Become who you are, not what you see

Jack Kirby draws back the curtain of the unconscious mind as the culture’s fears flood through from Transilvane to the ‘overworld’ in Jimmy Olsen # 143 (November, 1971), published 50 years ago today, 7 September, 1971. Like radioactive, green ghosts after a nuclear war or Huey helicopters spraying deadly defoliant in Vietnam, the tiny, horror, inhabitants of Dabney Donovan’s hidden planet experiment, rise up from the place you had hoped to seal them and stand before you, stripping your defences back to the bone like Jimmy's fallout hands, demanding answers.

Will we die? Will there be a nuclear war? Will my brother come home alive from Vietnam? Is my society falling apart? Where are my children? Kirby’s surface tale of DNA Project denizens of a room-sized devil planet, who have become the movie characters projected on their planet’s sky, Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein, is a metaphor for the unconscious and conscious mind.

It’s about what we project to ourselves and how that determines our identity, our behaviour. How our thoughts play dramas across the screen of our mind, how things gnaw at us and then sparked by a feeling or an event, loom up large in our consciousness, like the Transilvaneans when they shoot up in size to appear on Superman’s and Jimmy’s earth.

Like the title of the 1971 Australian cult movie, ‘Wake in Fright’ (released as ‘Outback’ internationally), Jimmy and Superman wake up to what is really going on in their world, they see the ugly truths hidden behind civility . 

Wake in Fright debuted at Cannes on 13 May, 1971

Underneath the awareness of everybody else, beneath a graveyard they finally see what delusional Dabney has made as they see for the first time, Transilvane and the movie projectors surrounding it. Kirby issues them their challenge: “For what Dabney hath wrought must not be rent asunder!! Or millions will die from ‘Genocide Spray.’

Given Kirby’s involvement in World War Two and his identity as a Jewish man, it feels like he is playing out some of his experience in fighting an evil madman who wanted to wipe put an entire race of people in a genocide. Only 30 years earlier, the Nazi regime used film (and cartoons) to bring out the latent race fears of the German populace, the antisemitism, to project that fear in a drama of the mind directed by Leni Riefenstahl.

Triumph of the Will (1935) directed by Leni Riefenstahl

The way Transilvane is constructed feels a bit like Nazi Germany, claustrophobic, pre-programmed, the characters in their desperation struggle against the ‘picture prophecy in our skies’. Count Dragorin and his Hammer horror movie pals feel that ‘somehow….our efforts to find Dabney Donovan will fail…’ Overcoming an obvious evil or obstacle is daunting, when you’re down it’s easier to believe negative things about yourself, it’s simpler to think things are not going to work out, that the ’demon dog’ will always win.

Luckily for Dragorin, Jimmy and the boys, they have Superman, for whom anything is possible and hope is never lost. The Big Red S gets to work and seeks out the Demon Dog, holder and issuer of the genocide spray, which the flying hound will use as ‘…deadly rain that is to wash the planet clean – for new experiments,’ like a canine Dr Mengele.

As Superman triumphs via brawn and later, Oklahoma (yes, really!), he and Jimmy watch the Transilvaneans shrink to return to their planet, now that the fear, the threat has gone. Superman reflects on apocalyptic prophecies in the Transilvanean culture and his own/our culture: “A demon dog—the symbol of their destruction. – As our own is forecast in the prophecies we’ve inherited. Donovan had watched life evolve on Transilvane and by film had prepared it for its own doom….after generations of watching sky movies – they became what they saw!”

We become what is projected to us unless we can step back and see behind the screen and ask ourselves, why is this being shown to me this way? Is this our only path? Is there a different response to my fears and how can I show that picture?

Kirby as always is not just adventure tale auteur, he is a cultural prophet. He’s seen the outcome long before his audience watches the closing credits. That’s a wrap.

‘I got to keep movin', I got to keep movin'
Blues fallin' down like hail, blues fallin' down like hail
Hmm-mmm, blues fallin' down like hail, blues fallin' down like hail

And the days keeps on worryin' me
There's a hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail
Hellhound on my trail’

Hellhound on My Trail, Robert Johnson (recorded June 1937, released September 1937)

Robert by Robert (Robert Crumb draws Robert Johnson)

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 24^th of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries (I’m halfway!:). Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!