Holding a mirror up to death

In Jimmy Olsen # 142 (October, 1971), published 50 years ago today, 19 August, 1971, Jack Kirby abruptly shifts from the rollicking Rickles two-parter to a story involving a malevolent vampire who controls young women who tell ‘Count Dragorin’ their secrets. Dragorin’s  power ‘will make us as one’ and once the power has ‘….fully taken hold—controls the body chemistry—controls the very body atoms—so that a pattern is followed—a complete and total pattern.’

Jack Kirby only had to pick up his newspaper in March 1971 when he was drawing Jimmy Olsen # 142¹, to see a real-world example of an evil force who turned young women (and men) into undead creatures, willing to do his will unthinkingly, following a ‘complete and total pattern.’ Charles Manson had been convicted of multiple murders in the Tate-La Bianca killings in January 1971 but his penalty trial, where his punishment would be decided, took the next two months and finished at the end of March with the death penalty, as Kirby was finishing Jimmy Olsen # 142.

Manson’s Family followers, particularly those principals he programmed to kill (Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie van Houten, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson) are like Dracula/Dragorin’s victims, seduced through fear, sex and blood by the mesmeric qualities of the Transylvanian’s and Transilvanean’s magic, in the latter’s case from the power that comes from his eyes. 

In a chilling sequence, his power pours out ocularly as if his evil life force is being released from a kabuki husk, painted bone. He strikes from afar and deep into the sleeping Laura Conway’s body and psyche so powerfully she does not even notice.

Manson’s followers called him the ‘man of a thousand faces’ who related to people on their level of need and whose ability to ‘psych out’ people was so great that many of his disciples felt he could read their minds. Murdering together ‘created a bond not less but more binding in that it was their secret.’³

There is no murder in Jimmy Olsen # 142 but the idea of Manson as vampire, as a real-world inspiration is one way to explain the entry of Dragorin into the Fourth World. Manson’s crimes and those of his followers, sucked the soul out of the Sixties as surely as Dragorin’s beams into Laura’s neck made her undead.

Laura, like Sadie, Patie and Lulu ‘casts no reflection’. Once taken by a vampire, you no longer see yourself in the mirror, the empty mirror stares back at you as if to say ‘you are not there’, your identity, your humanity, is gone. You are a blank slate primed for a vampire’s will. You only reflect the Master.

Jimmy Olsen # 142 is terrific action plus and the pace moves quickly capped by the revelation of a devilish planet. It’s enjoyable for the straight-up story that is told and is a welcome relief from the issues that preceded it but death and undeath hang over it.

Even the Newsboy Legion whose role is usually roly-poly comical, lose their sense of joie de vivre when they chance upon the killer of the original Guardian, Jim Harper (not the clone they team up with from time-to-time). There is murder in their eyes and straight after they hear the killer’s confession Kirby shifts the scene back to Superman and Jimmy in a graveyard!

Deliberately or not, it feels like Kirby is reflecting the fear and violence of the times as a corrective to the blithe, middle-aged, party piece of the Rickles issues. Vietnam still dragging on, the counter-culture fragmented and out of gas, Soledad brother George Jackson about to be killed in prison.⁴ Some older readers might have felt a bit like Jimmy, ‘This is it! I’m going to die!—And there’s no escape!’

You know that Supes and Jimmy will triumph in the end but first they have to get through ‘The Genocide Spray’ ! I know, more death! Jimmy Olsen # 142 hit the stands just as Charles 'Tex' Watson's trial began....⁵

¹ Jack Kirby Collector # 80 has a chart showing when Kirby drew each Fourth World issue, pg. 6.

²I draw on  the Bugliosi account of the penalty trial, pgs. 541 – 599.

³Bugliosi, pg. 627.

⁴George Jackson, activist, author, prisoner and subject of a famous song by Bob Dylan, was killed at San Quentin Prison on 21 August, 1971, the same day remnants of the Manson Family held up Western Surplus Store in Los Angeles as part of a plot to free Charles Manson.

⁵ Watson's trial had been delayed after he had been extradited from his home state of Texas. The trial began in the same week as Jimmy Olsen # 142 was published, 16 August, 1971 and finished on 21 October, 1971. Watson was sentenced to death.

 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)

-The equally indispensable Old Gods, New Gods (Jack Kirby Collector # 80: 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 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 23rd of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ugliness reveals its true face in beauty

You wouldn’t like Orion if you met him. The real him. The face behind the face, stripped of its middle-class mother box make-over. Unadorned, with his dirty, uglier, Apokoliptian visage, he comes from a different side of the street than you do. You need him but you don’t want him. Carved out by definitive, leave-the-lines-in Mike Royer inking (bye, bye Vinnie), Orion is like a gang member with his tattoos covered, an outcast sinner made acceptable to New Genesis heaven, with a lie.

The question Jack Kirby poses in New Gods # 5 (November, 1971), published 50 years ago today, 12 August, 1971 is why can’t Orion show his true face and be accepted by the beautiful gods of New Genesis with all their high church spirituality, their lovely homes, their shining technology? Orion is a soldier for Good, he doesn’t yet know he comes from Bad. Swapped at birth for Scott Free (Mister Miracle), as the miraculous one was sent to Apokolips and Orion to New Genesis as part of a pact to prevent war, Orion has only has an inkling of the truth: that he is Darkseid’s (second) son. He spends his life battling against that heritage.

There’s an echo of Kirby in Orion’s life. Why can’t they accept me for who I am and give me what I want, what I deserve? Cast out of National/DC in the late 1950s after losing a lawsuit against powerful editor Jack Schiff¹, Kirby was driven back to Timely/Marvel, a place he had left 15 or so years earlier after a dispute over Captain America and proper reward.² At Marvel he works feverishly to largely create the Marvel universe by himself to keep food on the table yet he never gets what he is promised. He is always affable to Lee but with friends when he talks about the situation he fulminates with rage.³ One face is acceptable in the world, the other is not.⁴

Were Kirby or his avatar Orion to show their real face in polite society, you get the feeling that the luxury, Bel-Air gods of New Genesis would shun the Thousand Oaks scion of Apokolips and cross the street, like he was an uncelebrated Vietnam veteran. Yet they need him. Orion is the teeth of the Revolution, in the war, he is the Front Line. He is not focused on Forever People non-violence, or Highfather diplomacy or Scott Free kindness, Orion is born-to-rule grit, the imperious dog-soldier. His opponent in this issue, Slig, a kind of grotesque fish, is only going to end up, belly-up, at the bottom of the fish tank.

It is the exchange between the two opponents that is the most instructive and memorable sequence in New Gods # 5 (even more so than the opening shots of Metron and the Final Barrier giant). Having escaped a giant, Deep Six-spawned clam, Orion hunts down Slig to give him ‘a last salute to his talent for killing.’ As they fight, they bait each other, contemptuous of their opposite. There is nothing stereotypically superhero noble about the clash. Orion enjoys inflicting pain on Slig, insults him constantly and laughs deeply at Slig’s misfortune. Orion likes being nasty.

Beaten physically, Slig has a far more powerful weapon: he knows who Orion truly is. “Noble, sanctimonious New Genesis hero!! I’ll kill you for the sham you are!!—Your love of destruction has forced your true face from hiding….you’re a mad, tormented animal, Orion!” 

We finally see Orion’s real face, the regular Kirby Fourth World ‘revelation’. Orion admits he is flawed, he uses Mother Box to hide his true nature: “Mother Box protects me. She calms me and restructures and keeps me part of New Genesis.” Slig rolls his groper fish head back, all incisors and saliva and laughs, “Orion is his very own monster!”

With this, Slig seals his fate: “Once stirred in the fires of hate and inner fear, there’s no stopping the arrival of death!” Orion kills Slig because Slig spoke the ugly truth, he got to Orion. Orion cannot live with his own otherness, his ugliness, he knows Slig is right and kills him for it. In a real sense, it is not just Slig who dies, it is a part of Orion too, the part that wishes he did not need to deny himself, to live.

The most disturbing part of this is the commentary it makes on Kirby’s society and our own. Be it ‘dirty hippies’, gang members, homeless people, prisoners, disabled people, people at work or in our own family who we find difficult or who make us uncomfortable, will we accept them as they are or will we with the power, the money, the position, demand that they fit in with us while we don’t or won’t change?

Ashore in France, soon after at D-Day in 1944 and fighting for his life, I feel Kirby draws on his experiences when he inhabits Orion. When you’re forced to be someone you are not to survive, what you find are ugly truths. As wartime Orion, peacetime Scott Free/Kirby is forced to exchange part of himself for someone he would rather not know. Afterwards he has to live with two, irreconcilable sides, changed but whole. Like Orion, he must ride the Leviathan, on the unconscious sea.

¹As outlined in Jack Kirby Collector # 80, ‘Old Gods, New Gods’, April, 2021, pg. 26.

²Ibid.

³Gil Kane’s remembrances from his 1986 UK Comic Art Convention interview, as referenced in Jack Kirby Collector # 80, pg.28.

⁴Graphic Story World editor Richard Kyle theorised that Kirby was conveying the theme of saving face in the Fourth World. Kirby felt he hadn’t received proper credit at Marvel and success at National/DC would regain face with the public. Jack Kirby Collector # 80, pg. 90.

 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)

-The equally indispensable Old Gods & New (Jack Kirby Collector # 80: 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 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 22nd of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

Feel the pain, heal the wound, live again

‘I can think of younger days when living for my life

Was everything a man could want to do
I could never see tomorrow
But I was never told about the sorrows

And, how can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
How can you stop the sun from shining?
What makes the world go round?
How can you mend this broken man?
How can a loser ever win?
Please help me mend my broken heart and let me live again.’

(How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, Bee Gees, 1971)¹

Sonny Sumo sees the wounds that no else sees because he has lived the life of a Samurai warrior, he has seen the signs, he knows what to look for, he sees past the surface and deep into the body, mind, soul.  His ritual of ‘wound rejection’ is not just about physical healing, it is about transcending the emotional damage to the spirit. 

Aided by the Motherbox, Sonny is the man to mend the broken hearts of the Forever People, to restore the youthful hippie avatars to life, to lift the non-violent visitors from New Genesis from sorrow to winning with kindness, in Forever People # 5 (November, 1971), published 50 years ago today, 3 August, 1971.

Stuck in Desaad’s ‘Happyland’ since last issue, they writhe in tailored torment, each torture designed by Desaad to drive at the particular pain of Mark Moonrider, Big Bear, Beautiful Dreamer, Serifan and Vykin the Black. Desaad loves pain, like Charles Manson he gets off on watching the vulnerable suffer.² The intensity of his enjoyment of fear is akin to an orgasm and it distorts his face in half-human pleasure.

Desaad, like the believer in Helter Skelter and his inspiration, the leader of the Process/The Church of the Final Judgement, Robert de Grimstone (Robert Moore), surgically dismantles his target’s personalities. He looks for weak points, for people who are down or believe the best in others. Desaad and his twisted real-world counterparts deliver them the worst. Like all bullies their inability  to deal with their own pain inspires them to inflict it on others through fear:

“Fear is beneficial…Fear is the catalyst of action. It is the energiser, the weapon built into the game in the beginning, enabling a being to create an effect upon himself, to spur himself on to new heights and to brush aside the bitterness of failure.”³

Desaad

Charles Manson

Robert de Grimstone/Robert Moore

The threat posed by someone genuinely happy fills Desaad with fear because he has long since stopped believing in it. ‘Happyland’ is his response, false façade and the reality he embraces inside, both in himself and in his torture chambers. Happiness is a Big Lie and his job is to undermine each of the Forever People by taking away their greatest strength, so they admit it.

Mark Moonrider struggles to escape his glass cage, the leader of the Forever People exposed as a skeleton, no flesh on his bones, no substance to his leadership as the theme park cruisers literally see through him. Sonny Sumo sees through the Looking Glass and smashes the perceptions of those watching to reveal the true self.

Big Bear, the strongest of the Forever People is made weak by constant hammering shots to the body. Sumo rips off the fourth world wall and the audience sees the real person behind it. 

Beautiful Dreamer, the serene beauty who brought peace to all, is made afraid of all by the monsters in her constant nightmares. Sonny and Motherbox give her sight and her smile returns.

Serifan the child, the youngest, most vulnerable of the Forever People must constantly kick a lever or his friend Vykin the Black will die and Serifan will be alone and responsible. Motherbox frees the enslaved black Vykin from his bonds and both are again, free.

Broken hearts mended, sorrow lifted, wounds healed and a successful battle with Desaad’s ‘faithful’. Kirby then comes with the revelation: Sonny Sumo knows the anti-life equation! ‘The very opposite of living….absolute control over you…without independent will.’  That makes him Darkseid’s target and the Forever People join forces with him to stop the Master of Apokolips and just live their way.

The issue closes with a stunning, self-aware remark from Darkseid who almost evokes sympathy from the reader. Responding to seeing Sumo has the anti-life equation and to the Forever People’s remarks, he says  ‘…I must admit they have a point. We must be what we are. And of course – that’s the pity of it. It’s the very core of our conflict. To fulfil ourselves, we must kill them!’ Darkseid’s evil and the Forever People’s goodness seems pre-destined. 

Darkseid is a broken man who will never be mended. The Forever People will see tomorrow, marked by pain and wound but believing always, in each other, living again.

¹The Bee Gees song, ‘How Can You Mend A Broken Heart’  from the album ‘Trafalgar’ was their first US number #1 hit, making the mark in the same week as Forever People # 5 was published.

²Charles Manson rarely participated in his followers’ activities. He was a voyeur who liked to direct orgies, drug-taking, violence and then watch. Manson organised the Tate-La Bianca murders in August 1969 but was not present. His followers killed for him.

³As quoted in Bugliosi, pg. 612, from a special issue of The Process magazine. Bugliosi interviewed Manson after his conviction on June 14, 1971 and asked him directly about the connection to the Process/Church of the Final Judgement. It followed an earlier conversation during the Tate-LaBianca trial where Manson denied knowing de Grimston/Moore. Two of deGrimston’s followers visited Bugliosi and assured him Manson and de Grimston had never met. They had earlier visited Manson in jail. The Process’1967 HQ in San Francisco, was only two blocks from where Manson lived after leaving jail in the same year (pg. 611). The Process and Manson’s beliefs were similar and Bugliosi concluded Manson heavily borrowed’  from de Grimston. This is the same conclusion reached by the recent Sons of Sam Netflix series on David Berkowitz et al who were influenced by the Process.

 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 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 21st 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!