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!