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! 

 

Through a glass finally

 

Look in the mirror, who do you see? Do you see who you are now, who you were then, who you will be, do you see yourself as others see you, others who wish you ill? In Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle # 8 (June, 1972), published 50 years ago today, 16 March, 1972, the King, yet again, provides us with a multi-levelled tale and takes us deep into ourselves in ‘The Battle of the Id.’

Picking up from last issue, Scott Free is on Apokolips where he is attempting to free himself forever from Granny Goodness’ control, to stand free from the pain he merely escaped from when he was allowed to leave the Hell planet.  Like all heroes he has to fight for that freedom but unlike lesser, literal-minded creators, Jack Kirby has Scott's battle take place not just against an evil opponent but against himself.

Tied to a torture table, he is hooked up for a ‘psycho-merge’ in a mind hook-up with The Lump, a creature of the Id while Granny, Kanto, Virmin Vundabar and a mystery prisoner (Tigra, second wife of Darkseid and mother of Orion) look on. Big Barda and her army of Jack Kirby’s murderous, cosmic roller girl, ex-girlfriends, Stompa, Gilotina, Bernadeath, Mad Harriet and Lashina, Manson girls on a tighter leash, are powerless as yet to save the Miracle Man.

Face-to-face with his Freudian fears, Scott Free tries to dodge a death dance with the Sligian monster, an endlessly malleable slug, whose form shifts at will, whose will seems irresistible and whose power seems overwhelming. In Sigmund’s theory, the Id contains sexual and aggressive drives, hidden memories, the super-ego is the human conscience and the ego, the realist who manages the former two . There can be no doubt that Scott Free feels that the Lump is real, that he really will die back on the table if he loses but equally there is no doubt that Scott is in a war with his own mind and heart.

Abused on Apokolips, fueled by desperation and rage, a cry for justice, Scott Free has largely transcended his desire for revenge but here, in his Id, where the last act of transformation occurs, is the part of him, the part of us, we don’t want to look at because it negates all that we think we have achieved. The Lump is our own burden, the weight of unresolved emotions, thoughts, it’s all that we wanted to leave behind in our lives but can’t.

As a victim of child abuse from Granny and her slaves at her terror orphanage, the Id of hidden memories presents the greatest challenge to Scott Free. The worst memories of the supremely, shape-shifting, knowing evil that he has suppressed, the deepest feelings of visceral revenge that come with those memories, the greatest challenge to how he sees himself now, that is what he faces in the battle of the Id. All those conflicting emotions and thoughts, literally rise from his subconscious mind, ‘….from the depths of the swirling gases…’ and he sees reflected back all the parts of himself he wants to deny.

Whatever our experience, we often struggle with why we are at war with ourselves. Why can’t we control what we say, what we do, what we feel, why do others seem to exert such control over us? Surely as Scott Free says to his Lump, as he challenges the endless cycle of fighting and death, ‘…Till the end of time? Is that the kind of world you want to live in? A world of endless struggle?’

So much of Kirby’s creative life must have felt like that. Just as he thought he was reaching the top of the mountain at Timely, National, Marvel and National/DC, final recognition would be ripped away from him.  There’s a sense that you can’t win, you can’t triumph over your greatest pain until you accept that you can’t win, that it has happened, that you’ve given your best and that you are fighting on the wrong ground.

This is the point Scott makes to Barda when in her attempt to free him and hearing that Scott is dead, Barda is about to kill Granny, ‘Hag! You taught me how to hate! But you couldn’t teach me whom to hate!’ A suddenly-alive Scott, cries out, ‘No, Barda! You mustn’t!’ It is the cry of the non-violent victor, the confident voice of the heroic ideal. We don’t fight here, we don’t kill, we are not like them.

Scott has escaped and broken Granny’s hold, ‘…the secret of her power. The ability to shake our self-confidence.’ And how has he done it? Not by killing his opponent, not through his own power but with a simple mirror, subtly forged, to force the Lump to look at himself, to defeat himself. The Lumpian Id cannot handle the sight of the ego of the real Lump and now lies paralysed, ‘….in eternal fear of facing himself.’

Kirby’s proxy, Scott Free, has won out over his own revenge, his own anger, his own violence. He has stared into his own abyss and let everything that once hurt him dissolve, now just a reflection in the rear-view mirror, of a life transformed.

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)

-The Ego and the Id, www.simplepsychology.org

-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)

-Time Magazine

-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 39th of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries (more than three quarters of the way there!). Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake! 

I am somebody

In Jimmy Olsen # 148 (April, 1972), published 50 years ago today, it’s the cover that sends the strongest message. This issue is the last of Jack Kirby’s revisioning of Superman’s previously foppish, carrot head schoolboy. Jimmy and the Newsboys are in army green, in a cage being lifted away by an unseen force and not even Superman looks like he can save them. Prisoners in the Fourth World version of the Hanoi Hilton¹, powerless Sixties youth drafted into a war they don’t believe in, Carmine Infantino’s unseen hand yanking away Kirby’s creative dreams.

Over the Jimmy run (#133 to # 148, except for a #140 reprint), Jack Kirby used the title, his first at National/DC after leaving Marvel, to escape his own self-imposed strictures of telling the Big Story (in New Gods, Forever People and Mister Miracle). It allowed him to run the full gamut of counter-cultural symbolism, to farce, to boy’s own adventure, to loneliness and the human condition. His Jimmy Olsen comics have been overlooked and derided by many fans because they simply haven’t looked closely enough at the content (before writing these commentaries I would have included myself in their number).

Apart from the Fourth World introduction of Darkseid in # 134, Jimmy Olsen has been a wild free-for-all with the only real constant being the relationship between Superman and Jimmy. It’s hard to remember now but in 1970 Jimmy was a sychophant, a dependent dweeb, a teenager continually bailed out by Uncle Supes.

Kirby made Jimmy independent, he separated Jimmy from Superman, he made Jimmy a counter-cultural Youth symbol for his readers and gave the big red S the role of the State. The conflict between the two characters was generational, it was the fight his readers were having with their parents (perhaps in the case of Jimmy, the fight his readers’ older brothers and sisters were having, Jimmy Olsen always seemed aimed at younger readers).

The King addressed the origin of generational conflict, Vietnam. His character Angry Charlie (# 145) bursts out of a prison door and grabs youth wearing army of the street while their friends can do nothing to stop him. The cover of # 148 echoes the cover of # 145. While all the news in the early part of 1972 was about President Nixon’s efforts to end the war, the battles in Vietnam that year leading up to ‘peace’ were some of the biggest of the War.

The villain of the issue # 148 is Victor Volcanum who bears some physical resemblance to Ho Chi Minh, receding hair, moustache and goatee-like beard. Volcanum is a wholly unconvincing villain and Superman, Jimmy and the Newsboys deal with him in summary fashion. Superman frees them from the cage on the cover, ‘…liberty and justice for all!!’, they battle Volcanum’s robots and finally stop his spinning killer gondola, bringing with them a sleeping Angry Charlie. Almost devoid of Fourth World references, the last panel sees Jimmy, Superman and the boys return to Metropolis for a bath.

Jack Kirby dropped Jimmy Olsen due to the pressures of his other titles. His three Fourth World comics would soon be joined by Kamandi, the last boy on earth. At the time he wasn’t aware that National/DC publisher was about to end the Fourth World, citing low sales. His farewell to Jimmy Olsen follows his greatest achievement on the title, ‘A Superman in Supertown’ (# 147). Issue # 148 reads like a coda to all that is gone before. All the cultural and personal forces that drove his stories are ending, the counter-culture, the War, his own Fourth World carte blanche.

Jimmy’s immediate future is in stories like ‘Attack of the locust creatures’ as his independent persona, his Kirby Sunday punch is absorbed back into the mid -70s DC mush like counter-cultural kids attending business school. Just for a moment though, Kirby made Jimmy somebody. Kirby’s Jimmy was someone you could see yourself in, he was part of a world where younger voices mattered, where there was a new way to express who you were. Kirby took us, his character and himself to a better place. No one can take that away.

¹The Hanoi Hilton was the nickname captured American soldiers gave to Hỏa Lò Prison prison in Hanoi where they were held for years in terrible conditions.

 Research this article:

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)

-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)

-Time Magazine, January 17, 1972, January 24, 1972, January 31, 1972, February 7, 1972, February 14, 1972

-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 38^th of a projected 48 Fourth World commentaries (more than three quarters of the way there!). Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!