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!