A natural woman for a miracle man

Big Barda is the Germaine Greer of superheroines, there is no doubt about who she is and what she wants and no man is going to tell her what to do. Her debut in Mister Miracle # 4 (October, 1971), published 50 years ago today, 13 July, 1971, is epochal. At a time when women did not have equal rights, Big Barda decided her own and in her journey with Mister Miracle, she provided him the ‘maximum’.

Like her real-world contemporaries, Mary Tyler Moore, Carole King, Angela Davis, she expresses herself as she truly is, no small feat for a woman in 1971 in our world or hers. Like Greer’s 1990s remembrance of her hugely influential book, the Female Eunuch (1970)¹, Barda wants to live with the ‘…freedom to be a person, with dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, talk loudly and sit with your knees apart. Freedom to know and love the earth and all that swims, lies, and crawls upon it.’²

Barda is no fanboy, fetishistic, fantasy-engineered, cos-play, lust object. She is a proper woman in the best and fullest sense. Straight out of Kirby’s favourite Marilyn Munro physical form playbook, she is big in all senses, a big body, which she is entirely comfortable with and bigger than life. The total opposite to the prevailing late period, counter-culture, idealised female form, the thin, leggy, rock trophy waif wife Bianca Jagger (then recently-married to tax exile Mick) or the earlier mid-60s Twiggy.

Barda is representative of second wave feminist women who challenged the patriarchal revolution, that power to the people’ includes women.³ I can see her rounding up the brainwashed Manson supplicant succubuses like Squeaky Fromme who still roamed Kirby’s Los Angeles streets, and packing them off to a work camp.  ‘I’ve no time to cuddle your neuroses!’

Scott Free’s pararmour is military. She is a soldier in Darkseid’s army. Barda helped Scott escape from Granny Goodness’ terror orphanage where they were both imprisoned yet she did not leave. She has a bond with Mister Miracle that spans the years and the two of them exemplify many qualities opposite to the traditional gender roles of the time.

Barda is earth to Scott’s spirit, she is strength to his subtlety, size to his slim form, warrior to his priest, ground to his flight, passion to his intellect, action to his thought. In many ways Barda is more ‘man’ and Scott is more ‘woman’. In the humble pages of a then throwaway medium, Kirby is subverting the expectations of the superhero comic audience, he is, as usual, reflecting his times. Without fully realising it, the two characters are being made for each other, they are two proud people who need the other but are only just beginning to see it.

The two of them take moments to teach the other about how they have changed since they last met. Barda stands her ground about her decision to stay at Granny’s and not do what Scott told her to and escape with him (‘Yes, perhaps I should have…but I stayed—to become..what I am.’). Scott pulls Barda up on her reaction to Oberon’s dig after the Kirby avatar has sized her up and reckoned Mister Miracle would be better off without the female warrior. Barda goes full army and says ‘The little rat—he needs a disciplined tongue!’ Scott counters, ‘This is a house of friends, Barda! The strong don’t rule here!’

Scott, the abused child, sees no justice in distorted discipline, no gain in inflicting more pain. His is a New Genesis message of vulnerability, acceptance, freedom, love, reconciliation, qualities more often associated with women. Barda is all consequence, action, punishment, traits traditionally associated with men and practiced to perfidy perfection on Apokolips.

Like John Sinclair of the White Panthers⁴ or John Lennon however, Scott Free has some way to go on the road to female equality. Finished with explaining how he escaped Doctor Bedlam’s trap and 5000 raving maniacs where we left him last issue, the clever, scientific, detached, sensitive miracle man, dressed in an apron while cooking a meal for her, another role reversal many readers would not have seen at the time at home or in popular culture, patronisingly remarks, ‘Oh Barda’s all right. She’s just a child, you know. A powerful, deadly child playing soldier.’

Behind him, Barda has shed her military uniform and has stripped down to her undergarments, which upon seeing her, causes the boys to exclaim, (Scott) ‘I take it back Oberon! That’s a big, beautiful woman playing soldier. (Oberon) ‘Whoever made that gal wear a uniform should be horse-whipped.’

There is no sense here that Kirby is pandering to the reader. Barda’s clothing decision is completely in character. The battle is over, she’s back in the barracks and someone’s cooked good food. She’s just showing the freedom to run, talk loudly and sit with her knees apart. Her sexuality is not simply located in her body, it’s in how she carries herself, how she relates to her community, to her friends, to her mission.

Like all good relationships, the Barda-Miracle dance is one of strong wills and revelations, disagreements and surprises. Big Barda sets Scott, free, in so many ways (and vice versa). She is a natural woman for a miracle man.

‘When my soul was in the lost and found

You came along to claim it
I didn't know just what was wrong with me
'Til your kiss helped me name it
Now I'm no longer doubtful, of what I'm living for
And if I make you happy I don't need to do more

'Cause you make me feel
You make me feel
You make me feel like a natural woman (woman).’

Carole King, from her 1971 album, Tapestry, released 10 February, 1971

¹The Female Eunuch by Greer debuted to ‘mixed reviews’ in 1970 but soon became a feminist classic. By March, 1971 it had almost sold out its second printing. In July 1971, Eunuch was number # 3 on Time Magazine’s non-fiction bestseller list. Time Magazine 5 July, 1971, pg. 60.

²Greer, Germaine (1993). The Female Eunuch. London: Flamingo. p.11.

³Yoko Ono helped bring about John Lennon’s realisation of his sexism in 1971. Lennon said ‘how can you talk about power to the people unless you realise the people is both sexes?’ Ono completed the lesson, ‘…if you are a slave around the house, how can you expect to make a revolution outside it?’ Doggett, pg 422.

⁴Formerly macho leader of the White Panthers John Sinclair underwent a revelation in jail and denounced her own ‘persistent sexism’ in a June 1971 bulletin, ‘Free Our Sisters/Free Our Selves!’ Doggett, pg. 421.

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)

-Time Magazine, 5 July, 1971

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

Michael Mead is a 55-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 20th 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! 

 

 

Kirby's wonderful world rickles with madness

At the time of the greatest climax in the counter-culture’s war against the State, Jack Kirby gave us….double Rickles. To be more precise, Goody and Don because one Rickles deserves another. And no Superman because, well, Superman isn’t funny. Kirby’s second, comedic, rollicking Rickles tale in Jimmy Olsen # 141 (September, 1971), published 50 years ago today, 8 July, 1971, is another opportunity to put the ‘Merchant of Venom’, insult comedian Don Rickles, into the Fourth World. He features prominently on the cover and to the bemused reader, Kirby’s invitation is simply, ‘Don’t ask! Just buy it!’

Taken together, the two Don Rickles issues (see my commentary on Jimmy Olsen # 139, # 140 is an all-reprint giant size comic) are like an extended Dad joke. Only this time you get to go to the office with Dad, like those times at school when you’d write a book report the next day which said something like ‘my Dad sits at a desk and types and it seems very boring’ (hint: the school system does this to prepare you for your adult life, remember?). When Don Rickles visits the office though, beautiful girls love being insulted by him (I’ve never found this a workable seduction technique), middle-aged men act like man-love groupies and want his autograph ‘write something weird and nasty!’ (again, preparation for the resident office sociopath, every office has one).

The focus of Kirby’s Fourth World is on the youth reader but in the two Don Rickles issues he shows the child reader the Parent World. It’s as if Kirby has sealed off the comic from the outside world, while the other three titles prominently feature hippie avatars and their concerns and savagely satirise public figures.

Outside Jimmy’s pages, in the weeks leading up to publication, Woodstock nation rushed towards its greatest climax, it had proved the Government had been spying on them¹ and a 40-year-old strategic analyst and friend to the Movement, Daniel Ellsberg (you can trust someone over 30), had leaked top secret government papers showing the Government had been lying to Americans about Vietnam.²

From Time Magazine, 5 July, 1971, pg. 13

The two revelations came at exactly the right time for the Movement, brought low by Kent State a year earlier and seemingly out of gas after the last big, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in May, 1971.  The impact of the Pentagon Papers, showing untruths across multiple Republican and Democrat administrations, went right to the top. Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman repeated a colleague’s point:

‘To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing.... You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the – the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because It shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.’³

From Time Magazine, 5 July, 1971, pg. 13

The juxtaposition of the other three Fourth World titles and the two Rickles issues of Jimmy and the difference between what is happening within the pages versus what is happening outside them, is jarring. It’s a kind of madness reflected in the growing mental instability of Don Rickles, like a symbol of the establishment parent, who starts off with his insult jokes, becomes increasingly irritated and by the end of the story is literally carried off stage by men in white coats, unable to reconcile what he is hearing with what he is seeing.

Morgan Edge tries to calm people down after the explosive threat of Jimmy and the New Guardian’s ingestion of the chemical pryo-granulate has been neutralised, ‘We did have an emergency here! But it was brought under control!’ Don Rickles responds: ‘That’s a lie! I’m the bomb! And I’m primed to blow! Get me outta here! Stop me from killing!’ It’s like two sides of the State, one moving to acknowledge something has gone wrong and wanting to reassure the populace that the system is OK, the other warning that everything is going to fall apart.

Superman, the State saviour, is shuffled off stage in this issue. He meets Lightray for the first time but as Clark Kent (you never see him in costume within the issue), returning at the end via Boomtube, his loud entrance serving as the final insult to send Don Rickles over the Edge.  

Reading this issue, you might feel the same, it might drive you bananas, you might feel like you are on the ropes but hey, this is Kirby! It’s a wonderful world. Just listen to ol’ Pops.

‘Some of you young folks been saying to me," Hey Pops, what you mean 'What a wonderful world'? How about all them wars all over the place? You call them wonderful? And how about hunger and pollution? That ain't so wonderful either."

Well how about listening to old Pops for a minute. Seems to me, it ain’t the world that's so bad but what we're doin' to it. And all I'm saying is, see, what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love baby, love. That's the secret, yeah. If lots more of us loved each other, we'd solve lots more problems. And then this world would be a gasser.

That's wha' ol' Pops keeps saying."

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom, for me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world….’

From the lyrics to It’s A Wonderful World (spoken version) by Louis Armstrong, 1970. Armstrong would pass away two days before Jimmy Olsen # 141 hit the stands, on 6 July, 1971.

¹On 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. Time Magazine, 5 April, 1971, pg.15.

²The New York Times first published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers on 13 June, 1971, followed by the Washington Post, five days later. The US Government sought an injunction to stop publication of the material but in a 6-3 Supreme Court decision on 30 June, 1971, the court found the Government had not met the heavy burden on proof for the injunction.

³From Eddie Meadows’ June 14, 1971 transcript "Oval office meeting with Bob Haldelman, Nixon Presidential Materials Project, Oval-519-, Cassette 747", audio tape.

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)

-Time Magazine, 5 July, 1971

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

Michael Mead is a now, 55-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 19th 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!