Kirby's Kids refuse to be silent

 

By January 1971, Jack Kirby was writing and pencilling and editing all four, 4^th World titles. Even for an artist as prolific as Kirby (his 1970 deal with National/DC required a minimum of 15 pages a week*) ,that is a big load and something had to give. That something was Jimmy Olsen.

Jimmy Olsen # 136, on the stands 50 years ago today, 14 January 1971, came out on the same day as Mister Miracle # 1 (see my MM # 1 blog also out today). Jimmy Olsen is the most straightforward of all the 4th World titles. It starts with a bang as Kirby’s first auteur comic for DC and Jimmy Olsen # 133 and 134 are terrific, full of the kind of energy, connection to youth culture and revisioning of Jimmy and his relationship with Superman (see my earlier blogs on these issues). Their themes of identity, separation, innocence, dissolution, distrust, revolution resonate still.

Kirby was certainly working on the other three titles but the first two issues hit you between the eyes because he had time. By Jimmy Olsen # 136 the demands of creating an entire new universe of characters take their toll and Jimmy Olsen becomes the most traditional of the four titles as Giant Green Hulk Kryptonite-Coated Jimmy Clone goes a few rounds with the Big Red S/New Guardian and we learn about competing clone projects on Earth and Apokolips.

When Kirby met with National/DC they offered him Superman and asked him to revamp it but he declined and instead said to Infantino et al, ‘what’s your lowest-selling title?’**. The reply was Jimmy Olsen. Anything to do with Superman means you have to help bear the corporate burden of the company’s founding character and I think Kirby felt restrained with what was possible. He wasn’t at National/DC to do other people’s characters, he wanted to do his own.

When I look at the four 4^th World titles I think they all have a different function and perhaps target slightly different age groups. New Gods sits at the top of the Kirby universe, it literally tells the story about the World. Forever People, regarded as the centrepiece title by many commentators is about the People, the characters are the most closely tied to the counter-culture youth Kirby saw all around him in California. Jimmy Olsen is about the Kids. It’s about the fights, the camaraderie, the joie de vivre Kirby remembers growing up in the Lower East Side of New York. Mister Miracle is about the Individual, Scott Free on the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey we all need to define for ourselves.

In this company, Jimmy Olsen is the least sophisticated of the four titles because it is targeted at the youngest audience. But Kirby being Kirby, he managed to say something which caught my eye and got me thinking about a situation closer to our own time. Darkeseid’s Project minions, Mokkari and Simyan regroup after a call to Darkseid and help Kirby with his exposition as they talk about how their mission is to replace the Earth Project with theirs and bring chaos in the place of order, “…from that chaos will arise the new masters of earth – with the great Darkseid as their exalted leader.” They talk about how they will destroy the Earth Project and “….It shall become again as it once was ---empty! Silent!’’

Darkseid brings chaos and that chaos simply destroys, it delivers nothing in the place of what once was, only emptiness and silence. Evil isn’t creative in the sense it cannot build anything. It can only tear things down. Darkseid is a being of no principles, no morals, no ethics. Behind his words, there are no thoughts, behind the rage, there is no strength, only empty darkness. Kirby who landed on Omaha beach only 10 days after D-Day fought against the evil of a great darkness, Hitler and his Nazis***, the unrestrained Will of a narcissistic colossus. According to multiple commentators, Kirby had Hitler (and even Nixon) in mind when he created Darkseid.

Yet like all despots, like all demagogues, Darkseid will overreach himself. His empty words will ring hollow, his followers will melt away, their bravado replaced by cowardice. The appeal to force will always be attractive to many, to shut down free will with ‘the outside control of all living thought’**** an all-encompassing effort to get people to think and act in only one way, controlled by an outside force. We, the people, cannot be silent when our dark side speaks.

*Comic Book Resources website (interview with Mark Evanier, Kirby’s assistant)

** Comics Journal # 134, February 1990, pg.94

*** Comics Journal # 134, February 1990, pg. 68

**** New Gods # 1, pg. 9.

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! 

 

 

 

 

 

A Miracle in Time

 

Scott Free got out. He escaped as an orphan from Grannie’s unkind goodness on the 4^th world hell of Apokolips but he didn’t escape scot-free. He was hit by Darkseid’s ricochet:

“Sweet Child in time you’ll see the line

The line that’s drawn between good and bad

See the blind man shooting at the world

Bullets taking their toll,

If you’ve been bad, Lord I bet you have

And you’ve not been hit by flying lead

You’d better close your eyes and bow your head

And wait for the ricochet.”

(Child in Time, Deep Purple, 1970)*

 

In Mr Miracle # 1, which came out 50 years ago today (14 January, 1971), Jack Kirby, as always, is writing and creating on multiple levels. On one level, he tells a story about a ‘super escape artist’, the ‘making of a legend’, a miraculous man who blends science and spirit to soar past the challenges of all traps, who puts his life on the line each time, a man who ‘cheats death.’ You could enjoy the story just for its own surface sake, like a comics Evel Knievel.

On another level, Kirby is interested in the journey of the human spirit and how it overcomes pain, particularly childhood pain. As Scott gets to know the original Mr Miracle, Thaddeus Brown, Brown tests him by chaining him and daring him to escape. The elder Miracle and assistant/Kirby avatar Oberon, are surprised when Scott doesn’t struggle.

Scott says “The trap is not in the chain—it is in the brain…” When you’re trapped and you can’t get out, when you are someplace bad, struggle is useless. When a terrible thing happens to you, you fight but you fight against a force that will inevitably overpower you. Scott accepts the moment and transcends it by connecting to something bigger than himself. Before the trap test, he reaches into his bag and the comforting voice of the mother box. Oberon says: “Look at him! He reached into the bag and touched something – now – look at him!” Scott says “I’m ready.”

Scott Free carries a lifetime of hurt, collateral damage from an unholy exchange deal between Moses (Highfather) and the Devil (Darkseid). As a child, he is abused, trapped in Grannie’s torturous, terror orphanage, hit by the flying lead of a blind Darkseid shooting at the world. A child in time, his cries, his needs are drowned out by the all-consuming needs of the discordant, distorted, abusive adult. The wails in the Deep Purple song only grow stronger and louder, faster, more insistent until in the second half, there is a moment of peace, a lament and finally cries of pain, ‘No! Do it! No! No!’

The need to escape pain is universal, escape from bullying, from abuse of all kinds, from people who deride you because you are different. We run from it. We seek an altered state through drink or drugs or anything else to avoid being present with pain. We also seek solace in things and people that give us hope and love, comics, community, a future vision of ourselves that reaches back to our child in time and says ‘you will make it.’

Scott Free as Mr Miracle rushes at pain in defiance of it. He challenges death each time using all the tools he learned in hell. At first it’s how he survived as a child, escaping from his own body and the pain he felt, now it’s how he lives as an adult, escaping from traps, each escape a reaffirmation of his own journey. He won’t be put down, drowned out, his voice will be heard, he won’t be abused. He seeks to turn the pain he felt as a child into something transformative, serenity in the face of death.

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 and came out, healed.

“Spread the word around

The rat is leaving town

The message is a song

The misery is gone

….

Now I’m free

And I can see

And I am me…”

(Flight of the Rat, Deep Purple, 1970, the song after Child in Time on the album, Deep Purple in Rock).

 

*Child in Time was released on the Deep Purple Album ‘In Rock’ in June 1970, as Kirby prepared to write and draw Mister Miracle # 1.

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).

Discography:

In Rock, Deep Purple, 1970

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! 

 

 

Kirby's Life Equation: New Gods, no limits

At a time when God was dying, Jack Kirby gave us New Gods.

Three days before Christmas 1970, Kirby’s kinetic creativity exploded in the pages of New Gods # 1, 50 years ago today, 22 December, 1970. At the time, America and the Western World, the Christian West, was in ferment with theologians, philosophers, atheists proclaiming the Death of God by which they meant the death of the theist God, God as a separate being who would intervene in human affairs. God, who was inside and outside the Universe, immanent and transcendent, had been given His (second wave feminist theologians hadn’t quite achieved widespread use of female terms for God) marching orders.

The Death of God wasn’t just a subject confined to the coteries of religious institutions. It was front cover news in popular culture (Time Magazine, 8 April 1966) right around the time Kirby was creating the Fourth World but not giving it to Marvel.

The ideas of German theologians Rudolf Bultmann, the Bible’s demythologiser who distinguished between history and heilsgeschichte (‘holy history’) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘’God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along without Him….”, (Letters and Papers from Prison, London, 1959,pg. 95) formed during World War II, reflecting the experience of Christians at a time of great crisis, were beginning to filter down to the wider Western populace, both sacred and secular, as the insurgent Sixties challenged, threw out and remade the culture. It became less and less possible to believe in a theist God when the evil of the Nazi death camps or racism or sexism or the war in Vietnam seemed to draw no response from an omnipotent God.

Into this context stepped Jacob Kurtzberg, Jewish champion of the Outsider Art, filled with the stories of the Torah, Kirby makes his biggest Fourth World statement yet with New Gods # 1, a cosmological epic in 23 pages introducing Darkseid scion Orion, New Genesis, Lightray, Metron, Highfather (the Fourth World’s Moses), Kalibak, and the central conflict of the whole Fourth World, the pursuit of the Anti-Life equation. Whew! The New Gods have arrived in stunning, mind-expanding, world-building fashion! ‘An Epic for Our Times!’

On the face of it, Kirby seems merely to be telling a familiar story, another series of God beings with a dualist dynamic. It’s an irony of our times that in 2020, with Christian belief in the Western World much lower than in 1970*, that a largely secular audience is still hugely attracted to stories about Gods, superhumans. Even when our God practice has fallen by the wayside, the conventional many given way to the intentional few, our imagination is still engaged, our desire to be told conventional God stories is still strong, in the sense of another reality beyond this one about people with cosmic power.

Kirby’s story is not so straightforward as it first appears. He wants to tell a story about the moment he is in: “I feel that whatever story there is to this ‘gods’ business, the ‘new’ gods or the ‘old’ gods, I feel that there is a story to them. I feel that there was an actual replacement of the ‘old’ gods by new ones which are relevant to what we see and hear….This is a whole new interpretation and cannot be told with shields and swords; it must be done with what we know and deal with what we worry about.” (Comic and Crypt interview with Kirby on 31 January, 1971, published November, 1971).

And what do we know and deal with and worry about? The 'Life Equation’. When Highfather seeks counsel he turns to the Source (Wall) and the moving hand writes words which prophesy the future war with Apokolips. Orion calls the eternal advice ‘irrevocable’ but Highfather corrects his stepson’s still developing theology, ‘’But it does not decide. The right of choice is ours! That is the Life Equation!” Free Will is at the centre of New Genesis’ world, not (pre) Destiny. The Divine can advise but does not interfere. We make the difference by doing good or evil to each other. The Source is more like Lutheran Protestant theologian Paul Tillich’s (1886 – 1965) ‘Ground of All Being’, not a theist, separate, outside force who created the Universe but the Universe itself.

And what of the Anti-Life Equation? Kirby gives an answer which ties straight into the times. Metron says, “The Anti-Life Equation was undiscovered until these days! It means the outside control of all living thought.” Kirby doesn’t settle for a simple explanation of evil. He defines it like a totalitarian State, an Orwellian, Fascist, all encompassing effort to get people to think and act in only one way, controlled by an outside force, sort of like a certain kind of politics in 2020.

The Sixties, that short 1965 to 1973 period brought to popular consciousness many ways to see truth, it threw out the monocultural, (mono) theist, patriarchal, hetero-normative, narrow, stifling view and opened the doors to an undiscovered country of popular thought, a new consciousness, a Teilhard de Chardin type ‘noosphere’, a new sphere, where the evolution of thought of the noosphere would be a new birth, a ‘noogenesis’, New Genesis.

The Life Equation, what we all engage with in our lives, isn’t an unchanging theist God, it is the human, everlasting journey of thought, freedom, creativity that we all add to with each breath and expand noogenesis. Modern Christians see this as an expression of the Divine, Christianity is not set, it is dynamic, tending non-theist, it evolves with the times.

Beyond all its theological, philosophical content, New Gods # 1 is just so damn exciting! It feels so alive, so here. The momentum that builds carries you forward so powerfully it becomes difficult not to exclaim out loud. It is impossible to take in all the concepts, the implications, the sweep of the story in one reading. Marv Wolfman in the endpiece writes, “…you watch raw energy strained to its utmost. The imagination of Jack Kirby has no boundaries, no limits…nothing is too incredible to be conceived. A wise man once said that when man eventually reaches the far end of the universe, he will undoubtedly find the name Jack Kirby signed on the lower right-hand corner.”

From New Gods to the God of comics, our ever-expanding universe of knowledge and the stars keeps us looking ‘just over yonder’ to where Kirby takes us. It is a journey that will never end, a Christmas gift that keeps on giving.

* (Pew research tells us that belief in God stood at 97 per cent in the US in 1966 but had fallen to 63 per cent in 2014, the US is an outlier amongst Western countries, in other countries belief is much lower).

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).

 

Theology:

-A History of Christianity (Diarmid McCulloch, Penguin, 2010)

-From the Big Bang to God (Lloyd Geering, Steele Roberts, 2013)

- Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrick Bonhoeffer, London, 1959)

-Time Magazine, 8 April, 1966, ‘Toward a Hidden God’ pgs 82-87)

-Tomorrow’s God (Lloyd Geering, Bridget Williams Books, 1994)

-Wrestling with God: the Story of My Life (Lloyd Geering, Bridget Williams Books, 2006)

 

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! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finding Forever in aging children

 

When I was young, I thought hippies would never die. They seemed like eternal children, protected from the mortality that comes for all of us. The Age of Aquarius somehow broke the rules, tossed out the past, created a New Eden and with it, Forever People, ‘they belong to the sunrise…they’re from a place that men have sought but never found….’

On the cover of Forever People # 1, published 50 years ago today, 1 December, 1970 (cover dated Feb – Mar 1970), Superman, like the younger me, is drawn to Big Bear, Mark Moonrider, Vykin the Black, Serifan because he wants to find people like him ‘this is my only chance to find my own kind! You must tell me how to reach Supertown!’

In the story, Superman appears worn down, like the 1970 Don Draper at the end of the AMC TV drama Madmen, exhausted from the mechanistic mayhem of competitive capitalism, ad-man turned hippie. Superman wants time off, to be with his own people, sit in the sun and forget about all his superhero obligations for a while.

Superman feels alone, apart from others, even from himself, quoting Heinlein to convey his feelings: ‘Despite his powers he is in a minority of one in a teeming world of billions. A stranger in a strange land. What does Superman mean for you down there?…for the first time in many years – I feel that I’m alone --  alone.’ For me as a reader it’s akin to watching your friends fall away from the collecting world, leaving you in a wilderness of one, carrying on by yourself and hoping to find someone that shares your passion.

Superman wants what we all want: peace. The kind of peace that comes from finding yourself in another, your own Supertown community. When you meet a friend who instantly gets you, no need to be understood or to understand, no explanations or justifications. ‘Rise mother box, unite us as one….make us the door for him to enter….let your circuits carry the word, let it grow loud until it reaches the winds of infinity.’

The idea of Supertown not only functions as a place where all those lucky enough to be super can be together but also as a metaphorical boomtube for the reader, when we were young enough to believe in a place where superheroes could be real and it was possible for us to be taken there.

The boomtube is a gateway to all kinds of other worlds, for Superman to what he will eventually discover is New Genesis, for both reader and superhero, a step into the infinite world of the imagination, of what’s possible, not just what is. ‘The only way to find Supertown….is to find those kids!’ It’s as if Kirby is calling out to your child self and saying you, only you, can help Superman find himself. As you turn the pages, you create your own journey, if Superman can find forever people, why can’t you? We identify with Big Bear, Mark Moonrider, Vykin the Black, Serifan and we become them.

Kirby’s genius is not just his creation of lasting characters, of superhero worlds and universes, of memorable villains, of iconic visuals, his talent extends to connecting with the childhood world in ways that seemed only to speak to you, because he could find you and take you to Supertown and come back with your Beautiful Dreamer. ‘Listen to the night – you may hear sounds heard by few men…’. 

The impact of his comics stays with his aging children everywhere.

‘People hurry by so quickly

Don't they hear the melodies
In the chiming and the clicking
And the laughing harmonies

Songs, to aging children come
(Songs, to aging children come)
Aging children, I am one (I am one)

(From Songs to Aging Children Come, on Joni Mitchell’s 1969 album, Clouds)

Research this article: 

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

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

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

-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website.   

 

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! 

Chris Claremont's birthday gift to me

Happy 70th birthday, Chris Claremont!:). From 1980 to about 1988, Uncanny X-Men was my favourite superhero comic, in large part due to Chris Claremont. In retrospect he was prone to overwrite sometimes, like an 80s Don McGregor (whose soaring, yearning, illustrated novel prose, I now appreciate on Jungle Action) but the extended emoting, the exploration of the interior lives of the characters was exactly what I needed as a teenager. 

I needed models of people to say what they felt, so I could. When I reread those X-Men from that period, they take me back not just to the 80s but to the younger version of me. It's nostalgic and uncomfortable at the same time but those X-Men helped me imagine a future for myself that was better than the place I was in. Thank you, Chris:). 

Found in the 4th World: a place for you, a place for us

Jack Kirby’s fascination with the hairy hippies he saw all around him in 1970 can’t be contained in the pages of his comics in Jimmy Olsen # 135 (cover-dated January 1971, published 50 years ago today, Tuesday 24 November, 1970). It extends to a special text piece in the issue, ‘The Hairies – Super-Race or Man’s Second Chance.’

Like a New God, he creates them as perfect Adams and Eves, cloned best bits, without Original Sin, innocent and free, “…they 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.”

Hippy hairy outsiders are like children, in the words of a contemporary writer, the counter-culture “…rediscovered a childlike quality that it supremely treasures, to which it gives its ultimate sign of reverence, vulnerability and innocence.”* And from Joni Mitchell’s 1969 song Woodstock, “….we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden…..” (of Eden), before hate, before hierarchy, away from the competitive Apokolipitical Anti-Life of parental capitalism.

Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon album debuted in April 1970, featuring 'Woodstock'

Views like this were met with cynical dismissal at the time from the Establishment, parents, civic leaders who had a different understanding of human nature and remembered their own youthful innocence before it was swept away by the inevitable compromises of middle age. Yet the idealism, the hopes, the desire for something different, to be left alone when you are different to others, to see the best in them and be Good are universal, present in all religions, all secular philosophies. They are also at the heart of comics fandom.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in full flight in 1970, from Johnny Rogan's book, Crosby Stills Nash & Young while Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and the nephews curse Gladstone Gander's luck, again! 

I got into hippie music about the same time as I started reading comics, as a young child in the early 1970s. We sang Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi as five-year old new entrants at school and I went home to read about Duckburg’s greatest loser, Donald Duck. I liked the high harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the soaring notes and the lifting vision of what and who it was possible to be in this world. Choosing to be a hippy in 1970 was a bit like being a comics fan in the same or any era, it puts you on the outside. People don’t understand you and some are even hostile.

Kirby continues about the Hairies: “That is their challenge – to find a way of living with what is around them without the mindless, merciless, prerogative of inflicting destruction. Of course, this makes the Hairies perfect targets for all of us! We’ve got to kill them! Wipe them out!! They are not like us!”

If you retain the innocence of your youth in some way, if you still like superheroes, if you are quiet and gentle, if you want to live in harmony, you will attract conflict, judgement. Anything outside the norm, your hair, sexuality, philosophy, paper pamphlet habits gets you whomped on, laughed at during high school. So where do you go to be accepted, to a place where people “…exert no pressures on their fellows. They strive to give to each other what they can – and that can be quite a bit….each Hairie considers the other a most valuable and miraculous organism…”?

Comics fandom is the Woodstock of outsider culture. It has a long history of bringing together all those who don’t fit in, of treating people well who have been cast out by society, the shy, the sensitive, the artistic, the autistic. No community is perfect and it would be easy to point to people and groups in fandom who aren’t like this but overall in its relative powerlessness, in its unknownness, in its stubborn belief that there is a place for you if you like comics no matter who you are, fandom provides a Hairy Hippy Haven.

The famous-in-comics image from the 1969 Comic Art Convention in New York

Kirby’s 4^th World comics continue to be about far more than a battle between good and evil with great-looking machinery. He connects with youth culture in a way that his former Marvel counterparts at the time could only dream about. His heart, his hope, his hippy idealism resonate strongly, 50 years later.

‘Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning.’

(from the lyrics to Woodstock, by Joni Mitchell, 1969).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRjQCvfcXn0

* Charles A Reich, from his book The Greening of America, as quoted in Time Magazine, November 2, 1970, pg. 13

Research this article: 

-Time Magazine, November 2, 1970, 'Fuzzy Welcome to Cons. Ill, pg. 12-13

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

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

-Crosby Stills Nash & Young (Johnny Rogan, Omnibus Press, 1996)

-Sense of Wonder - My Life in Comics Fandom - the Whole Story (Bill Schelly, North Atlantic Books, 2018)

-The Golden Age of Comics Fandom (Bill Schelly, Hamster Press, 2003)

-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website.   

 

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!