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!