Kirby's travels: riding the tempest

Are we truly beyond time? Are we beyond death? Young Esak poses these questions to Metron in Jack Kirby’s New Gods # 4 (September, 1971), published 50 years ago today, immortality being a perennial subject from Socrates to Swift to Superman, to Serifan.

Central to living forever is the idea that we can stop or even reverse the aging process, through scientific advancement. That we can stop time, preferably in our 25- year-old body, get beyond it as Esak says. While we’re waiting to be able to do that, some people, like baseball star Ted Williams, however involuntarily, have been put on ice. Secular resurrection it seems may also be an option in the future.

In comics both immortality and resurrection happen all the time. Death has lost its sting for superheroes who die valiant deaths only to eventually be revived, brought back, through some incredibly unlikely plot twist introduced just at the point a new generation of readers arrives. Immortal beings in comics are as common as multi-national tax avoiders.

As a Jewish man and regularly attender at Temple, Jack Kirby would have been familiar with the ancient Hebrew idea of Sheol, the underworld which claims the lives of humans, whose body and spirit are not immortal.² He would know about the later Jewish belief in resurrection around the time of the second century BC Jewish rebellion, where a select few who had not collaborated with their conquerors would be justly restored to life, bodily or spiritually. A widely-read comics creator, Kirby would know about the Greek (and subsequently Christian) idea of immortality which held the soul lives on after the body dies, no resurrection needed for the immortal soul.

In his Fourth World comics, you can see these ideas playing out. Darkseid is kind of Sheol Grandmaster. His pursuit of the anti-life equation, total control over all living thought is about the final death of the body, the spirit/soul, the imagination. It concerns the end of our ability to be human, even if we are physically alive, we are psychically dead. 

His own immortality has led him down the darker path, like Swift’s Struldbruggs, who as consequence of never dying, lost interest in life, became petty, angry, miserable, envious, vain, cut off from others and who left unfettered, would ‘…in time become Proprietors of the whole Nation, and engross the Civil Power; which for want of Abilities to manage, must end in the Ruin of the Publick.’³

The Black Racer, like the conquered Hebrew people, has suffered (in Vietnam), he is crippled in his bed, as per my New Gods # 3 commentary, a metaphor for black America. Yet his journey symbolises the Civil Rights movement, black power comes to him and he is lifted out of his bed and raised to life, like Lazarus to perform his duties as the New Gods’ African American valkyrie. The death of the New God Seagrin, the answer to Esak’s earlier question, seems like a Viking death, the earthly body consumed, ‘the Source will take you as a warrior who has given all.’ You get the feeling that Seagrin’s spirit is on the (resurrection) way up (Valhalla) not down (Sheol), cosmologically speaking.

The Forever People, facing death in Forever People # 3, are not afraid because they believe their spirit will live on, it cannot die.  Connected to the Source by the Motherbox, they speak their Truth quietly, intimately, to the weakest and leave them with the strongest message, ‘Donnie, life is good! Live it for others – not against them. In that way you will always be close to us.’ In that truth, they live forever.

Kirby’s life was dedicated to the pursuit of the outer limits of his imagination, his quest is eternally human. He put down on paper his answers to the questions the ancients posed and answered with immortality and resurrection: Is there meaning to life? Is there hope? Do good and bad matter?⁴

These seem to me the quintessential questions for every human but particularly the super-human. Super-man or New God, colourfully garbed heroes are the exemplars, the vanguard who answer those questions with a super ‘yes!’ The meaning they give to their lives is how they help others and the urgency in doing so comes because their life is finite. Metron, Lightray, Orion come from the Source of all that is good and return to it once they pass. 

Darkseid, Desaad, Kalibak hollow out their souls, desecrate their bodies in shadow, they become the absence of good by denying it whenever they see it. Evil is not an equal, oppositional force with its own original identity, it is simply the negation of Fourth World good, anti-Life.  When darkness dies, it collapses in on itself, an empty husk absorbed into a black hole.

Kirby has said about the Fourth World that “…there’s good and bad in all of us. We have to face them both, and sometimes we have to make a decision between each. It’s nothing we can avoid. Nothing we can rant against. Each individual has to make his own decision on it.”⁵

Kirby’s heroes may not live beyond death, they may not live forever but for them in their war against anti-Life, they ride the tempest, enter the cosmic fire, they make their decision for good, there is meaning, there is hope, good and bad do matter. Beyond time, beyond death.

¹See ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary short, ’Immortal Man’. Two of baseball great Ted Williams’ children decided to have him cryogenically frozen.

²Here I have drawn on Ian Harris’ article on Immortality in the New Zealand magazine, Touchstone, June 2021, pg. 5.

³From Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, pg. 215.

⁴Harris, op. cit

⁵Kirby in Jack Kirby Collector # 17, pg. 20.

Research this article:

Comics:

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

-Jack Kirby Collector # 17, November, 1997

-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website

-The Indispensable Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows)

Literature:

-Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986

Popular culture:

-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)

-Uncovering the Sixties (Abe Peck, Pantheon, 1985)

Theology:

-Ian Harris in his Honest to God column in Touchstone magazine, June 2021. Harris ‘blends the secular and sacred’ in his writing on religion for Touchstone and the New Zealand daily newspaper, the Otago Daily Times (ODT). He has recently published a book of ODT columns, Hand in Hand, The Cuba Press, Wellington, 2021.

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!