Is that a landmine in your lunchbox?

Jimmy Olsen # 139 (July, 1971), published 50 years ago today, is like that joke your Dad tells over and over because he thinks it’s funny and you think it’s lame. Somehow though, it lodges itself in your brain and then you see there’s something more to it. Something you rushed past in your youthful cringe, something he’s slipped in there, like a time capsule that goes ping at a pre-determined time, when you’re ready to see it and when you open the contents, when you unscrew the top of that 1950s metal jar he stuck in the ground, you suddenly see a childhood moment with adult eyes.

In this case that Dad is Jack Kirby’s version of the ‘Merchant of Venom’, ‘insult’ comedian Don Rickles or to be more accurate his lookalike ‘Goody Rickles’, one of Morgan Edge’s research staff at Galaxy Broadcasting Service. National/DC decided to showcase the real Don Rickles, who was riding high with a successful comedy album, TV show and appearance in a prominent movie¹, in two issues of Jimmy Olsen to help promote the comic. Rickles gave his permission for a brief appearance and then felt exploited by National’s fulsome use of his likeness, later disowning the comics.²

Kirby’s treatment of Goody Rickles in Jimmy Olsen # 139 is almost pure comedy. It’s an unexpected change of pace from the main storyline, Morgan Edge’s involvement with Darkseid and Inter-Gang. So it’s unsurprising that readers then and since have panned the two issues. It’s easy to agree with letter-writer Gerald Triano, that Jimmy Olsen “….is being used as a supplement to Mr Kirby’s trilogy of mags, and nothing more.”

Yet there are some very funny moments including Edge’s murderous exchanges with Goody which are like a straight man/funny man stand-up routine, and some pointed satire. As my one-time comic-reading sister said to me when she was reading these commentaries, Kirby is amazingly subversive with a youthful audience. The kind of material, issues, ideas he is exploring, eyeline straight into the brain, heart and consciousness of a child, unnoticed by the contemporaneous adult world and then instantly stand out when that child reader gets old.

The first bit of text on the cover is: “Are you ready for defoliants in your succotash? Are you ready for landmines in your lunchbox?” Vietnam worsening, no end in sight, the counterculture’s final big push, the May Day 1971 protests at Washington D.C. over and each night, over dinner, or at lunch at school, images flashing before your eyes of young men dying, Agent Orange defoliant billowing across the screen, violence on domestic streets, anger and dissent, bitter generational conflict.

The juxtaposition of Kirby’s words mirror the compartmentalisation in society that was happening at the time. The jarring nature of such an all-encompassing conflict expressed as entertainment  ‘up next, more death in Vietnam, followed by the Don Rickles comedy hour, only on ABC!’ It’s like Kirby is saying, ‘this is what they’re serving up to you, are you going to swallow this?’ Jimmy Olsen # 139 follows on the aerodisc heels of Mister Miracle # 3 whose cover copy told readers about the paranoid pill and said ‘buy it, don’t swallow it!’

Kirby’s subversion continues in the vein of his signature Fourth World satire from Forever People # 3, the Glorious Godfrey issue. There’s a cynicism to the lines he feeds Goody, as the costumed researcher veers from slapstick, cornball, physical comedy to undermining authority, puncturing dreams. Goody hugs, mock punches Edge and then the agent of Apokolips becomes frustrated with the Rickles doppelganger: “(Edge) Walter Cronkite won’t get it! Truman Capote won’t get it! But you! – Goody Rickles! You’re going to get it! (Goody) It’s like John Wayne says! The American dream—it works! You just have to eat apple pie and believe!”

These aren’t sentiments your average eight- year- old reader would be used to reading. In its own way it’s a negative nod to the big red S, the idealistic State symbol of everything good, the super dream of truth, justice and the American way. Kirby features Superman prominently in Jimmy Olsen and undermines what he represents at the same time. Not everybody makes it, barriers are there for some but not for others.

The ‘landmine in your lunchbox’ is not a stink bomb put there by one of your friends, it’s not a literal bomb from a B-52, it’s the realisation that despite all the good intentions from others, all your fervent beliefs, things might not be as they seem, things may not work out for you, after all. The joke is an ugly truth. Are you ready for this?

¹Don Rickles was a nationally-know comedian, a peripheral member of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack with a long list of screen credits. His 1968 comedy album, 'Hello, Dummy!' charted to a high of # 68 in the Billboard top 200 charts. In the same year ABC gave him a variety show which lasted one season. In 1970, Rickles had a notable role in the film Kelly's Heroes, sharing billing with co-stars Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland and Carroll O'Connor. 

²From Mark Evanier’s ‘News From Me’ website blog, Sunday May 21, 2017 at 1.48pm.

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. This is his 16th Fourth World 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!  

Paranoia in, peace out, the Miracle pill

 

‘I need someone to show me

The things in life that I can't find

I can't see the things that make

True happiness, I must be blind

Make a joke and I will sigh

And you will laugh and I will cry

Happiness I cannot feel

And love to me is so unreal

 

And so, as you hear these words

Telling you now of my state

I tell you to enjoy life

I wish I could but it's too late.’

 (Paranoid, Black Sabbath, 1970)¹

 

Did you have a moment, when it all started slipping away, when you lost hope, when you couldn’t trust anymore, when you became unmoored so far away from anything you yearned for and nothing was as it seemed? Is that when you took the Paranoid Pill? The occupants of Chandler Towers have no choice as they inhale the pill’s vapours and turn into ‘5,000 raving maniacs’ bent on destroying Scott Free in Mister Miracle # 3 (August, 1971), published 50 years ago today.

The predicament Jack Kirby put his super escape artist in via Apokolips’ Dr Bedlam, reflected the feelings some of his readers would have had. Paranoia was widely felt by countercultural youth at the time and with good reason.

From The Ring Magazine Muhammad Ali Special, 2016 pp. 79

On March 8, 1971, on the same night as Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier in New York in the ‘Fight of the Century’ with millions of people listening to radios or watching in theatres, the Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office outside Philadelphia and stole 800 documents which showed the Government was spying on black and student groups.²

From Time Magazine, 5 April 1971, pg. 15

The Commission released the papers to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. In June, 1971, the New York Times would publish the ‘Pentagon Papers’ showing how successive American administrations had lied to the public about Vietnam.

Paranoia isn’t bound by history. It comes at us in all times and places when we are at our lowest, when we feel cut off from our natural community, when we feel ‘other’, separate, strange, when we begin to believe happiness, love, is only for other people. Life hasn’t delivered for us and it can drive despair as equally as rage. For some it leads to faith in demagogues such as Glorious Godfrey and Dr Bedlam who play on the grievance paranoia brings, who say there is someone to blame.

Unlike Godfrey, Dr Bedlam doesn’t persuade and delude by words, he doesn’t invite his followers to fool themselves, he simply drugs them with his paranoid pill and lets its vapours blow the top off of their underlying fears, enmities, delusions. Scott Free’s fight against these ‘maniacs’ is like a journey from the unconscious (top floor) to the conscious (bottom floor) as Bedlam sets him the task of getting out of Chandler Towers alive.

Bedlam is Kirby’s rumination on the effects of evil. The bad doctor is only an elemental force until he can inhabit an ‘animate’, until his evil can be given life. Bedlam can only enter a blank slate, a being who has lost the spark behind the eyes, whose pupils are deadened, whose life and actions have corroded their soul, a human husk. 

The animates are like Alison Bechdel’s father, who lived a double life, in her graphic novel about her life, ‘Fun Home.’ To be around him was like being ‘…in the presence of an absence.’ ³ Evil is not a devil, it is not creative, it is anti-life, the absence of good. Invited in, it hollows out the good and leaves only emptiness, it can only animate a lifeless form.

Scott Free faces this kind of evil with Apokolips. If anyone has the right to feel paranoid, it is Mister Miracle. Targeted by Darkseid and Apokolips from birth, abused in Granny’s terror orphanage, constantly looking over his shoulder for the next evil menace, a ‘full second’ from death in traps he willingly puts himself in, he escapes as Mister Miracle because he has seen his fears, he has accepted where they come from and what he must do about it. Like Kirby’s advice to the reader on the front cover of Mister Miracle # 3, ‘Buy it! But don’t swallow it!’ Yes there is chaos, there is fear, there is mania but we don’t have to consume it.

Scott Free hasn’t pushed fear away, he hasn’t run from paranoia, he has let it in to see it, to know it, to prevail over it. “….You can’t visualize the kind of enemy we face unless you truly experience the effects of its power.” Unlike Dr Bedlam’s poor, innocent, victims, who walk on the poisoned ground Bedlam lays down and become infected, Scott’s childhood terrors have inoculated him, built up his immunity, he stares clear-eyed into the abyss and comes out unscathed, because he has already been there.

Facing a vanishing point death at the end of the issue, he seems in an inescapable physical trap but you know he will win because his mind is free. He has found happiness, he has felt love, it’s never too late for Mister Miracle.

‘It don't come easy,

You know it don't come easy.
It don't come easy,
You know it don't come easy.

Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues,
And you know it don't come easy.
You don't have to shout or leap about,
You can even play them easy.

Open up your heart, let's come together,
Use a little love
And we will make it work out better,

I don't ask for much, I only want your trust,
And you know it don't come easy.
And this love of mine keeps growing all the time,
And you know it don't come easy.

Peace, remember peace is how we make it,
Here within your reach
If you're big enough to take it.’

(Ringo Starr, It Don’t Come Easy, # 8 on the Billboard top 100 in the week of 22 May, 1971)

¹Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album was released in the United Kingdom (UK) in September 1970 and went to # 1. The eponymous single was released at the same time and reached number # 4 in the UK charts. In January 1971, the Paranoid album was released in the United States (US), debuted on the Billboard top 200 at # 25 in the week of February 20, 1971 and rose as high as # 12 in the week of March 20, 1971. The US single debuted at # 94 in the week of November 28, 1970 but only reached a high of # 61 in the week of 26 December, 1970.

²Time Magazine, 5 April, 1971, pg.15.

³From Tom Crippen’s review of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, The Comics Journal # 278, October 2006, pg. 154.

Research this article:                                           

Comics:

-Comics Journal # 134, February 1990 (Jack Kirby interview by Gary Groth)

-Comics Journal # 278, October 2006

-Fun Home, Alison Bechdel, First Mariner Books, 2007

-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)

-Time Magazine, 5 April, 1971

-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!