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!