar Oberon, are surprised when Scott doesn’t struggle.

Scott says “The trap is not in the chain—it is in the brain…” When you’re trapped and you can’t get out, when you are someplace bad, struggle is useless. When a terrible thing happens to you, you fight but you fight against a force that will inevitably overpower you. Scott accepts the moment and transcends it by connecting to something bigger than himself. Before the trap test, he reaches into his bag and the comforting voice of the mother box. Oberon says: “Look at him! He reached into the bag and touched something – now – look at him!” Scott says “I’m ready.”

Scott Free carries a lifetime of hurt, collateral damage from an unholy exchange deal between Moses (Highfather) and the Devil (Darkseid). As a child, he is abused, trapped in Grannie’s torturous, terror orphanage, hit by the flying lead of a blind Darkseid shooting at the world. A child in time, his cries, his needs are drowned out by the all-consuming needs of the discordant, distorted, abusive adult. The wails in the Deep Purple song only grow stronger and louder, faster, more insistent until in the second half, there is a moment of peace, a lament and finally cries of pain, ‘No! Do it! No! No!’

The need to escape pain is universal, escape from bullying, from abuse of all kinds, from people who deride you because you are different. We run from it. We seek an altered state through drink or drugs or anything else to avoid being present with pain. We also seek solace in things and people that give us hope and love, comics, community, a future vision of ourselves that reaches back to our child in time and says ‘you will make it.’

Scott Free as Mr Miracle rushes at pain in defiance of it. He challenges death each time using all the tools he learned in hell. At first it’s how he survived as a child, escaping from his own body and the pain he felt, now it’s how he lives as an adult, escaping from traps, each escape a reaffirmation of his own journey. He won’t be put down, drowned out, his voice will be heard, he won’t be abused. He seeks to turn the pain he felt as a child into something transformative, serenity in the face of death.

Scott Free remembers the wounds, he carries the scars the ricochets put there. He wears them proudly because they are not the signs of a victim but evidence of a miracle. Of someone who went through so much pain and came out, healed.

“Spread the word around

The rat is leaving town

The message is a song

The misery is gone

….

Now I’m free

And I can see

And I am me…”

(Flight of the Rat, Deep Purple, 1970, the song after Child in Time on the album, Deep Purple in Rock).

 

*Child in Time was released on the Deep Purple Album ‘In Rock’ in June 1970, as Kirby prepared to write and draw Mister Miracle # 1.

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).

Discography:

In Rock, Deep Purple, 1970

Popular culture:

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

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

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!