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!