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!