Kirby plays for keeps

 

The unforgettable fire of Jack Kirby and his Fourth World  booms back in his fight to the finish between father and son, Darkseid and Orion, in ‘Armagetto’, New Gods # 6 (Baxter reprint series), published 40 years ago today, 9 August, 1984.₁ The Kirby series is resurrected after a long period away but still bursts with the same, insurgent, big picture confidence as it lands punches like an Olympic comics champion, still burning with ‘ultimate ferocity’.₂

Much has changed since we last saw the Kirby New Gods, both for characters and creator, in New Gods # 11 (November, 1972). America’s creative, revolutionary, transformative Sixties have vanished. Sunk low by Watergate, inflation, two oil crises, economic recession, a botched hostage rescue, the culture is gripped by failure. Kirby has left comics, working in animation  after his 1975 to 1978₃ return to Marvel where his former readers turned pros, undermined him.₄

Like a heavyweight boxer, down for the count in the 14^th round, America and Kirby are never out of it. The regenerative power of both country and man to remake themselves lives and breathes life into the fight for survival, ’tigers in the night’.₅ Reagan’s ‘it's morning again in America’ unleashes a new wave of pride and prosperity for those lucky enough to benefit from it. Reagan is running for a second term, slap bang in the middle of the 1981-87 greed is good share market bull market and during the  July to August 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (no Commies). The Games are the showpiece centrepiece of American political, military, physical, confidence and exceptionalism.

Into this world, Kirby comes flying, back with the Real Thing, a primal, physical and mental struggle against the Evil Empire, son versus father. The shadow boxing of the previous 12 years is finished. Orion ‘pulls up his guts’₆ and goes in for the kill. Kirby’s opening pages of Armagetto are all big picture moments, double-page spreads, victory follows dominant victory…..until Orion has to be rescued by children.

The voices of marginalised people are always heard in Kirby’s comics. The youthful Newsboy Legion, the counter-cultural Forever People, the Black Racer, Big Barda. Kirby is interested in crossing the boundaries that separate us, discovering how difference can unite not divide as we face the challenges of our age. Like the mechanization/computerization he explores in Armagetto, a tool for the ‘….great, monumental cobra…’ Darkseid who is ‘…eager to swallow us….into his push button paradise.’₇

Darkseid is never a one dimensional villain in Kirby’s world. Jarringly, he needs things like we do, he is lonely, he needs friends. Unlike us he doesn’t make friends naturally, with vulnerability, he reforms past enemies, oozing them back into existence like  reanimated corpses, grotesque slow motion twists and turns of death played backwards in time. His first friend is the one who betrayed him, Desaad. Darkseid knows he is evil, so he can trust him.

Orion also needs a companion. Lightray, Richie Cunningham with super-powers, the idealistic, brainier, wordy, flower-child to Orion’s tunnel-visioned, realist, dog-soldier, Vietnam vet. As the last time we saw them, Orion takes time to see the wisdom in the ‘fool ’Lightray’s arguments. For the ‘amateur warrior’ has appeared to talk Orion out of his death mission: ‘’The confrontation between father and son is wrong! It bodes ill for you and Darkseid!’

This time it is Lightray who is humbled. Orion tells him that he isn’t here on Apokolips to kill his father but to rescue his mother: ‘When I was given to New Genesis in my youth as a lifelong war hostage…there was one on all Apokolips who fought Darkseid’s deal. That’s why I’ve returned. To fight for her. My mother Tigra is still alive….and Darkseid’s prisoner.’ It wouldn’t be a Kirby Fourth World comic without a revelation.

Suddenly the reader’s expectations are confounded. Armagetto becomes a story not about revenge but about rescue. Not about a son and a father but about a son and a mother. A child saving the one who gave him life not a victory over a parent who brings death. Kirby’s characters and stories are never simply about physical action, as good as he is at showing it, they’re about the people within those perfect, idealised, forms: ‘Darkseid, Highfather, and the rest of the cast have always been sincere expressions of my feelings, reactions to all the things I knew were out there in the night….’₈

Kirby warms us up for the fight as Darkseid resurrects multiple villains from the past, Steppenwolf, Kalibak, Mantis but these ‘animated…shells without identity’ are no match for the Mother’s Son. The prophesised  fight between father and son is on! Yet it is not a classic 15 rounds, it is a dance of deceit and cowardice by the Lord of Apokolips who fakes defeat and has his son murdered by anonymous others.₉ Orion’s bullet-ridden body drifts in space, crucifixion pose.

Orion’s eyes are as ‘black as coal’’₁₀. He has failed in his quest. Darkseid has won. Or has he? Orion has transcended his own hate, his own pain, his own desire for revenge. He has sacrificed everything so that that the Lifegiver might be free. Orion has rejected Darkseid’s will as ‘….he seeps into our hatreds and prejudices, and nurtures our biases until they become time bombs – primed and ready to activate the worst in us.’₁₁ He has walked ‘ til you run and don’t look back’ ₁₂and discovered the love within himself, ‘for here I am.’ ₁₃ Darkseid will live on in doubt, Orion will live forever in the certainty of redemption.

‘Ice, your only rivers run cold

These city lights, they shine as silver and gold
Dug from the night, your eyes as black as coal

Walk on by, walk on through
Walk 'til you run and don't look back
For here I am’

Unforgettable Fire by U2 recorded between May and August 1984

Footnotes

₁I’m aware of the 1976 New Gods revival by Conway et al and Kirby’s own New Godsesque ending in Captain Victor for Pacific (1981). My focus in these commentaries is the continuation of Kirby’s official New Gods story with DC characters in the order the reader of the time would have read them. So New Gods # 6 (Baxter reprint series), Hunger Dogs, Road to Armagetto (most recently published in the deluxe second volume of Absolute Jack Kirby and for the first time in colour).

₂A reference to Orion’s utterance in the closing moments of New Gods # 11 (November, 1972. See my commentary).

₃Old Gods, New Gods, pg. 130.

₄In his comments on a blog by Daniel Best, Steve Bissette, who often visited  the Marvel offices in the late Seventies, observed  the mocking treatment of Kirby’s work by younger Marvel staff.

₅From Kirby’s endpaper comments in New Gods # 6 (Baxter series).

₆Ibid.

₇Ibid.

₈ Ibid.

₉Just before Darkseid has Orion killed, there is a moment when Orion stands over his father and indicates his intention to deal with him. My interpretation of this moment is that Orion would not have killed Darkseid if he had had the chance based on what Orion has said previously to Lightray when Lightray challenged him to not fight his father. Orion’s mission is to rescue his mother. During the fight with Darkseid, he even says if his mother can be freed, he will never return to Apokolips. There is no mention anywhere in the fight that he intends to kill Darkseid.

₁₀From the lyrics to Unforgettable Fire by U2 recorded between May and August 1984. U2 were channelling the atomic bombing of Japan when they wrote this song.

₁₁From Kirby’s endpaper comments in New Gods # 6 (Baxter series).

₁₂ Unforgettable Fire, op.cit.

₁₃ Ibid.

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

- Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows)

- Old Gods, New Gods (Jack Kirby Collector # 80: TwoMorrows)

Popular culture:

-Chronicle of the 20^th Century, Editor in Chief John Ross, Viking, 1999.

-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 58-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 50^th (or 40^th) anniversary of publication of each issue of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, Forever People, New Gods and Mister Miracle, he published a contextual commentary. This is his 47th of a projected 50 Fourth World commentaries. He will also do commentaries on  the graphic novel Hunger Dogs (1985), the Absolute Jack Kirby volume two story, ‘Road to Armagetto’ and a final commentary/overview of the Fourth World. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!