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!