The smallest hope of victory

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years

And the slow parade of fears without crying

Now I want to understand

I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can.’

(Doctor My Eyes, Jackson Browne, # 10 on the Billboard Top 100, April 18, 1972)¹

All Empires fall and sometimes they’re brought down by a Bug. New Gods # 9 (July, 1972), published 50  years ago today, 18 April, 1972, reads like a Cold War allegory as the Great Powers fight via proxy over a country which doesn’t want either of them there. Jack Kirby sees clear-eyed beneath iron-faced patriotism, behind the pure light of ideology and into the eternal motivation and machinations of power and its effect on us, the little people.

In April 1972, Kirby has just been told about the end of his own Fourth World empire, forsaken by National/DC publisher Carmine Infantino.² In the words of Mark Evanier, the King, ‘…was grey and his voice had the solemn tremor of someone struggling to remain strong while announcing that a loved one had died.’³

Around him, the United States (US) government in April 1972, after a series of withdrawals, has only 6,000 troops in Vietnam (out of 70,000 personnel)⁴ as it pursues an ultimately unsuccessful policy of ‘Vietnamisation’ (letting the Vietnamese just fight each other). The Movement to End the War in Vietnam has similarly wilted away, occupying the territory of popular culture and then dispersing. Everywhere, on and off the page, things are ending.

The focus of popular music, film, comics continued to shift to the individual, away from the group. The early Seventies were the time of the introspective singer-songwriter and their personal concerns, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Carly Simon, John Lennon, Jackson Browne. So much had happened in the Sixties wave, so many people had committed to a cause bigger than themselves and now that that Vietnam cause seemed either hopeless or finished, the culture needed the space to sit down and work out what happened, who they were now as individual people.

Infantino’s influence pushed Kirby away from the greater story of the Source and War between New Genesis and Apokolips and towards treating the New Gods and the Forever People as straight superhero books. The covers played up horror as horror comics were selling the best at the time⁵ and put the spotlight on single characters over the group.

The Bug is one of those little people, a Forager, he is a ‘food seeker’, he leads the fight against an unseen enemy through a tropical jungle for his people’s survival in a constant cycle of raid and retreat. He and his people are seen as ‘pests’ by an all-powerful, technologically more advanced Empire which sprays them with defoliant/agent Orange from the sky, leaving untold dead. Even a great and good power like New Genesis/US is capable of killing without mercy, the shadow to the soul.

The Bug returns to his colony, a kind of Communist, North Vietnamese ant farm. Unlike the others, he thinks beyond his immediate physical needs and looks inward asking ‘why?’, he harbours ‘…values not known in the colony…’ The Bug is the counter-cultural conscience of his people, he sees beyond subsistence to higher concepts such as courage, loyalty, fondness, brotherhood, he wants to reach out to the ‘Eternals’ (the New Gods)⁶ to see ‘if we could understand each other….we could roam free in their giant domain…without peril!’ The Bug is the voice of peace from oppressed peoples, who suffer from clashes between bigger powers and just want to be left alone.

Having been attacked by the Good Power (South Vietnam/US), his people are now invaded by the Bad Power (Apokolips/Russia/China).Mantis calls Bug and his people to join him in a crusade to conquer a ‘new and large dominion’ where ‘our kind can rule’. ‘Other colonies’ have joined me to create a great army.’

Like North Vietnam at the time, which had little interest in the wider Communist struggle apart from as a source of weapons⁷, focusing instead on its nationalist aims, Bug and the colony’s deputy Prime Minister Prime One shake off their colonised minds and see through the motivations and machinations of power and call things what they are: ‘Mantis seeks to draw us into a war between eternals. We will be used as weapons—not equals…’ ‘Yes! No matter which of the eternals win – they shall still regard us as bugs!’

The Bug’s journey will eventually lead him to Orion and Lightray but not until next issue. Kirby’s focus on the Bug and what he represents lets us see the two New Genesis heroes in a different way. As representatives of the Good Guys, they are quite different and their clashing combination reflects the conflict between the aspirations of nations such as the US, to ‘liberate’ other countries and the reality of war on the ground.

Lightray is the pure, shining, King of the beautiful, patriotic, idea, his burst of blinding revelation burns our eye sockets straight from the royal three-pointed Crown insignia of those doves Born to Rule. He is of the Gods, he ‘liberates’ from the air.

Not for him the compromised, dog-faced, foot soldier of muck and dirt, the scarred, angry, cynical Orion in iron helmet: ‘All hail to the eternal virtues and optimism of New Genesis. The dogs of war, beware!’ Orion’s hawk eye is always watching as he trusts no one. He wants a straight fight to the finish with the Big Dog, no Kalibak proxy, no Cold War, launch the nukes: ‘Hear me, Darkseid! In the end, it shall be you and I – power against power! Your death – or mine!’

Kirby’s comics continue to function on multiple levels, part hero’s journey, part allegory, part political commentary. Even with the commercial walls closing in around him and the writing on those walls spelling his defeat, ‘if dreams can come true, so can nightmares’, his resurgent belief in himself and his creations live in the smallest of characters, turning the powers of his assailants against them to keep hope alive.

‘Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what you see
I hear their cries
Just say if it's too late for me’

Kirby’s Fourth World empire may be dying but he lives on and his reward  will be ‘…wondrous indeed. Before me is a placed the like of which I’ve never seen.’ The Demon, Kamandi, Sandman, OMAC await. Light will follow darkness, the King will rise from the dead.

‘Doctor, my eyes
They cannot see the sky
Is this the prize
For having learned how not to cry?’

¹Doctor My Eyes by Jackson Browne , see the Billboard chart, week of 22 April, 1972.

²See Jack Kirby Collector #80, pg. 114.

³Ibid.

⁴See Hastings, pg. 525.

⁵See Jack Kirby Collector # 80 pg. 110. Horror and mystery comics were selling well in 1972. Affidavit fraud created the misconception that Kirby's 4th World titles were selling poorly. So Infantino had Kirby conjure up The Demon and asked for Deadman to become a character in Forever People. Comics, always late on the uptake, had followed the horror trend that film had set in 1968 with the abolition of the Hays Code. Film moved from censorship to the ratings system we know today.

⁶Possibly the first reference to ‘The Eternals’ before Kirby’s poor man’s version of the New Gods debuted at Marvel in 1976.

⁷See Hastings, pg. 166-67.

Research this issue -

Comics:

-According to Jack Kirby (Michael Hill, Lulu, 2021)

-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:

-Billboard charts week of 22 April, 1972

-Doctor My Eyes by Jackson Browne (official promo, April, 1972)

-Helter Skelter, the True Story of the Manson Murders (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, W.W. Norton, 1994)

-The Games People Play (Eric Berne, Penguin, 1964)

-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)

-The Vietnam War: The Definitive Illustrated History (Penguin Random House, 2017)

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

-Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War (Max Hastings, William Collins, 2019)

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 41st of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries (only seven to go!). Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forever dead, forever remembered

‘On the first part of the journey
I was looking at all the life
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
There was sand and hills and rings…’

A Horse with No Name by America, # 1 on the Billboard top 100 April 4, 1972

As the Sixties begin to vanish, so too, does Jack Kirby’s magnificent Fourth World. Not to be outdone by the bombs raining down on North Vietnam in April, 1972, National/DC publisher Carmine Infantino explodes an incendiary beneath the King when he tells Kirby, the Fourth World is finished.¹ It was devastating for the greatest creator in comics as the freedom he was promised was taken away on a false basis (erroneous sales reports).² Forever People # 9 (July, 1972), published 50 years ago today, 4 April, 1972, on an unwanted, ironic note, features the return of Deadman, horror on the page and horror off it, the death of one of the greatest series of comics ever drawn.

The apocalyptic end to the Apokoliptic world of stories had been coming for some time. Infantino’s sales reports saw the Fourth World titles trending downwards and the horror titles surging to the top. He oversaw a move to spotlight horror characters across DC’s books, in line with the fascination for horror movies, books, tv shows of the time.³ By interfering in this way, he broke the understanding he had with Kirby, he reduced Kirby’s stories to a Boston Brand half-life, wraiths, ghosts of what they once were.

Forever People # 9 contains not a single, significant, Fourth World reference to the greater story, no Darkseid, no anti-life, no Highfather, no Source. It reads like a conventional superhero story as the former, flower-power, counter-cultural, hippie avatars, Mark Moonrider, Big Bear, Vykin, Beautiful Dreamer and Serifan, now feel more like straight-ahead superheroes as they start exhibiting super-powers, the megaton touch, the repelli-force, the magna power, even Serifan’s cartridges assume magical properties.

While some of these powers have been on display before, their use here distances the youthful reader from the central experience of the Forever People, representative of the California youth Kirby saw around him, believers in non-violence, they are now in service of a story Kirby did not want to tell in the way he has been forced to tell it and our reading experience suffers for it. We no longer see ourselves and our concerns as much in the characters, we can no longer live in them as we once did.

It's as if Kirby is back at Marvel, where Stan Lee muted the King’s creative concepts as the Smiling One preferred to follow a conventional approach aimed at boosting sales and settling for formula over new creative directions. The Frankenstein wanna-be villain of the story, Dr. Gideon, bears a resemblance to Lee, a man who tries to breathe life into dead concepts (superhero comics) and working unknown at Timely/Atlas, cannot succeed on his own because he lacks the vital life ingredients which only the zestful, Forever People youth/Kirby can provide.

Gideon, like Lee, is one of those ‘obscure dreamers’ who ‘…take a simplistic road to fulfilment…’ His efforts only succeed in reviving a dead man. He tracks the Forever People and sees Serifan’s use of a blue cartridge from his hat band which transforms Beautiful Dreamer’s costume, it has ‘a strange link with the infinite’: ‘Incredible! That force in that cartridge is precisely what’s lacking in my experiment. I must have it! Fate didn’t throw this thing in my way just so I can look at it. “Doc” Gideon’s a loser no longer! Tonight my surgical subjects shall—walk!’

While Forever People # 9 was written and drawn months before Infantino gave Kirby the ultimate bad news, the King could have been forgiven for beginning to think even then, when the horror focus came, ‘here we go again’, how different was Infantino to Lee, slave to corporate interests and profit, despite the fact that Carmine was also a real artist? The revived Frankenstein creature becomes a metaphor for incoherent capitalism, destructive, directionless, blind to what really matters:

‘The ocean is a desert with its life underground
And a perfect disguise above
Under the cities lies a heart made of ground
But the humans will give no love.’

Only Deadman, who strangely plays relatively little part in the story until now (despite a major revelation in his own personal story), can save things by possessing the monster’s body, a dead man stopping a dead man. The restless, animated spirit that once drove the Sixties body of work, the Movement, is now motionless, a phantom revolution, bought and sold, unrecognisable. ‘Not even Serifan’s blue cartridge can move limbs so severely damaged.’

Kirby had more triumphs to come but the feeling of glorious, ethereal, otherness and closeness, the soaring sensitivity and hope of the earlier Forever People issues, is gone. Forever dead, forever remembered.

‘After two days in the desert sun
My skin began to turn red
And after three days in the desert fun
I was looking at a river-bed
And the story it told of a river that flowed
Made me sad to think it was dead.’

¹See Jack Kirby Collector #80, pg. 114

²Ibid.

³See Jack Kirby Collector # 80 pg. 110. Horror and mystery comics were selling well in 1972. Affadavit fraud created the misconception that Kirby's 4th World titles were selling poorly. So Infantino had Kirby conjure up The Demon and asked for Deadman to become a character in Forever People. Comics, always late on the uptake, had followed the horror trend that film had set in 1968 with the abolition of the Hays Code. Film moved from censorship to the ratings system we know today. See NPR.

Research this issue -

Comics:

-According to Jack Kirby (Michael Hill, Lulu, 2021)

-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)

-Horse with No Name, # 1 on Billboard’s top 100, April 4, 1972

-The Games People Play (Eric Berne, Penguin, 1964)

-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)

-The Vietnam War: The Definitive Illustrated History (Penguin Random House, 2017)

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

-Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War (Max Hastings, William Collins, 2019)

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 40th of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries (only eight to go!). Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!