‘No, I can't forget this evening
Or your face as you were leaving
But I guess that's just the way the story goes
You always smile but in your eyes your sorrow shows
Yes, it shows…’
(Without You by Nilsson, February 1972)¹
Fortunate or damned? The opening words to New Gods # 8 (May, 1972) published 50 years ago today, 17 February, 1972 describe both Jack Kirby’s Fourth World and part of what he must have felt himself. At the apex of his art, Kirby had every reason to feel confident, fulfilled, yet only two months later, his creative world collapsed when publisher Carmine Infantino pulled the plug on the King’s new mythology for a new age.²
Kirby has spent so long at Marvel smiling without letting the sorrow show, Jolly Jack with no tears. So much time fighting ‘the wrath of the gods’ when ‘the chips are down’ at Timely in the 40s over Captain America, National in the 50s with Jack Schiff³ and finally watching a much lesser creative talent in Stan Lee drink in reflected glory like an alcoholic, one accolade was too many, 100 was never enough.⁴
Surely Kirby deserved more, surely he deserved to be fortunate, not damned, a man who ‘…chose the fire and the fury to become more than what they are…” In New Gods # 8 Kirby plays multiple characters as he channels his past, present and future, in the lead character and human, detective Daniel ‘Terrible’ Turpin and in the two young Gods, Orion and Lightray, in the battle against Orion’s half-brother Kalibak.
Turpin is the voice of age, the veteran Kirby proving he can still fire some shots, in the fight against the Apokoliptian King Kong Kalibak, who is ‘bringing the war home’ to Metropolis. It is his fight, no one else’s. Turpin rejects his younger protégé’ Matt Kiernan’s background role for him, ‘...but no thanks! That’s not the way I’d like t’see the book closed on Daniel Turpin….it’s my baby.’
According to Richard Kyle⁵, Kirby was concerned with regaining face at National/DC after feeling he had not received proper credit at Marvel. From the late 60s he was also up against the first wave of fans turned professional as National/DC and Marvel elevated Young Gods to replace older artists.⁶ As stogie stand-in, bowler-hatted Turpin, Kirby infuses the character with his determination, his courage, his belief in his own talent and his place at the table: “…and we’ll get the others too. This town—belongs—to us!”
Kirby’s dramas of the mind also play out in the fortunate Lightray and the damned Orion. The sequences involving the two characters are like a companion piece to New Gods # 5 where Kirby explored the idea of presenting one face to the world while hiding your true face, being forced to be someone you are not to survive and then discovering ugly truths about yourself.⁷ Jolly Jack in Bullpen Bulletins, Angry Jack to professionals he trusted.⁸
The distance between the two characters is like the two halves of Kirby’s experience, the death and terror he witnessed as a scout during World War Two, the hope of post-war peacetime and domestic life. Orion: “And so it is, with the romantic young, Lightray. Part fantasy, part truth—all comedy!” Lightray: “Not to them, Orion. It’s reality to them.’ Orion as crunchy, Archie Bunker curmudgeon, Lightray as kind, counter-cultural Youth. Both from the same creative voice, Kirby speaking to himself and readers at the same time.
Until now, Orion’s personal journey has been solitary. He has kept his own pain about his difference and only shared it with his opponents, such as Slig. His tremendous battle with Kalibak, aided by Lightray, is a fight of equals, a fight of brothers although they do not know it. In the signature moment of revelation, Orion shows his true face, for the second time in the Fourth World and it is a moment of recognition and defeat for Kalibak.
The relationship between Orion and Lightray changes after the battle when Lightray sees Orion’s face. Orion is angry, ashamed as Lightray sums up how things have gone: “Don’t hide the real issue, Lightray. You saw my true face!” Lightray defuses a moment that could have ended in conflict as he hands Orion his helmet: “I saw scars—both new and old—taken in the causes of New Genesis.” Orion responds: “You’re a good friend, Lightray.”
Jack Kirby, who has new and old scars, taken in the cause of his art and life, in his pursuit of Teilhard de Jardin Noo Genesis/New Genesis⁹, the trip to the outer limits of imagination and beyond uses the reconciliation, the vulnerability, of his characters to help heal himself. He trusts another to let his sorrow show and becomes stronger for it. We will always be fortunate that he did.
¹‘Without You’ by Nilsson, topped Billboard’s charts in the week New Gods # 8 came out.
²See Jack Kirby Collector #80, pg. 114.
³As outlined in Jack Kirby Collector # 80, ‘Old Gods, New Gods’, April, 2021, pg. 26.
⁴Stan Lee was a brilliant marketer but the evidence in Michael Hill’s book shows that his creative, story contributions, were minimal. My thoughts are there would have been no Marvel without Lee but no stories without Kirby and the other artists.
⁵Graphic 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.
⁶National/DC had begun replacing older writers and artists as early as 1968 after a failed writers’ attempt at forming a union to get greater employee benefits. See Comic Book Artist # 5, Summer 1999, pgs. 12-17.
⁷See my commentary on New Gods # 5, ‘Ugliness reveals its true face in beauty’
⁸Gil Kane’s remembrances from his 1986 UK Comic Art Convention interview, as referenced in Jack Kirby Collector # 80, pg.28.
⁹In his book, The Phenomenon of Man (published in English in 1959), Teilhard de Chardin explored a new consciousness, a ‘noosphere’, a new sphere, where the evolution of thought, the noosphere would be a new birth, a ‘noogenesis’, New Genesis. Kirby is on the human, everlasting journey of thought, freedom, creativity that we all add to with each breath and expand noogenesis.
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)
-Without You, single by Harry Nilsson, 1972
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 37thof 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!
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