Can you hear the music?

 

Jimmy Olsen # 137 (April 1971) published 50 years ago today (18 February, 1971) is both 1930s cliff-hanger matinee and metaphor for Woodstock Nation versus the State. It’s social commentary wrapped in pulp as the big Red S Action Ace, Jimmy and the Newsboy Legion come up against the Four-Armed Terror, no one comes out unscathed.

Kirby continues to provide unmatched multi-level entertainment as his fascination with the hippie hairies probes beyond their fashion, past their hirsute appearance and into their philosophy, into what they have to say to their society. Kirby is strongly attracted to the way the counterculture seemed to have been able to shake off the strictures of hundreds of years of embedded, inherited programming of who people are, who they should be, how they should relate to others, what they should think, believe, how they should act. Kirby’s creative drive is his unfettered self-expression, his commitment to his own open-ended identity. As a 53-year old World War II veteran, he is unlike many of his peers, he wants to see what is new, his imagination is sparked by seeking out difference.

Kirby senses in the hippie culture that in their commitment to a New Eden, they have connected to something greater than themselves, a new consciousness. He represents this as oneness, a harmony between black and white, youth and age, men, women, children, enabled by science and spirit as Jimmy, Superman, the Newsboy Legion and the Hairies are taken on a ‘trip’ by ‘solar-phone’, a device that ‘…gathers in the radio-signals from the stars and convert (sic) them into mental musical images.’

Music is the lingua franca of youth culture. It’s a language that their elders do not understand and that youth cannot fully explain but they know what it is saying. In the Woodstock film (director’s cut 1994), the interviewers ask attending festival attendees about the music. The answers youth give age don’t really satisfy the questioners because they are simply on a different wavelength. It’s like adults trying to tune into a distant signal on an old transistor radio while youth are hearing a sound only for their ears broadcast with a new song.

As in other issues of the Fourth World, Kirby finds a way to show drug consciousness without showing drug use.  Supes and the boys float past the Eye of God and through collaged images of ‘shifting, kaleidoscopic, geometric forms, of alien spaceships, new worlds and Eastern religious imagery, as if ripped of the wall of a Laurel Canyon pad.

Their heady flight into the light fandango is suddenly interrupted as the effect of the Four-Armed Terror becomes apparent. The beast is bent on taking away the atomic power of the project, a creation of evil factory overseers, Darkseiders Simyan and Mokkari. The dread duo seek an atomic explosion, the ‘last day of the world’, an apocalypse.

The Four-Armed Terror literally takes away the foundations of the Wild Area ‘dropout society’. In this way the beast can be seen as a metaphor for the State, the three arms of government, legislative, executive, judicial with one more arm thrown in for good measure, the four arms (rather than horsemen) of the apocalypse. Riven by dissension, infiltrated by COINTELPRO and CHAOSⁱ, horrified by Kent State and Jackson State, the counterculture leadership in 1971 was under sustained attack and in danger of collapse.

The Terror is destruction, emptiness, he is not filled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, just a lust for power. He proves a match for Superman and even hairy sound waves from the Newsboy Legion cannot stop him. The issues ends, appropriately apocalyptically enough with a revelation, the Four-Armed terror was just a prophetic prototype, his brothers and sisters hatching from Evil Project shells are set to wreak even more havoc.

Jimmy Olsen’s pulp propels the action but the subtext sustains the adult reader. ‘Each of us hears the music in the way it pleases him most!’ says one Hairy girl floating on the back of a geometric wave, ‘Groovy! This is a real gas!’ says Jimmy. Kirby has all bases covered.

Footnotes:

¹ COINTELPRO and CHAOS were FBI and CIA programmes respectively, designed to discredit the counterculture and maintain the status quo.

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:

-COINTELPRO and CHAOS: How the FBI and the CIA Suppressed Dissent in the 1960s (Nick Tomich, medium.com, 4 March, 2020

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

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

-Woodstock 40^th Anniversary Revisited, the Director’s Cut, 2014 (three disc blu-ray set)

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! 

Like son, unlike father

Could you kill your father? If your father was an evil, manipulative, abusive parent, deliberately creating a climate of fear, hurting all those around him, breaking their will to fill the black hole of his own endless desire, would you do it? What would stop you?

These are the questions that Orion, scion of Darkseid is beginning to face in New Gods # 2 (published 50 years ago today, 18 February, 1971). He is not yet aware that Darkseid is his father but he senses a bond between them. Confronting Darkseid who sits in an office chair in a nondescript room, everyday evil next to you in your cubicle, Orion cries out ‘King of the Damned! I can finish you now!’ Darkseid’s reply chills and taunts at the same time: ‘Finish me and you finish yourself! You hesitate Orion! You can sense why—but you don’t know do you? But Darkseid is free of mysteries. He can act!’¹

The fantasy to be able to stop a great evil before it wreaks its worst, before Darkseid can find the anti-life equation, ‘the ability to control free will’, to kill a Hitler before they came to power, these are dreams many have had, but would we do it? Killing a relative, let alone the one who created you is as Darkseid says, like finishing a part of yourself. That part that hopes for redemption of someone bad, the part that hopes for love from someone who shows none. Even if killing that evil would remove fear, Orion hesitates.

Close to danger: Jack Kirby lived in Thousands Oaks, CA, in 1971, currently 38 minutes away from the downtown Los Angeles and 26 minutes away from Manson's base at Spahn Ranch at what was 12000 Santa Susana Pass Road (now 23000).

The fear on Kirby’s pages was real in the streets all around him in Thousand Oaks where he lived and 38 minutes away in Los Angeles proper. Darkseid doppelganger, Charles Manson, had just been found guilty of the Tate-LaBianca murders in the Los Angeles Hall of Justice, along with three of his girls, Susan ‘Sadie Mae’ Atkins, Patricia ‘Patie’ Krenwinkel and Leslie ‘Lulu’ van Houten.²

As the subsequent ‘penalty trial’ began³, there was a huge earthquake in Los Angeles, 6.5 on the Ritcher scale in which 65 people died⁴, just over a week before Forever People #2 came out. Manson’s girls outside the courtroom claimed they had caused it. Hollywood’s entertainment elite and many others lived in fear of Manson’s minions as they promised after the Manson verdict, ‘You are next, all of you.’⁵ The debut of Black Sabbath’s Album ‘Paranoid’ (in the same week as Forever People # 2) could not have described the times more aptly.⁶ 

It must have felt a little like Desaad’s Fear Machine in operation. Darkseid describes the inner workings of both his abusive mind and the workings of the Fear Machine’s gears: ‘Emotional turmoil breaks the dikes of the mind—and releases the flood in which we must fish Desaad.’ Manson, like many abusers, had a special talent to target the most vulnerable, the weakest, those most desperate for love and belonging.

Like Darkseid he fermented emotional turmoil, promising a helter-skelter future, which only he and his followers would survive, an apocalypse with an upside.  He created an atmosphere of false affection and drew his followers to it, to the point where they lost the sense of themselves and then were so open to the power of suggestion, that they would kill.

Darkseid’s, Manson’s, Hitler’s evil is so active in its destruction. Apokolips’ fiery pits and machinations make the unspoilt, green paradise of New Genesis and its high-minded leaders look passive by comparison. The inhabitants of the ‘sunlight, sister world’ seem so trusting to the point of child likeness. In Orion they have a much-needed champion. Someone who unknowingly, carries knowledge of evil within him, ‘…though I be of peaceful New Genesis, I shall strike with more ferocity than can be mustered in all Apokolips.’

Whether Orion actually kills his father remains to be seen but in a sense he already has. He has created an identity based on difference. Orion is an example to his father of what might have been, choosing love over hate, courage over fear, life over anti-life.

Footnotes:

¹ A number of writers have commented on the similarities of the relationship between Orion and Darkseid compared with Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Both Orion and Luke do not know who their father is early on. This has led to speculation that George Lucas took key plot ideas for Star Wars from Jack Kirby. See article on the Kirby Museum website.

² The jury in the case of the People of the State of California vs. Charles Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Leslie van Houten, found all four guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and seven counts of murder, on Monday 25 January, 1971. Bugliosi, pg 539.

³ The penalty trial, to decide the sentence, began on Tuesday January 26, 1971, Bugliosi, pg. 543.

⁴ The earthquake struck at 6.01am on February 9^th, 1971, nine days before Forever People # 2 hit the stands. Bugliosi, pg. 554.

⁵ Manson girl, Sandra ‘Sandy’ Good repeated Manson’s words, delivered in court months before, on the corner outside the Hall of Justice, after the guilty verdict. Bugliosi, pg. 540.

⁶ Black Sabbath’s Paranoid Album debuted on the Billboard top 200 album charts at number 25, in the week beginning Sunday 14^th February, 1971. Forever People # 2 was published on the 18^th.

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:

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

-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! 

Truth is forever

In the eternal battle between life and anti-life, truth lives forever. ‘Truth is real! Truth lives forever – we’re the Forever People!’ Beautiful Dreamer’s words in Forever People # 2, published 50 years ago today, 2 February, 1971, are at once speaking to the times they came from and to our own. What was once taken for granted, now seems under attack.

Jack Kirby locates truth and life in youth, the Forever People bring a new counter-cultural consciousness at odds with the tired stereotypes of their elders. The middle-aged yokels who greet Mark Moonrider, Big Bear, Vykin the Black, Serifan and Beautiful Dreamer when they make their city debut amongst Earth’s wider populace, resort to cliched hippie catcalls and are deftly and eruditely put in their place by a bemused Big Bear.

When the Forever People, those who seek eternal truths, find a place of their own to be, the first person they meet is a crippled child, Donnie, in an otherwise deserted area. Outcasts alone, together, the Forever People in full garb are like a Western outlaw rock ‘n’ roll band, a Byrds after Crosby, a Buffalo Springfield. 

The Byrds’ 1970 Untitled album, released 14.9.70, on the charts when Forever People # 2 debuted ¹

Donnie’s uncle shows up and immediately sees danger before the empathetic Dreamer senses what will calm him and changes his perception of what he sees, no longer alien hippy ‘savages’ but Dick van Dyke Show era Mary Tyler Moore² an All-American lettered sports star, an adult businessman and a Western rancher in a wide-brimmed hat.

The Forever People’s power, their life, is not simply their outer-worldly abilities but the quiet connection of relating to people who are different and bringing them closer. They know that you don’t have to reveal everything about yourself all at once but you can show enough of who you are, you can let people see enough of themselves in you.

Kirby is always pointing in his comics to something bigger than yourself. Serifan lets Donnie hold one of his ‘cosmic cartridges’ and suddenly Donnie is ‘…everywhere at once.’ In a kind of psychedelic but without the drugs vision, Donnie sees ‘….everything – and everything moves – and makes a kind of beautiful noise…’ Serifan replies ‘Harmony is the word Donnie! You’re listening to – all there is!’

In this way Kirby reflects the transcendent truths found by Sixties youth who took drugs to expand consciousness, like the Hairies, the Forever People, ‘…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.’³

By 1971 this kind of Sixties dream was fading. Previously revolutionary figures such as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman had become clownish parodies of themselves as corporate culture sought to commodify and pacify the revolution.

If you can’t overthrow the State, you could at least buy a part of the Revolution ⁴

The last attempt at some kind of counter-cultural unity, the National Coalition Against War, Racism and Repression in January 1971 (a few weeks before the publication of Forever People # 2) between the Yippies, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe), had broken up in disarray amidst infighting as the power of the State infiltrated and undermined the various movements. Hoffman lamented, ‘A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.’⁵

The Forever People brought their own, ego-less consciousness to bring change and challenge the powers that be. They didn’t seek attention or fight amongst themselves like their real-world long-haired counterparts, they sacrificed their own individuality for a greater cause. 

To defeat Mantis, the villain of the piece, the Forever People each ‘..lose their life to find it…’⁶ as they commune with the Source in an Ark of the Covenant moment, holding up the Mother Box and becoming one hero, the Infinity Man: ‘Make us one with that life! Let him displace us….let him enter on the power of the word….even as we vanish when the word is said—‘, like one version of Biblical creation, ‘….in the beginning was the Word….’⁷

It turns out that Infinity Man vs Mantis is only a secondary battle. Darkseid, sitting in the background is not concerned with turning humans into slaves as Mantis craves, he wants something far more powerful, the Anti-Life Equation found in as yet unnamed terran. His evil is strategic, not tactical. His pursuit of the prize is relentless. In Darkseid is the personification of anti-life, like a reverse Jesus, he has come that you may have death and have nothing else.⁸ Anti-life is ultimately selfishness, it is selling out your soul and it is an incredibly active and pernicious force in Kirby’s world and in ours.

The Life vs Anti-Life battle recalls the quote from Dylan, ‘…that he not busy being born is busy dying.’ ⁹ For truth to live forever, good people cannot do nothing. The system itself is not enough, we need to join together to make us one with life. Serving each other will defeat selfishness. Taaruu!

¹ After the excesses of 1967’s psychedelic Summer of Love, the hippy scene had begun to sour by 1968 with scores of homeless young people flooding Haight-Ashbury, the drug scene moved towards harder drugs like heroin. Hippie headline artists like the Byrds, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash, preferred to live a country lifestyle, far away from the madding crowds, in places like Laurel Canyon or Woodstock (Dylan). The Byrds led the way musically with Sweetheart of the Rodeo (30.8.68) the first major album widely recognised as country rock. I think Kirby, who was an astute follower of youth culture, picked up on where the counter-culture was headed and styled his characters accordingly.

² Mary Tyler Moore co-starred in the Dick van Dyke Show (1961-66). By 1970 she had her own Mary Tyler Moore show (1970-77) as her character developed from a small-town girl to a woman who threw off patriarchal perceptions every time she threw her hat in the air. Forever People # 2 came out towards the end of the first season of Mary Tyler Moore.

³ From Kirby’s text piece in Jimmy Olsen # 135, cover-dated January 1971.

⁴ The advertisements appear in Forever People # 2, after page 12.

⁵ As quoted in There’s A Riot Going On, page 406.

⁶ Matthew 16: 25, ‘For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.’ New International Version of the Bible.

⁷ John 1:1, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ New International Version of the Bible.

⁸ John 10:10, ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.’ Jesus as the Good Shepherd referring to the life he will give his followers, as found in the English Standard Version of the Bible.

⁹ From the lyrics to It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) on the Bob Dylan album, Bringing It All Back Home (Columbia Records, released 22.3.1965).

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!