Give me a reason to believe, forever

Every picture tells a story. Jack Kirby’s multi-level Fourth World epic continues to crack open the American dream and make our heads explode in Forever People # 6 (January, 1972), published 50 years ago today, 5 October, 1971. Kirby’s surface tale of Mark Moonrider, Vykin, Big Bear, Beautiful Dreamer and Serifan fighting Darkseid and his Omega effect, a battle between innocent hippie avatars and overpowering strategic evil is exciting enough but it’s the picture behind the story that endures.

Kirby’s tale continues his exposé of the two Americas he began in Forever People # 4, between the State that wants its youth to just play a game of pretend you don’t see what is really happening and accept the lies that we told your parents and the counter-culture kids who want to blow it all up by firing ‘…a few well-placed shots (that) will start a chain of disruption that can’t be stopped.’

Happyland’s destruction is like Muhammad Ali’s 1974 victory over George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle¹, the Movement absorbed blow after blow, endured and then applied the final little touches as a previously dominant opponent collapsed under their own weight, punched out and out of gas, defeated more by themselves, by their own anxiety and the weight of unsustainable beliefs  than by the blows of an underrated adversary.

As Forever People # 6 hit the stands, the news was full of the ‘bitter lessons of Attica’, a prison riot in which 35 people died², most of them Black, the sham ‘democratic’ election of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu who was the only candidate, the failure of Vietnamisation and the sinking morale of a reduced force of US soldiers who no longer believed they were ‘fighting for democracy.’³ Time Magazine said Attica, was like ‘…Kent State, Jackson State, My Lai and other traumatic events that have shaken the American conscience and incited the searing controversy over the application of force.’⁴

Kirby’s characters play out the conflict between what society said it stood for and what it actually did. One on side is Glorious Godfrey and his Justifiers, dressed like a medieval King with his faceless Crusaders, he is the evil chameleon Messiah, alternately angelic-faced destroyer and cynical manipulator, someone who teaches his followers a belief in anti-life, that  makes‘…all justifiable. Belief in you, Glorious Godfrey, makes us “Justifiers”’, echoing Bugliosi’s description of Charles Manson: ‘He taught his followers a completely amoral philosophy, which provided complete justification for their acts. If everything is right, then nothing can be wrong’.⁵

The most unnerving part of Godfrey’s philosophy is his knowledge of the human condition. Asked about his secret to get his minions doing what he wants, is it the helmet, the uniforms, the creed, Godfrey gives an answer straight out of the fascist playbook: ‘Earthmen are given all these things at birth. I merely justify their readiness to use them. That’s why they love me.’ We’re just looking for the Leader to give us permission to act out our selfish instincts.

Matched against the worst of us, is the best of us. The Forever People and Sonny Sumo use the anti-life equation against Desaad’s warriors and then destroy Happyland, Kingdom of the Damned. When what is said cannot be reconciled with what is done, it must be destroyed to be reborn.

The image of the back of the Humpty Dumpty Nixon lookalike character’s head being blown off is like a Sixties metaphor. We simply cannot go on like this. This madness must stop. 1971 was the year of the Pentagon papers that lifted the lid on the lies told to the American people by successive Democratic and Republican administrations about Vietnam, the same year Nixon installed the tapes system in the White House⁶ that led to his downfall three years later, ‘…death rushes through a thousand collapsing circuits—Happyland’s façade begins to crumble.’

As in past issues, the Forever People can deal with Apokolips’ thugs but they cannot prevail against Darkseid’s power. His Omega effect is truly terrifying and he erases all but one of the Forever People from the Earth. The scenes of Vykin, Sonny Sumo, Big Bear, Beautiful Dreamer and Mark Moonrider (off camera) getting wiped out really set my childhood heart pounding. 

Darkseid leaves the youngest, Serifan alive, because he has dealt with the threat. His evil is strategic, he has long term goals for which he must conserve his energy. He has no time for the short-term tactical mayhem proposed by his lesser subordinates.

As the youngest, Serifan is a substitute for the younger, child reader. The weakest, the one whose greatest fear is being alone because he needs his other, older, friends to help him.

Even so, in a crisis, Serifan shows his resourcefulness and manages to escape to the sanctuary of the Super-Cycle, a boy and his living toy are all that is left to stand up to gathering evil: ‘I’m Serifan. And we two are all that is left of our unit. Just we two!’

When all looks lost, we know it’s not over. We still have reason to believe.

‘If I listened long enough to you
I'd find a way to believe that it's all true
Knowing that you lied
Straight-faced while I cried
Still I look to find a reason to believe.’

(Reason to Believe by Rod Stewart from his 1971 album, Every Picture Tells A Story. The album was number # 1 on the US Billboard top 200 charts in the week Forever People # 6 was released. The single from the album , Maggie May/Reason to Believe, was number # 1 on the US Billboard top 100 in the same week).

¹Ali beat Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo)  on October 30^th, 1974 for the heavyweight championship, absorbing many blows, rope-a-dope style before unleashing a flurry of punches in the eighth round. After a hard right to Foreman’s face, Ali declined to send Foreman to the floor with another punch, instead opting to watch him spin semi-balletically to the canvas in a final piece of artistic triumph over Foreman’s brawn. On arrival in Zaire, Ali had cultivated a strong relationship with the local people while Foreman with his German Shepherd dog and garish clothing was perceived as Belgian type colonial oppressor. See the classic, 1996 documentary film, When We Were Kings.

²Time Magazine, September 27, 1971, pgs. 12-13

³Hastings pgs. 505-517

⁴Time Magazine, pg. 13

⁵ Bugliosi, pg.629

⁶The Nixon administration installed the tapes system in February, 1971 in the Oval Office, including in Nixon’s desk.

Comics:

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

-Jack Kirby Collector # 5, May 1995

-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)

-Time Magazine, September 27, 1971

-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 26th of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries (I’m more than 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! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the miracle we know

After wandering long and lost in the dark, Scott Free’s life  is a transcendent journey, step by step, towards grace and the truest version of himself. He possesses a core strength ‘that survives the worst that life can bring’ and ‘emerges with sudden splendour in the face of death’, like his creator Jack Kirby.¹

In Mister Miracle # 5 (December, 1971), published 50 years ago today, 16 September, 1971, the King of Comics rises up against the malign forces of Apokolips, transported in the Fourth World character he most identified with and offers us quiet strength, hope and the smiling, impish optimism of someone who doesn’t know when to quit. This is the America Jack Kirby knew.

Characteristically, Mister Miracle # 5 begins with someone other than Mister Miracle, his companion, paramour and fellow Granny Goodness orphan, Big Barda. Scott Free is no alpha male, he lives and breathes through others, through an old man, through a powerful yet vulnerable warrior woman of Apokolips.

In a memorable sequence, the gorgeous, muscular, feminine, no-nonsense Barda helps Scott with preparation for his escape act, by hoisting a giant Civil War cannon over one shoulder with one hand, as if it were a suit of clothes or a rucksack with her lunch in it. Along the way she puts a group of leering, unimaginative male ciphers in their place, dismissive of their weak sexism. Barda is all action, heal to toe, elegant power, amplified by the distinct, hand-crafted inking line of Mike Royer. 

In a later sequence, she is eventually captured by the villain of the issue, Baron Vundabar and his dog soldiers. As she stands in the tranquil surrounds of a quiet pool before the battle, she decides to leave Apokolips and takes a moment to enjoy the cooling touch of healing waters, throwing her head back and closing her eyes. We see her, just for a second, like the Queen on holiday, a woman free of any roles or expectations or any man’s eyes, even as the dog soldiers approach behind her. Soon that serenity is shattered and her royal instinct transforms her for war.

Kirby lets us see behind the masks. He gives all his characters the freedom to say who they are, all of who they are, particularly people on the edges of the culture, the people who don’t count, to buck stereotypes and stuff it all back in their critics’ faces. Like Barda, the undersized Oberon is the odd one out. The relationship of old man Oberon and young man Scott Free is like that of father to son but Kirby reverses it. The younger Scott is the one who speaks wisdom to the older assistant.

Mister Miracle needs all the people in his life, his miraculous community, to escape. In a chilling back-up story, the early life of Scott Free, he is trapped in Granny Goodness’ terror orphanage, surrounded by the ‘brute randomness of death’², mercilessly tortured by the vicious Granny and hazed by ‘children of the same foul spirit.’³ They seek to punish him on the throne of truth, ‘Scott Free must be freed of lies!!’ The story is the first real glimpse of the apocalyptic world of conflict and death, of carnage and sirens that shaped Scott and that he must escape. Through it all, he refuses to break and is the ‘face of hope and mercy in dark places'⁴, to the prisoner, to the tormented, to slaves who look like us.

Mister Miracle draws on this defiant, constant belief as he willingly allows himself to be put in a death trap by Baron Vundabar to rescue Barda. Vundabar throws everything at him, encasing him in an impenetrable coffin, smashing him with steel fists, shocking him with huge electrodes, incinerating him in a ‘controlled atom blast’ and then finally corroding his apparently lifeless form in acid.

Vundabar’s mistake is not his technology. It’s his inability to understand that Scott has been through all of this a child. He’s been enslaved, he’s been beaten, he’s been shocked, his personality pounded but he has not dissolved. Scott’s adult life has been about becoming immune from pain by making himself vulnerable and helpless from a position of strength. 

Escaping traps is how he feels the power of his own salvation, power he only dreamt of as a child. It’s akin to the impossible, fearsome, murderous traps Jack Kirby would have been in on the front lines of World War II. He wanted to come home to Roz, a survivor of the murder machine of war, not cleaned and pressed in a coffin.

Mister Miracle wins of course. He triumphs like a smiling G.I. in Paris as he watches on as Vundabar and his cronies laugh in apparent victory. Scott’s escape is due to both American ingenuity and his own knowledge and belief.  “I’m familiar with this type of structure, Vundabar!! I knew where to go! What to do! Now, I’m here!’ Scott could be describing the arc of his own life as much as his understanding of Apokoliptian engineering.

With the villains vanquished, Scott holds Barda in his arms, the proud female warrior says, ‘Scott!! Scott!—Forgive me!! I was afraid! –For us! I—a warrior!’. Scott replies, ‘You’re better than that, Barda. You’re a woman.’ There is no sense here that a stereotypical man is saving a diminutive, helpless woman. Barda and Scott are equals, they both ‘instinctively grab a neighbor’s hand and rally to the cause of one another.’⁵ They have been through the worst and now give each other their best. They help each other become their truest selves.  This is the miracle they know, from sea to shining sea. 

‘O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!’

(America the Beautiful, 1911 version)

¹In this commentary I draw from former United States President George W. Bush’s 9.11.21 speech at the Flight 93, 20^th anniversary, memorial service.

²Ibid.

³Ibid.

⁴Ibid.

⁵Ibid.

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:

-Former United States President George W. Bush’s speech at the Flight 93 memorial service, 9.11.2021. From the CNN transcript

-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 25th of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries (I’m more than 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! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

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! 

 

 

 

 

Holding a mirror up to death

In Jimmy Olsen # 142 (October, 1971), published 50 years ago today, 19 August, 1971, Jack Kirby abruptly shifts from the rollicking Rickles two-parter to a story involving a malevolent vampire who controls young women who tell ‘Count Dragorin’ their secrets. Dragorin’s  power ‘will make us as one’ and once the power has ‘….fully taken hold—controls the body chemistry—controls the very body atoms—so that a pattern is followed—a complete and total pattern.’

Jack Kirby only had to pick up his newspaper in March 1971 when he was drawing Jimmy Olsen # 142¹, to see a real-world example of an evil force who turned young women (and men) into undead creatures, willing to do his will unthinkingly, following a ‘complete and total pattern.’ Charles Manson had been convicted of multiple murders in the Tate-La Bianca killings in January 1971 but his penalty trial, where his punishment would be decided, took the next two months and finished at the end of March with the death penalty, as Kirby was finishing Jimmy Olsen # 142.

Manson’s Family followers, particularly those principals he programmed to kill (Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie van Houten, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson) are like Dracula/Dragorin’s victims, seduced through fear, sex and blood by the mesmeric qualities of the Transylvanian’s and Transilvanean’s magic, in the latter’s case from the power that comes from his eyes. 

In a chilling sequence, his power pours out ocularly as if his evil life force is being released from a kabuki husk, painted bone. He strikes from afar and deep into the sleeping Laura Conway’s body and psyche so powerfully she does not even notice.

Manson’s followers called him the ‘man of a thousand faces’ who related to people on their level of need and whose ability to ‘psych out’ people was so great that many of his disciples felt he could read their minds. Murdering together ‘created a bond not less but more binding in that it was their secret.’³

There is no murder in Jimmy Olsen # 142 but the idea of Manson as vampire, as a real-world inspiration is one way to explain the entry of Dragorin into the Fourth World. Manson’s crimes and those of his followers, sucked the soul out of the Sixties as surely as Dragorin’s beams into Laura’s neck made her undead.

Laura, like Sadie, Patie and Lulu ‘casts no reflection’. Once taken by a vampire, you no longer see yourself in the mirror, the empty mirror stares back at you as if to say ‘you are not there’, your identity, your humanity, is gone. You are a blank slate primed for a vampire’s will. You only reflect the Master.

Jimmy Olsen # 142 is terrific action plus and the pace moves quickly capped by the revelation of a devilish planet. It’s enjoyable for the straight-up story that is told and is a welcome relief from the issues that preceded it but death and undeath hang over it.

Even the Newsboy Legion whose role is usually roly-poly comical, lose their sense of joie de vivre when they chance upon the killer of the original Guardian, Jim Harper (not the clone they team up with from time-to-time). There is murder in their eyes and straight after they hear the killer’s confession Kirby shifts the scene back to Superman and Jimmy in a graveyard!

Deliberately or not, it feels like Kirby is reflecting the fear and violence of the times as a corrective to the blithe, middle-aged, party piece of the Rickles issues. Vietnam still dragging on, the counter-culture fragmented and out of gas, Soledad brother George Jackson about to be killed in prison.⁴ Some older readers might have felt a bit like Jimmy, ‘This is it! I’m going to die!—And there’s no escape!’

You know that Supes and Jimmy will triumph in the end but first they have to get through ‘The Genocide Spray’ ! I know, more death! Jimmy Olsen # 142 hit the stands just as Charles 'Tex' Watson's trial began....⁵

¹ Jack Kirby Collector # 80 has a chart showing when Kirby drew each Fourth World issue, pg. 6.

²I draw on  the Bugliosi account of the penalty trial, pgs. 541 – 599.

³Bugliosi, pg. 627.

⁴George Jackson, activist, author, prisoner and subject of a famous song by Bob Dylan, was killed at San Quentin Prison on 21 August, 1971, the same day remnants of the Manson Family held up Western Surplus Store in Los Angeles as part of a plot to free Charles Manson.

⁵ Watson's trial had been delayed after he had been extradited from his home state of Texas. The trial began in the same week as Jimmy Olsen # 142 was published, 16 August, 1971 and finished on 21 October, 1971. Watson was sentenced to death.

 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 23rd of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ugliness reveals its true face in beauty

You wouldn’t like Orion if you met him. The real him. The face behind the face, stripped of its middle-class mother box make-over. Unadorned, with his dirty, uglier, Apokoliptian visage, he comes from a different side of the street than you do. You need him but you don’t want him. Carved out by definitive, leave-the-lines-in Mike Royer inking (bye, bye Vinnie), Orion is like a gang member with his tattoos covered, an outcast sinner made acceptable to New Genesis heaven, with a lie.

The question Jack Kirby poses in New Gods # 5 (November, 1971), published 50 years ago today, 12 August, 1971 is why can’t Orion show his true face and be accepted by the beautiful gods of New Genesis with all their high church spirituality, their lovely homes, their shining technology? Orion is a soldier for Good, he doesn’t yet know he comes from Bad. Swapped at birth for Scott Free (Mister Miracle), as the miraculous one was sent to Apokolips and Orion to New Genesis as part of a pact to prevent war, Orion has only has an inkling of the truth: that he is Darkseid’s (second) son. He spends his life battling against that heritage.

There’s an echo of Kirby in Orion’s life. Why can’t they accept me for who I am and give me what I want, what I deserve? Cast out of National/DC in the late 1950s after losing a lawsuit against powerful editor Jack Schiff¹, Kirby was driven back to Timely/Marvel, a place he had left 15 or so years earlier after a dispute over Captain America and proper reward.² At Marvel he works feverishly to largely create the Marvel universe by himself to keep food on the table yet he never gets what he is promised. He is always affable to Lee but with friends when he talks about the situation he fulminates with rage.³ One face is acceptable in the world, the other is not.⁴

Were Kirby or his avatar Orion to show their real face in polite society, you get the feeling that the luxury, Bel-Air gods of New Genesis would shun the Thousand Oaks scion of Apokolips and cross the street, like he was an uncelebrated Vietnam veteran. Yet they need him. Orion is the teeth of the Revolution, in the war, he is the Front Line. He is not focused on Forever People non-violence, or Highfather diplomacy or Scott Free kindness, Orion is born-to-rule grit, the imperious dog-soldier. His opponent in this issue, Slig, a kind of grotesque fish, is only going to end up, belly-up, at the bottom of the fish tank.

It is the exchange between the two opponents that is the most instructive and memorable sequence in New Gods # 5 (even more so than the opening shots of Metron and the Final Barrier giant). Having escaped a giant, Deep Six-spawned clam, Orion hunts down Slig to give him ‘a last salute to his talent for killing.’ As they fight, they bait each other, contemptuous of their opposite. There is nothing stereotypically superhero noble about the clash. Orion enjoys inflicting pain on Slig, insults him constantly and laughs deeply at Slig’s misfortune. Orion likes being nasty.

Beaten physically, Slig has a far more powerful weapon: he knows who Orion truly is. “Noble, sanctimonious New Genesis hero!! I’ll kill you for the sham you are!!—Your love of destruction has forced your true face from hiding….you’re a mad, tormented animal, Orion!” 

We finally see Orion’s real face, the regular Kirby Fourth World ‘revelation’. Orion admits he is flawed, he uses Mother Box to hide his true nature: “Mother Box protects me. She calms me and restructures and keeps me part of New Genesis.” Slig rolls his groper fish head back, all incisors and saliva and laughs, “Orion is his very own monster!”

With this, Slig seals his fate: “Once stirred in the fires of hate and inner fear, there’s no stopping the arrival of death!” Orion kills Slig because Slig spoke the ugly truth, he got to Orion. Orion cannot live with his own otherness, his ugliness, he knows Slig is right and kills him for it. In a real sense, it is not just Slig who dies, it is a part of Orion too, the part that wishes he did not need to deny himself, to live.

The most disturbing part of this is the commentary it makes on Kirby’s society and our own. Be it ‘dirty hippies’, gang members, homeless people, prisoners, disabled people, people at work or in our own family who we find difficult or who make us uncomfortable, will we accept them as they are or will we with the power, the money, the position, demand that they fit in with us while we don’t or won’t change?

Ashore in France, soon after at D-Day in 1944 and fighting for his life, I feel Kirby draws on his experiences when he inhabits Orion. When you’re forced to be someone you are not to survive, what you find are ugly truths. As wartime Orion, peacetime Scott Free/Kirby is forced to exchange part of himself for someone he would rather not know. Afterwards he has to live with two, irreconcilable sides, changed but whole. Like Orion, he must ride the Leviathan, on the unconscious sea.

¹As outlined in Jack Kirby Collector # 80, ‘Old Gods, New Gods’, April, 2021, pg. 26.

²Ibid.

³Gil Kane’s remembrances from his 1986 UK Comic Art Convention interview, as referenced in Jack Kirby Collector # 80, pg.28.

⁴Graphic Story World editor Richard Kyle theorised that Kirby was conveying the theme of saving face in the Fourth World. Kirby felt he hadn’t received proper credit at Marvel and success at National/DC would regain face with the public. Jack Kirby Collector # 80, pg. 90.

 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 (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 22nd of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!