Forever kind, forever justified

By April 1971, Nixon’s ‘Silent Majority’¹, the faceless, fatigued, flummoxed, fulcrum that would deliver the President a massive majority in the following year’s elections had had enough of the counter-culture. You can see and hear them in the opening page of Jack Kirby’s Forever People # 3, published 50 years ago today, 1 April, 1971.

Disgusted by the malleable morality of the hippie faithful and bewildered by what they perceived to be a raging, insulting, violent assault on their way of life, they were ready to strike back, to be justified, they were ripe for the words of someone like that ‘striking and vigorous dynamo of belief’, Glorious Godfrey, in his Fourth World debut: “Tell it Godfrey! Tell us how our pride is being attacked and dragged into the dust!” “It’s the others, Godfrey! Those who don’t think right!” “This is our world! They have no right to meddle with it!”

Like any Orthodoxy, left or right, when a dominant power feels threatened, it circles the wagons. It conceives its strength as a singularity, blank, closed, eyeless stares, old, threatened, unthinking, a no longer human mechanism, like extras in a scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis film². One ‘lefter/righter-than-thou’ view, one lord, one way of being Right.

Kirby is taking issue with what he perceives as the dangerous demagoguery of people like the Glorious Godfrey real world contemporary 1970s counterpart, the evangelist Billy Graham (check the physical resemblance³), whom Kirby believed to be anti-Semitic⁴ (White House tapes later revealed Graham making anti-Semitic comments in a 1972 conversation with Nixon, Graham would later apologise for the comments⁵). Jacob Kurtzberg/Jack Kirby invokes Adolph Hitler whom he quotes saying “That is the great thing about our movement – that these members are uniform not only in ideas, but, even, the facial expression is the same!”⁶

Glorious G invites his followers to wear metal mitres so they can be ‘justified’ and wield God-free death and pain. Godfrey’s head coverings are unlike those worn by real religious leaders. His cover the face, they deny the individuality. Kirby’s anti-life revelationist is one-part charming child salesman and one part terror pawn. His appeal is the removal of ambiguity, a God-free helper holds up a placard which says “Life will make you doubt! Anti-life will make you right!” When things get difficult and threatening, the simple black and white ‘truths’ of charlatans such as Godfrey are attractive to some people.

Forever People is a comic book about Truth and truth in conflict. Inevitably Godfrey’s justifiers and the Forever People, Mark Moonrider, Vykin the Black, Big Bear, Serifan and Beautiful Dreamer get set to fight for what’s right. The Forever People rescue their crippled child friend when the book-burning, scapegoat-sign-painting, justifiers come for him as the Nazis came for all those who weren’t ‘perfect’ Aryans.

The Forever People realise that individually they cannot hope to defeat the Apokiliptan evil and they join together as the Infinity Man, a pentavalent equivalent of the Trinity, the best of five in one person, Mark Moonrider’s leadership, Vykin the Black’s science and spirit, Big Bear’s strength, Serifan’s hand of friendship, Beautiful Dreamer’s love. Their message is togetherness too but based on openness, celebration of difference, of complexity, values that will sustain their Taaru community of peace. They are brought together as always by a laying on of hands as they blend with the holy Mother Box spirit.

The Forever People are God-filled, they lose their lives to find it, in each other. They are the repudiation of Glorious Godfrey’s arrogant, proud justifiers, they live  by a different youthful code and reject the weight of the past:

‘You, who are on the road

Must have a code, that you can live by
And so, become yourself
Because the past, is just a goodbye...

….Teach, your children well
Their father's hell, did slowly go by
And feed, them on your dreams
The one they pick's, the one you'll know by.’

(Teach your Children, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, live version released on the double-album Four Way Street, the week after Forever People # 3).

While Infinity Man easily deals with Godfrey, even the faithfulness of Forever is not enough to beat the ‘Master of the Holacaust’ as Darkseid, along with his left hand of darkness, Desaad, defeat Infinity as the weakness of his complex structure literally undoes him.

Darkseid’s pursuit of and belief in the anti-life equation is then laid bare in what must be one of the single greatest Kirby one-page panels in the Fourth World. Like Mantis before him, Godfrey is just another Apokoliptian Corporal, Darkseid is the Leader, the revelation, the tiger-force, the living nightmare.

In contrast, the Forever People are young, vulnerable, seemingly defeated before they have begun, on the way to Desaad’s (concentration) ‘camp of the damned.’ Yet they are not afraid. They leave behind ‘…what cannot die – love! Friendship!’ They seek not glory or power over others, connected to the Source by the Motherbox, they speak their Truth quietly, intimately, to the weakest and leave them with the strongest message, ‘Donnie, life is good! Live it for others – not against them. In that way you will always be close to us.’

In that Truth, they live forever.

‘When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.’

(Let it Be by the Beatles, 1970)

¹Nixon coined the term in a televised November 3, 1969 speech which he wrote himself, as he attempted to name the great mass of Americans who were confused and frightened by loud, counter-cultural excesses and show North Vietnam that most Americans supported him to strengthen his ability to end the War on his own terms. According to PBS, it was his greatest speech and resulted in 80,000 supportive letters and telegrams.

²Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece features in film critic Roger Ebert’s words, “….a workers' city where the clocks show 10 hours to squeeze out more work time, the workers live in tenement housing and work consists of unrelenting service to a machine…”

³Kirby modelled Glorious Godfrey on evangelist Billy Graham. In the words of Mark Evanier who worked with Kirby on the Fourth World, “Kirby was appalled at some of Graham's apocalyptic sermons which — to Jack — were more calculated to instill fear than faith, and to stampede people into service of Graham's causes.” News from Me, March 7, 2002, 9.01pm.

Kirby was not unsympathetic to religion. Kirby’s family were Conservative Jews and he went to Hebrew School. In later life he attended ‘Temple’, Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, California, with wife Roz. Author, writer, artists’ rights advocate and Vanguard Productions founder, J. David Spurlock, befriended Kirby in 1977 and remembers (Jack Kirby – The King of Comics Facebook group, March 23, 2021) that Kirby became more and more involved and attended regular services. When Kirby died, his family requested donations for just one charity: the Jack Kirby Memorial Fund at his temple, Etz Chaim, to benefit the temple’s Ner Tamid Education and Community Center.

Barry Milavetz (Jack Kirby! Facebook group, March 23, 2021),says Kirby actively participated in services at Etz Chaimand drew bar/bat mitzvah cards for congregation members. Two of Barry’s friends had cards.

⁴Evanier says “Jack's belief — which he expressed on several occasions — that Graham and the president he counseled were both virulent anti-Semites.”

⁵Whitehouse tapes released in 2002 contain anti-Semitic comments from both Nixon and Graham. Graham later apologised for the comments.

⁶Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise to Power by Konrad Heiden, 1944.

Research this article:

Comics:

-Comics Journal # 134, February 1990 (Jack Kirby interview by Gary Groth)

-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website

-News From Me, March 7, 2002, 9.01pm (Mark Evanier’s blog)

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

Popular culture:

-Politico Magazine, 21 February, 2018, ‘When Richard Nixon Used Billy Graham’ by Jeff Greenfield

-RogerEbert.com, June 2, 2010, ‘Urban Renewal on a Very Large Scale’

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

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

Michael Mead is a 54-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. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

 

 

  

Through fire and rain, free

Take my voice, take my heart, take my guts, I will still rise above you and defeat you. Scott Free as Mister Miracle in Mister Miracle # 2 (May – June 1971), published 50 years ago today, 16 March, 1971, invites death to rip him open, defiant in his vulnerability, like Jesus in red tights. His escapes are like executions, as he places himself on the Whipping Post, re-experiencing all the emotions of an abused Apokoliptian child, the desperation, the helplessness, the inverted sense of responsibility, welcoming death as a peace offering.

‘Sometimes I feel, sometimes I feel,
Like I've been tied to the whippin' post.
Tied to the whippin' post, tied to the whippin' post.
Good Lord, I feel like I'm dyin'…’

(Whipping Post, Allman Brothers on Live at the Fillmore East, live version recorded 13.3.1971)

Scott pushes the boundaries to their sharpest edge because he knows that the evil he faces will not rest until it has exploited every last facet of his personality, every chink, every kindness, to defeat him. He must be ready, he must be his strongest, his most active, the ‘madness’ of his more and more dangerous training is as much about building inner resilience, belief, love, as it is about creating technical skills. He’ll need everything because he is up against Granny.

Granny Goodness, in her debut, is a reptilian, lizard-mother dominatrix with her sickly, frightening bug-eyed toy boys.  She ostensibly hunts Scott because he was the first, and at this stage only, escapee from her terror orphanage. The deeper reason is that Granny is angry with Scott because he does not love her with the kind of distorted devotion that abusive tyrants prize, based on a degraded form of loyalty, bowing down to the one who hurts you, losing control of yourself, sacrificed to the unquenchable ego of someone to whom too much is never enough. Like the March 1971 debut Album from Alice Cooper, Granny Goodness’ key performance indicator, is Love It To Death.¹

Oberon asks Scott about his past and Scott tells the small Kirby avatar how he escaped, through the cosmic womb of the Boomtube and the Mother Mary Motherbox, birthed into a much better world than the Apokiliptic one he left: “…it can be a way of escape! – And I took it! I had to survive as an individual – as myself!’’

So much of Mister Miracle is the individual’s journey, the creation of an identity that is resilient, that will stay in shape, that will not buckle under intense pressure. Like a comics version of James Taylor, Scott has been through extremes of experience, been pushed mentally and emotionally far beyond normal limits, through fire and rain, from an abyss to a place of strength in serenity, in gentleness but with a lived-in, purposeful vision that comes from knowing himself at a young age when all seemed lost. Scott, like Taylor ‘….references roads travelled and untravelled, to fears spoken and left unsaid – reaches a level of both intimacy and emotion rarely achieved….”²

Kirby’s hero reflects the changing concerns of the times and the way these concerns were expressed in popular culture. The braggadocio of loud guitar-dominated group Rock, the mass demonstrations of the Movement to End the War in Vietnam, the overwhelming explosion of different voices, is gradually replaced by the individual needing the time and space to process what just happened. To hear their own voice, distinct from what Old Mole called  an increasingly shrill ‘more-left-than-thou’ ideological group-think.³

The question is not ‘where are we now?’ but ‘where am I?’ 

For Scott that is down in the X-Pit, the technological torture chamber as he and Oberon seem destined for defeat by Granny. He triumphs (of course!) because throughout his ordeals, he backs himself, his knowledge of the machine and his faith in transforming negative forces to positive, anti-life to life. He stops what seems to be a huge and overwhelming evil and makes it small.

Scott Free is on a mission of kindness, of victory over death, of beauty from pain. He wants to free himself and others from the ultimate trap, not the external evil of villainous death machines created by his enemies but the self-imposed doubts and fears that come from within. Pour out your love, pour out your belief, pour out your hope. You will be your own miracle.

‘Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain

I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you again.’

(Fire and Rain, James Taylor, from the Album Sweet Baby James, released 1 February, 1970)

Footnotes:

¹Love it To Death was released on March 9, 1971. Pictured below is the original cover which features Cooper using his thumb to appear like a penis. Warners later censored this in later pressings of the album.

²From Time Magazine, March 1, 1971, pg 34. James Taylor may have made sweet-sounding music but it came from a lot of pain. He lost a friend to suicide, became a heroin addict and ended up in a mental hospital, by the time he was 20.

³From Uncovering the Sixties, pg 256. Writers at the counter-cultural Old Mole magazine, lamented the balkanisation of the Movement, saying in a November1970 issue, “As long as we are caught in the competitive cycle of being ‘more left than thou’, we will keep getting further out and more unable to communicate with most Americans.”

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).

Popular culture:

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

-Time Magazine, March 1, 1971

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

Michael Mead is a 54-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. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

 

 

 

 

  

Can you hear the music?

 

Jimmy Olsen # 137 (April 1971) published 50 years ago today (18 February, 1971) is both 1930s cliff-hanger matinee and metaphor for Woodstock Nation versus the State. It’s social commentary wrapped in pulp as the big Red S Action Ace, Jimmy and the Newsboy Legion come up against the Four-Armed Terror, no one comes out unscathed.

Kirby continues to provide unmatched multi-level entertainment as his fascination with the hippie hairies probes beyond their fashion, past their hirsute appearance and into their philosophy, into what they have to say to their society. Kirby is strongly attracted to the way the counterculture seemed to have been able to shake off the strictures of hundreds of years of embedded, inherited programming of who people are, who they should be, how they should relate to others, what they should think, believe, how they should act. Kirby’s creative drive is his unfettered self-expression, his commitment to his own open-ended identity. As a 53-year old World War II veteran, he is unlike many of his peers, he wants to see what is new, his imagination is sparked by seeking out difference.

Kirby senses in the hippie culture that in their commitment to a New Eden, they have connected to something greater than themselves, a new consciousness. He represents this as oneness, a harmony between black and white, youth and age, men, women, children, enabled by science and spirit as Jimmy, Superman, the Newsboy Legion and the Hairies are taken on a ‘trip’ by ‘solar-phone’, a device that ‘…gathers in the radio-signals from the stars and convert (sic) them into mental musical images.’

Music is the lingua franca of youth culture. It’s a language that their elders do not understand and that youth cannot fully explain but they know what it is saying. In the Woodstock film (director’s cut 1994), the interviewers ask attending festival attendees about the music. The answers youth give age don’t really satisfy the questioners because they are simply on a different wavelength. It’s like adults trying to tune into a distant signal on an old transistor radio while youth are hearing a sound only for their ears broadcast with a new song.

As in other issues of the Fourth World, Kirby finds a way to show drug consciousness without showing drug use.  Supes and the boys float past the Eye of God and through collaged images of ‘shifting, kaleidoscopic, geometric forms, of alien spaceships, new worlds and Eastern religious imagery, as if ripped of the wall of a Laurel Canyon pad.

Their heady flight into the light fandango is suddenly interrupted as the effect of the Four-Armed Terror becomes apparent. The beast is bent on taking away the atomic power of the project, a creation of evil factory overseers, Darkseiders Simyan and Mokkari. The dread duo seek an atomic explosion, the ‘last day of the world’, an apocalypse.

The Four-Armed Terror literally takes away the foundations of the Wild Area ‘dropout society’. In this way the beast can be seen as a metaphor for the State, the three arms of government, legislative, executive, judicial with one more arm thrown in for good measure, the four arms (rather than horsemen) of the apocalypse. Riven by dissension, infiltrated by COINTELPRO and CHAOSⁱ, horrified by Kent State and Jackson State, the counterculture leadership in 1971 was under sustained attack and in danger of collapse.

The Terror is destruction, emptiness, he is not filled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, just a lust for power. He proves a match for Superman and even hairy sound waves from the Newsboy Legion cannot stop him. The issues ends, appropriately apocalyptically enough with a revelation, the Four-Armed terror was just a prophetic prototype, his brothers and sisters hatching from Evil Project shells are set to wreak even more havoc.

Jimmy Olsen’s pulp propels the action but the subtext sustains the adult reader. ‘Each of us hears the music in the way it pleases him most!’ says one Hairy girl floating on the back of a geometric wave, ‘Groovy! This is a real gas!’ says Jimmy. Kirby has all bases covered.

Footnotes:

¹ COINTELPRO and CHAOS were FBI and CIA programmes respectively, designed to discredit the counterculture and maintain the status quo.

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).

Popular culture:

-COINTELPRO and CHAOS: How the FBI and the CIA Suppressed Dissent in the 1960s (Nick Tomich, medium.com, 4 March, 2020

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

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

-Woodstock 40^th Anniversary Revisited, the Director’s Cut, 2014 (three disc blu-ray set)

Michael Mead is a 54 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. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

Like son, unlike father

Could you kill your father? If your father was an evil, manipulative, abusive parent, deliberately creating a climate of fear, hurting all those around him, breaking their will to fill the black hole of his own endless desire, would you do it? What would stop you?

These are the questions that Orion, scion of Darkseid is beginning to face in New Gods # 2 (published 50 years ago today, 18 February, 1971). He is not yet aware that Darkseid is his father but he senses a bond between them. Confronting Darkseid who sits in an office chair in a nondescript room, everyday evil next to you in your cubicle, Orion cries out ‘King of the Damned! I can finish you now!’ Darkseid’s reply chills and taunts at the same time: ‘Finish me and you finish yourself! You hesitate Orion! You can sense why—but you don’t know do you? But Darkseid is free of mysteries. He can act!’¹

The fantasy to be able to stop a great evil before it wreaks its worst, before Darkseid can find the anti-life equation, ‘the ability to control free will’, to kill a Hitler before they came to power, these are dreams many have had, but would we do it? Killing a relative, let alone the one who created you is as Darkseid says, like finishing a part of yourself. That part that hopes for redemption of someone bad, the part that hopes for love from someone who shows none. Even if killing that evil would remove fear, Orion hesitates.

Close to danger: Jack Kirby lived in Thousands Oaks, CA, in 1971, currently 38 minutes away from the downtown Los Angeles and 26 minutes away from Manson's base at Spahn Ranch at what was 12000 Santa Susana Pass Road (now 23000).

The fear on Kirby’s pages was real in the streets all around him in Thousand Oaks where he lived and 38 minutes away in Los Angeles proper. Darkseid doppelganger, Charles Manson, had just been found guilty of the Tate-LaBianca murders in the Los Angeles Hall of Justice, along with three of his girls, Susan ‘Sadie Mae’ Atkins, Patricia ‘Patie’ Krenwinkel and Leslie ‘Lulu’ van Houten.²

As the subsequent ‘penalty trial’ began³, there was a huge earthquake in Los Angeles, 6.5 on the Ritcher scale in which 65 people died⁴, just over a week before Forever People #2 came out. Manson’s girls outside the courtroom claimed they had caused it. Hollywood’s entertainment elite and many others lived in fear of Manson’s minions as they promised after the Manson verdict, ‘You are next, all of you.’⁵ The debut of Black Sabbath’s Album ‘Paranoid’ (in the same week as Forever People # 2) could not have described the times more aptly.⁶ 

It must have felt a little like Desaad’s Fear Machine in operation. Darkseid describes the inner workings of both his abusive mind and the workings of the Fear Machine’s gears: ‘Emotional turmoil breaks the dikes of the mind—and releases the flood in which we must fish Desaad.’ Manson, like many abusers, had a special talent to target the most vulnerable, the weakest, those most desperate for love and belonging.

Like Darkseid he fermented emotional turmoil, promising a helter-skelter future, which only he and his followers would survive, an apocalypse with an upside.  He created an atmosphere of false affection and drew his followers to it, to the point where they lost the sense of themselves and then were so open to the power of suggestion, that they would kill.

Darkseid’s, Manson’s, Hitler’s evil is so active in its destruction. Apokolips’ fiery pits and machinations make the unspoilt, green paradise of New Genesis and its high-minded leaders look passive by comparison. The inhabitants of the ‘sunlight, sister world’ seem so trusting to the point of child likeness. In Orion they have a much-needed champion. Someone who unknowingly, carries knowledge of evil within him, ‘…though I be of peaceful New Genesis, I shall strike with more ferocity than can be mustered in all Apokolips.’

Whether Orion actually kills his father remains to be seen but in a sense he already has. He has created an identity based on difference. Orion is an example to his father of what might have been, choosing love over hate, courage over fear, life over anti-life.

Footnotes:

¹ A number of writers have commented on the similarities of the relationship between Orion and Darkseid compared with Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Both Orion and Luke do not know who their father is early on. This has led to speculation that George Lucas took key plot ideas for Star Wars from Jack Kirby. See article on the Kirby Museum website.

² The jury in the case of the People of the State of California vs. Charles Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Leslie van Houten, found all four guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and seven counts of murder, on Monday 25 January, 1971. Bugliosi, pg 539.

³ The penalty trial, to decide the sentence, began on Tuesday January 26, 1971, Bugliosi, pg. 543.

⁴ The earthquake struck at 6.01am on February 9^th, 1971, nine days before Forever People # 2 hit the stands. Bugliosi, pg. 554.

⁵ Manson girl, Sandra ‘Sandy’ Good repeated Manson’s words, delivered in court months before, on the corner outside the Hall of Justice, after the guilty verdict. Bugliosi, pg. 540.

⁶ Black Sabbath’s Paranoid Album debuted on the Billboard top 200 album charts at number 25, in the week beginning Sunday 14^th February, 1971. Forever People # 2 was published on the 18^th.

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).

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 54 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. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

Truth is forever

In the eternal battle between life and anti-life, truth lives forever. ‘Truth is real! Truth lives forever – we’re the Forever People!’ Beautiful Dreamer’s words in Forever People # 2, published 50 years ago today, 2 February, 1971, are at once speaking to the times they came from and to our own. What was once taken for granted, now seems under attack.

Jack Kirby locates truth and life in youth, the Forever People bring a new counter-cultural consciousness at odds with the tired stereotypes of their elders. The middle-aged yokels who greet Mark Moonrider, Big Bear, Vykin the Black, Serifan and Beautiful Dreamer when they make their city debut amongst Earth’s wider populace, resort to cliched hippie catcalls and are deftly and eruditely put in their place by a bemused Big Bear.

When the Forever People, those who seek eternal truths, find a place of their own to be, the first person they meet is a crippled child, Donnie, in an otherwise deserted area. Outcasts alone, together, the Forever People in full garb are like a Western outlaw rock ‘n’ roll band, a Byrds after Crosby, a Buffalo Springfield. 

The Byrds’ 1970 Untitled album, released 14.9.70, on the charts when Forever People # 2 debuted ¹

Donnie’s uncle shows up and immediately sees danger before the empathetic Dreamer senses what will calm him and changes his perception of what he sees, no longer alien hippy ‘savages’ but Dick van Dyke Show era Mary Tyler Moore² an All-American lettered sports star, an adult businessman and a Western rancher in a wide-brimmed hat.

The Forever People’s power, their life, is not simply their outer-worldly abilities but the quiet connection of relating to people who are different and bringing them closer. They know that you don’t have to reveal everything about yourself all at once but you can show enough of who you are, you can let people see enough of themselves in you.

Kirby is always pointing in his comics to something bigger than yourself. Serifan lets Donnie hold one of his ‘cosmic cartridges’ and suddenly Donnie is ‘…everywhere at once.’ In a kind of psychedelic but without the drugs vision, Donnie sees ‘….everything – and everything moves – and makes a kind of beautiful noise…’ Serifan replies ‘Harmony is the word Donnie! You’re listening to – all there is!’

In this way Kirby reflects the transcendent truths found by Sixties youth who took drugs to expand consciousness, like the Hairies, the Forever People, ‘…are their own experience and follow it where it leads them. Their minds are fresh and new, clean slates unmarked by rigid hardening, conflicting indoctrinations….they fear nothing, they hate nothing, worship nothing but their own compatibility with the rest of Creation.’³

By 1971 this kind of Sixties dream was fading. Previously revolutionary figures such as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman had become clownish parodies of themselves as corporate culture sought to commodify and pacify the revolution.

If you can’t overthrow the State, you could at least buy a part of the Revolution ⁴

The last attempt at some kind of counter-cultural unity, the National Coalition Against War, Racism and Repression in January 1971 (a few weeks before the publication of Forever People # 2) between the Yippies, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe), had broken up in disarray amidst infighting as the power of the State infiltrated and undermined the various movements. Hoffman lamented, ‘A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.’⁵

The Forever People brought their own, ego-less consciousness to bring change and challenge the powers that be. They didn’t seek attention or fight amongst themselves like their real-world long-haired counterparts, they sacrificed their own individuality for a greater cause. 

To defeat Mantis, the villain of the piece, the Forever People each ‘..lose their life to find it…’⁶ as they commune with the Source in an Ark of the Covenant moment, holding up the Mother Box and becoming one hero, the Infinity Man: ‘Make us one with that life! Let him displace us….let him enter on the power of the word….even as we vanish when the word is said—‘, like one version of Biblical creation, ‘….in the beginning was the Word….’⁷

It turns out that Infinity Man vs Mantis is only a secondary battle. Darkseid, sitting in the background is not concerned with turning humans into slaves as Mantis craves, he wants something far more powerful, the Anti-Life Equation found in as yet unnamed terran. His evil is strategic, not tactical. His pursuit of the prize is relentless. In Darkseid is the personification of anti-life, like a reverse Jesus, he has come that you may have death and have nothing else.⁸ Anti-life is ultimately selfishness, it is selling out your soul and it is an incredibly active and pernicious force in Kirby’s world and in ours.

The Life vs Anti-Life battle recalls the quote from Dylan, ‘…that he not busy being born is busy dying.’ ⁹ For truth to live forever, good people cannot do nothing. The system itself is not enough, we need to join together to make us one with life. Serving each other will defeat selfishness. Taaruu!

¹ After the excesses of 1967’s psychedelic Summer of Love, the hippy scene had begun to sour by 1968 with scores of homeless young people flooding Haight-Ashbury, the drug scene moved towards harder drugs like heroin. Hippie headline artists like the Byrds, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash, preferred to live a country lifestyle, far away from the madding crowds, in places like Laurel Canyon or Woodstock (Dylan). The Byrds led the way musically with Sweetheart of the Rodeo (30.8.68) the first major album widely recognised as country rock. I think Kirby, who was an astute follower of youth culture, picked up on where the counter-culture was headed and styled his characters accordingly.

² Mary Tyler Moore co-starred in the Dick van Dyke Show (1961-66). By 1970 she had her own Mary Tyler Moore show (1970-77) as her character developed from a small-town girl to a woman who threw off patriarchal perceptions every time she threw her hat in the air. Forever People # 2 came out towards the end of the first season of Mary Tyler Moore.

³ From Kirby’s text piece in Jimmy Olsen # 135, cover-dated January 1971.

⁴ The advertisements appear in Forever People # 2, after page 12.

⁵ As quoted in There’s A Riot Going On, page 406.

⁶ Matthew 16: 25, ‘For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.’ New International Version of the Bible.

⁷ John 1:1, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ New International Version of the Bible.

⁸ John 10:10, ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.’ Jesus as the Good Shepherd referring to the life he will give his followers, as found in the English Standard Version of the Bible.

⁹ From the lyrics to It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) on the Bob Dylan album, Bringing It All Back Home (Columbia Records, released 22.3.1965).

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).

Popular culture:

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

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

Michael Mead is a 54 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. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!