Dreams of hope fulfilled

‘Old man look at my life

I'm a lot like you were
Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were

Love lost, such a cost
Give me things that don't get lost
Like a coin that won't get tossed
Rolling home to you’

Old Man by Neil Young, 1972¹

‘I’m a dreamer. A visionary….I dream! I roam the universe…’ Jack Kirby’s Fourth World farewell issue of Mister Miracle, # 9 (August, 1972), published 50 years ago today, 11 May, 1972, is about the power of the imagination to create hope and release from suffering, to see beauty in darkness, transformation from decay, new life from death. In his just-in-time masterpiece, ‘Himon’, Kirby tells the tale of Scott Free’s escape from Apokolips as Carmine Infantino’s forces gather for a final end to the King’s world.

Kirby had planned to tell the story of Scott Free’s mentor, his deliverer at a later stage but like the ‘Armagetto’ sign at Darkseid’s evil factory, the writing was on the wall a month earlier², when Infantino told Jack the dream was over. So Kirby brought forward ‘Himon’, like a final stand at An Loc or Kontum³, before he was overrun.

Himon stands against Darkseid’s shadow and for the ‘lowlies’, the outcasts, the weak, those who seek to create a space of beauty and expression in a world of destruction. In Himon’s strength, perseverance, compassion, courage, vision, imagination, we see Kirby. Mister Miracle # 9 is as much about Scott Free’s own journey out of himself, from the abuse he suffered as a child, to become someone new, as it is Kirby’s commentary on his own career, what drives him, what he faced, how he overcame overwhelming odds and even when all was lost, how he kept pitching.

Darkseid’s minion ‘Wonderful Willik’, one of those insidious names given to ‘protectors’ of oppressive regimes, chases Himon on Apokolips because Darkseid fears him. Their first confrontation is inconclusive but it establishes Himon as a force, ‘Now the flames test you! Step in!’ If Himon is a saviour, he is no painty-waist. Like the hand of God, Himon reaches through a wall and beckons a young, bald, brainwashed Scott Free and takes him to join the other misfits Himon has rescued, along the way revealing his face which bears a certain resemblance to you-know-who.

Sitting around a table, Himon, like an indulgent father helps prepare Kreetin, Zep, Bravo, Weldun, Auralie to escape. These are the misfits, the comics geeks, the outliers, the artistic, the idealistic, the enthusiastic, the autistic, the brainy and in Kreetin, the misanthropic, the people that haven’t made it in the outside world and need some extra help, confidence to be themselves. They are comic reader stand-ins and together their qualities also represent the many parts of Scott Free.

Scott Free, the narcissistic little bully boy, the skinhead assassin, contemptuous of wisdom, weakness, beauty, others, grudgingly acknowledging the practical help Himon gives, while pouring contempt on his spirit. Yet his journey of transformation, in body, soul, mind, begins here amongst the lowlies, particularly through the silent Auralie, an Apokolips abuse victim like all the others, who still manages to ‘create visions that dance…Auralie’s thoughts are beautiful. She creates beauty. Imagine, -- doing this on a world like Apokolips!’

Kirby is not just talking to Scott, to Auralie, to the reader here, he is talking to himself. In the world of commercial comics, with its harsh, capitalist dictums, where others continually took credit for his work, took his proper financial rewards⁴, trampled on his Art, Kirby still creates, he takes a moment in chaos and bleakness to celebrate the work of a child, ‘You’re free to dance here…you won’t be punished—we’d like to watch you.’ With this issue, he gives a gift he knows is going to be taken away.

Himon is up against a culture of death, personified by Big Barda, a regime that is threatened by love, which shuts down beauty, which denies hope, closes off ‘other roads.’ Himon sacrifices himself to save the others, a saviour, he gives himself over to the mob, is betrayed by Kreetin/Judas and then put to death….but they cannot kill him.

Himon always escapes/resurrects and as he stands next to the Apokolpitian pharisees, they do not recognise him. Foreshadowing Scott Free’s story, Himon seems to agree with the cynical aside by one of the mob but his meaning is quite different: ‘…I’m not sure that thing is….Himon…that replicas can be made---faithful to every atom in our form.’ ‘You make a valid point, friend.’ Hope cannot be killed. It lives on in others.

In a stunning page and reveal, Himon meets the intriguing Metron who knows the whole story about what will happen to Scott. In a Michelangelo moment, the two reach out to each other, God to man, creator Himon to reader Metron: ‘The wonders I build are born in your brain. The roads I travel are opened by your massive perceptions.’ ‘Alas. The heart and brain of the visionary are eternally grounded here. I fostered Darkseid’s power. I must be there at its end!’ Himon/Kirby will stick it out to the end, create to the last moment because they believe in Scott/the reader: ‘…I can teach him to escape Apokolips. But I can’t give him the resolve. Only Scott can renounce what he was here.’

Scott’s escape moves quicker now. Brought before Wonderful Willik’s merciless court, he learns the lowlies are dead, murdered. Scott has grown his hair, expressed his individuality, in defiance of the regime. He stands with Barda and yet they still waver between duty and escape. Their minds are made up by the cruel, tortuous, death of the innocent, Auralie, little Auralie, contemptuously, coldly, killed before dinner.

Willik meets a satisfying end and there follows the most moving sequence in the issue. Himon/Kirby pours out his spirit to Scott/Barda/the reader about who he is, about the power of love and hope to triumph over death and the dreaming we must do to make it happen.

‘The Source. It lives. It burns. When we reach out and touch it – the core of us is magnified. And we tower as tall as Darkseid….yes Scott. Darkseid fears you too. Because you, too, can dream of things beyond Darkseid. What is the dream released inside Scott Free?’ In a final confrontation, Scott answers, ‘Let me be Scott Free—and find myself!’

Scott’s journey that he began in issue # 1 is complete. He has entered the dream of the old man and  had the vision as a young man⁵ that will sustain him for the rest of his life, to turn the pain he felt as a child into something transformative, serenity in the face of death, ‘…embodied in the voice of a woman.’ He has torn out the shrapnel from Darkseid’s richochets, ‘hit by his flying lead’, ‘seen the line between good and bad’, and stands, unbowed.

As always with Mister Miracle, the larger story of the New Genesis vs Apokolips battle, the visceral plot twists, the huge moments, are eclipsed by the personal. Scott Free’s story is our story. Scott Free remembers the wounds, he carries the scars the ricochets put there. He wears them proudly because they are not the signs of a victim but evidence of a miracle. Of someone who went through so much pain, who dared to dream and came out, healed.

‘Old man take a look at my life

I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
The whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
And you can tell that's true.

I've been first and last
Look at how the time goes past
But I'm all alone at last
Rolling home to you

Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were
Old man look at my life
I'm a lot like you were.’

 

¹Old Man by Neil Young from Harvest, charted as high as number # 4 in Canada and number # 31 on the Billboard top 100. In the week that Mister Miracle # 9 came out, the song was up 12 places on Billboard to # 47. Harvest was the number # 2 album in the Billboard top 200.

²Carmine Infantino told Kirby that the Fourth World was finished, in April, 1972. See Jack Kirby Collector #80, pg. 114.

³In May 1972, as North Vietnamese victories began to mount, South Vietnamese forces still held out at An Loc just north of Saigon and Kontom in the Central Highlands. See The Vietnam War, pg. 270.

⁴In May 1972, under pressure to repay the loan from Marvel’s Martin Goodman that enabled his California move, Kirby signed an agreement to relinquish claim to the copyright of Captain America # 1-10. See Jack Kirby Collector # 75, pg. 113.

⁵See the Hebrew Testament (Old Testament), Joel 2:28: ‘And afterward, I will pour out My Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.’

 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)

-Old Man, by Neil Young, from the Album ‘Harvest’, 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 42nd of a projected 46 Fourth World commentaries (only four to go!). He may also do commentaries on the 1984 New Gods # 6, the graphic novel Hunger Dogs, the Absolute Jack Kirby volume two story 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! 

 

 

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!