Through a glass darkly, love is coming to us all

The Forever People are like hippies in Sixties Haight Ashbury looking up at the bus full of straight Middle America staring out at them behind the glass, snapping photos like they are some kind of zoo specimens.¹ State America was happy enough with the counterculture as long as it could be some kind of powerless tourist attraction, a sappy summer camp to send the kids before they grew up and went back to school, shaped up, put on a suit and led the life their fathers and mothers had.

The trouble was that these kids were different and Jack Kirby knew it: “I filled (the Fourth World) with the people of the Sixties, and I called them the Forever People, because they seemed like Forever People to me. They were a new step, a new social event in the epic of America…the Forever People were the young people of their time, beautiful, active, highly intelligent, and wonderful material for stories. I used the young people of the times; the times themselves became the backdrop of my stories.”²

Those same beautiful youths, Mark Moonrider, Big Bear, Serifan, Vykin the Black and Beautiful Dreamer and their real-world counterparts had something to say. It’s just that the culture did not want to hear it and did everything it could to divide society, to disrupt the Movement, to distort the message, to silence the Sixties voice and trap it in an echo chamber ghetto.

Forever People # 4, published 50 years ago today, 1 June, 1971, opens with the screaming, parched, desperate denizens of Desaad’s colourless blue Kingdom of the Damned, a deathly Disneyland, called ‘Happyland’. Those who are trapped behind its one-way prison glass include the Forever People. It is not for them to walk leisurely through its happy surrounds and absorb its safe, 1950s perfect world. They are stuck, they are its tormented inmates who are ignored and their voice is not heard.

Desaad, agent of the Apokloliptian State, uses a ‘master scrambler’ to turn the damned’s cries into laughter, their desperation into amusement, their pleas for order into threats. The chilling image of the humpty dumpty figure, with an American flag cap who has a passing resemblance to Nixon, with the voices of the desperate silenced, their cries turning to ashes in their mouths, is like an image of the madness of society trying to carry on as if nothing is happening in Vietnam, nothing is happening in the streets, all is calm like a silent Christmas night, like a Don Rickles comedy special after watching 30 US soldiers get killed by a PAVN 122mm rocket hitting their bunker at Charlie 2³ or seeing 12,000 of your friends get arrested in the May Day protests.⁴

The two ways of seeing the world, the State’s and the counterculture’s were at war and Kirby reflects this conflict in his stories. The incredulity on both sides, how can you believe that, how can you think or do that? Mark Moonrider pleads with the straights who look at him through the glass, from his ‘unbreakable, transparent, cage’: “Help! You out there! Help me! What’s wrong with you?...Why do you just sit and stare?’’ The occupants of the amusement ride, under- the-boardwalk- era clothes and countenance, only see a skeleton howling thanks to Desaad’s scrambler, they see media-created caricatures, like their real-world counterparts on the San Francisco bus tours.  

It’s not the world that is different, it is the way you see it. Your feelings, your awareness changes, what once satisfied, what once made sense, now no longer does, ‘a happy place, turned into hell.’ The non-violent Forever People don’t want revolution, they want to communicate, they want people to hear, to understand. Their strength is in their vulnerability as in previous issues where they connect with outcasts, youth, the crippled. You want them to fight back physically but they don’t or won’t.⁵ The Forever People try to change people’s hearts and they suffer for it.

Our heroes are up against an ideology, an all-encompassing anti-life that won’t be reached by the mind, the voice, the heart. In June, 1971, the Forever People and the counter-culture look like they are on the ropes. Yet there is hope. Their lost mother box resists Desaad’s destruction, Serifan alone has the strength to defy Desaad and on the horizon, Sonny Sumo, the Banzai Express chances upon the suddenly materialised mother box and hears it calling out his name for help.

In one of the issue's mini posters after the story’s end, Kirby foreshadows the future, ‘Beautiful Dreamer versus Darkseid! Both hold the key to victory in the strangest war ever fought in comicdom’s history!’

As Beautiful Dreamer lies still beset by Desaad’s nightmares, she like the rest of the Forever People awaits the Mother Box’s call of deliverance. The dream is still alive, through the Looking Glass, someone will see, someone will hear, ‘….carry on, love is coming, love is coming to us all….’.⁶

¹A tour company organised a bus trip around San Francisco’s hippy areas in 1967, the same year as the Summer of Love, billing it ‘the only foreign tour in the domestic United States’, Video of the tour appeared in PBS’ documentary, ‘Summer of Love’

²From Jack Kirby Collector # 24, page seven, April, 1999.

³30 U.S. infantrymen, many from Company A, 1st Battalion, 61st Infantry Regiment, were killed when a PAVN 122mm rocket hit their bunker at Charlie 2 on 21 May, 1971. Source: Veterans of Foreign Wars Magazine, May 2011.

⁴From the New York Times, May 6, 1971, page one.

⁵Kirby deliberately made the Forever People non-violent. ‘The Forever People are non-violent. The Forever People are a challenge to comics, because although they engage in violent activities, they never fight…I don’t feel you have to show blood and gore and guts. I think it’s repellent. I’ve seen enough of it in reality….’ From an interview originally published in Train of Thought # 5, 1971, reprinted in Jack Kirby Collector # 17, November, 1997.

⁶From the lyrics to ‘Carry On’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The live version had come out on the double-live album, 4 Way Street, released in April, 1971.

Research this article:                                           

Comics:

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

-Jack Kirby Collector # 17, November 1997 and # 24, April 1999

-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!