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(The End of the) Fourth World

Some works take years to make their imprint on the medium that gave them life. In the case of Kirby's Fourth World books, we had material which (at the time) left a number of fans nonplussed and grumbling that, perhaps, reputation exceeded ability in the case of the esteemed Mr. Jack Kirby, yet would become a piece younger talents would dedicate considerable efforts in trying to revive, usually with not much success. At the time, no one really seemed to get the things Kirby put into these works - things including Homeric conflicts between the agents of dualistic metaphysical forces and, furthermore, a redefinition of the scope and scale of superhero comics in their entirety. But time would ultimately spread recognition of a mixture of Kirby's achievement and of his unfulfilled ambitions here, much as a later generation of scientists would finally figure out what Einstein had meant with his once-incomprehensible scrawlings about the effects of relative velocity on the speed of light.

To return to origins of this piece, however: Jack Kirby, in one of the disputes with management that speckled (some might say "defined") his career, left Marvel Comics over an unfortunate demand they made concerning page rates. Amid a general downturn in the market, Marvel Comics made the dubious proposition that Kirby should do the same amount of work for less money and he, recognizing that he had become a name (or perhaps the name) in the business, left to work for DC. Opting to turn adversity into opportunity, Kirby conceived a body of work of much more ambitious nature than his previous plateaus, and he conceived the comics collectively known as the Fourth World books.

This work spread across four concurrent titles that conceptually interlocked, including Mister Miracle, New Gods, Forever People, and a remarkable run of the normally-disposable DC chestnut Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen. Under sixty comics from inception to the cancellations and reassignments that shut down the franchise in the short term, these books would nonetheless provide a prototype for multi-issue, multi-title comics concepts from the everyday dense continuity to the much-abused megacrossover, and do it without becoming buried under the faults that would typify this material of a subsequent, descendant editorial model.

For, in this experiment, Kirby a) expanded the scale of the superhero comic; b) infused a kind of Homeric struggle between polar powers into the symphonies of action that he made leap from the page, thereby moving beyond the simple struggles between costumed adversaries that helped superhero comics earn a reputation for triteness; and c) passed all three of the important Trashmen Tests, in producing works that annoyed grown-ups, remained loud at any volume, and defied the tyranny of artificial intellectual credibility.

Stifled just as they approached maturity, the Fourth World books very much deserved to live.

The Generational Themes

Someone keen on pointing out the emptiness or disposability of comics could argue that garishly-colored depictions of hypermuscular men slugging it out while dressed in capes and ballet tights offer little to improve the mind or inspire the imagination. Some might claim that such work does not present - or contain - great ideas, or, indeed, any ideas worth noting. Reams of printed comics matter justify such claims. However, Kirby did not choose to think small in his Fourth World books. A foundation of ideas underlay the work as a whole, offering more than fisticuffs to the reader; indeed, some of these ideas retain credibility and currency when observed in the context of prose and of art forms which traditionally have earned scholastic and intellectual respect from the arbiters of culture.

Given the nature of the times he worked in at the dawn of the seventies, we might expect Kirby to have recognized the generational nature of the conflicts which threatened to divide America between competing visions. Generational themes, indeed, do define much of the character conceptions of the Fourth World; yet, unlike the simplistic remnants of sixties notions no longer current today but not yet faded in 1970 (such as "Never trust anyone over 30"), Kirby's thinking used generational divides as a source of dispute without declaring one generation good and another evil. One generation had Izaya and Darkseid, and another their offspring, who spread across both ends of a moral axis.

Some observers have made out the parent-child relationships that provide a central axis of the original Fourth World concepts as some kind of echo of the relationships in the Oresteia, Hamlet, or Oedipus Rex. A number of pieces of enduring literature deal in some of the central concepts behind the Fourth World works, and though I don't intend here to identify these as source material, it may prove useful to bring up works from literary canon that approach the same ideas.

The fights between generations central to the Fourth World books may suggest Oedipus and Laius to some or Hamlet and Claudius to others (and to some casting a cynical eye towards George Lucas' franchise, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader may suggest Orion and Darkseid). To my eye, however, they seem more akin to the kind of dynastic squabbling one encounters in the Old Testament; the tone makes me think of the civil war between Absalom and King David, but with the values of the principal players inverted.

Settings, Cast, and Schtick

While these elements may seem more like window-dressing than the substantial ideas that underlay the Fourth World books, they added much of the appeal that helped drive the key concepts home.

Begin with three central worlds involved in the conflict - our own Earth, the luminous New Genesis, and the gulag-like Apokolips. Between these, pass back and forth (by handy Boom Tube or other plot device enabling travel over interplanetary distances) crowds of costumed heroes and the occasional swarm of parademons. When necessary, infuse a cluster of hippie-themed godlings like the Forever People, who collectively can form yet another hero, the deus ex machina-like Infinity Man. Bring in cabals of cultists, the occasional sumo, and caricatures of prominent figures from Marvel Comics, such as Stan Lee and Roy Thomas. And, if the opportunity presents itself, throw in figures evocative of 1930s Brooklyn, such as "Terrible" Turpin.

And then proceed with the fundamental dualistic struggles between good and evil across three world, full of Homeric duels, explosions, swarms of ugly demonic creatures, and the like, and you begin to touch on what Kirby had, here, intended to present.

Ambitious projects often collapse under the weight of their own pretention, but Kirby undermined the inflated dignity of simulated importance typical of such excess early in the Fourth World books. We might consider that pretension represents more a crime of bad delivery than a flaw in the concepts a talent seeks to convey; and Kirby never forgot that, despite his own desires to expand the medium, that he worked in comics here, in all their garish four-color loudness. This, if anything, helped make the Big Ideas residing within stand out the larger.

Nature v. Nurture (and Various Related Notions)

The notions of Nature and Nurture come into the New World books through the vehicle of the diplomatic trade-off of the sons of Izaya and Darkseid. Simplistic models might expect that either Nature or Nurture would dominate for a Scott Free raised in the barracks of Apokolips or an Orion cultivated on New Genesis, but the forces have different effects on two different individuals. Scott Free, for instance, remains somewhat impermeable to the Apokoliptian indoctrination; whereas Orion retains both the violence of his Nature and the values of his Nurture.

Perhaps, though, we could interpret the way in which both men changed or failed to changed as a validation of the Nature-as-determinism concept, with the qualifier that good (as represented by New Genesis) and evil (as represented by Apokolips) have different properties. Examine, for instance, the apparent lack of impact the gulag planet had on Mister Miracle - its evil did not warp his own goodness. Yet New Genesis managed to invert Orion's loyalties. This suggests Kirby intended, on some level, to posit that good could trump, even subvert, evil, when applied properly.

The Rage of Orion

The Iliad dealt with the rage of Achilles - inspired by a slight to his person when a Mycenaean king took from him a woman taken as a prize in war - and the consequent troubles that accrue to both the Greek army and, then, to the city of Troy when he first recuses himself from, then returns to, the war. In New Gods, on the other hand, we begin with the rage of Orion against the evils inflicted on two (and more) worlds by his father Darkseid.

For a character frequently misused as another scowling bruiser among a company of too many uninteresting and interchangeable peers, Orion, as depicted by Kirby, had a lot of interesting angles. Parts of him say "Oedipus," parts say "Hamlet," parts say, naturally enough, Achilles. One part even clearly seems to derive from the biography of Attila the Hun, who, as a result of family diplomacy, ended up traded for a few years to a Roman family while the Roman child stayed among the royal family of the Huns. Like Attila, the experience broadened his ambition but did not change his nature.

Since Kirby took to a whole new stride in the classic rumbles in his Marvel work of the sixties - particularly the fights depicted in his Thor and Captain America stories in the variously-named books that featured these characters as principals - he made the fight itself something that would burst from the page and into a reader's face (and, perhaps, onto the walls behind him), and his Orion concept reflected his own recognition of this strong point in his work.

Violence, for Orion, represented less a method and much more an essence, since joy frequently overcame him even as the rage inspired him to wade into a morass of flying fists and exploding masonry. Indeed, the prospect of his own death seemed to inspire him. However, this did not fit the pattern of the cliched and generally uninteresting berserker rages of later, lesser characters. It resembled more the frenzy of the dervish or even a kind of religious light: In the act of war, Orion fulfilled (and, today, fulfills) his essence.

The Methods of Mister Miracle

While my own thoughts of the Iliad in the context of the Fourth World books may seem a stretch of a hyperactive imagination, think for a moment of the two protagonists, cast in Homer's epic as enemies. We have the affronted lifetime soldier Achilles, a relentless and irresistable warrior given to angry rages and relentless resolution of affronts to his person. We might make him represent the wilder and angry side of the undomesticated human male. On the other side of this side we find his domesticated counterpart, the gallant Trojan defender Hektor, a married man who no longer takes the required perverse joy in warfare that defines Achilles. Hektor, through his civilization, has lost some of the warrior's edge by taking on the roles of husband and father, communitarian and benign roles given to creation rather than destruction.

Though we find both men on the same side of the New Genesis / Apokolips divide, Mister Miracle has a number of Hektor-like properties and similarly serves as a balance to Orion in representing a more humane and civilized model of manhood, given to planning rather than violence, given to art rather than strength. If, like Achilles, Orion played bridegroom only to war itself (earning the epithet "Dog of War"), Mister Miracle engaged in much more social activity, including marriage and a career as an entertainer. Like Hektor, however, the ongoing conflict forced him, too, to take up his own form of arms, battling destructive powers he could overcome not so much by superhuman ability as by the willingness to put forth a superhuman effort.

Luckily for both heroes, they remained on the same side of the conflict. A certain unpleasantness, after all, attaches to Achilles' dragging Hektor around the city of Troy seven days behind his chariot, and likewise to his own fated death through a wound to the heel. If Kirby's original intent included such an end for either hero, the early foreclosure of his work prevented it.

Two Worlds and Two Poles

Having established both force (Orion) and reason (Scott Free) as appropriate methods when harnessed to a valid cause, Kirby's Fourth World furthermore proposed two worlds based on the opposing forces of benevolence and raw power.

The presence of the same methods and resources on both worlds stands as a marker of the difference of intent and character in shaping the worlds men or supermen inhabit. For instance, rather than cast New Genesis as an antitechnological Eden, we have a technological utopia that enables certain Edenic qualities to survive. Technology appears as a destructive force on Apokolips, but Kirby's vision recognized it as a morally neutral tool, the source of good or bad things depending on the choices made by those who have free will.

Though the poles of the moral universe of the Fourth World books center around the physical locations of New Genesis and Apokolips, respectively, however, one would come to understand that this separation represented an artificial dichotomy, with the real world representing a fusion of the two, a good world permeated by the corrupting influence of the evil. Indeed, Orion, the most important figure in this interpretation, represents in miniature just such a cosmos: Vital, strong, containing and controlling an evil he can't truly extirpate from himself, traits he has harnessed to the purpose of defeating the very evil that produced him. A false pretty face conceals Orion's own more disturbing features, just as wishful thinking can conceal the evil elements of created reality. But the two remain inseparable, and the balance of these elements remains more important than pretentious claims to a perfect alignment with either extreme.

And, furthermore, two metaphysical principles with objective manifestations, the benign Source and the malign Anti-Life Equation, play roles as (in the former case) an enabling force or (in the latter case) a desired object.

The Source, as best I could glean from the reprinted body of Fourth World material (which, circa 2001 excludes the Jimmy Olsen pieces) represents a life-giving emanation not altogether unfamiliar in nature to those versed in the Judeo-Christian tradition, though not necessarily incompatible to other metaphysics, a benefit of creatively vague definition. The Anti-Life Equation, on the other hand, possesses great destructive power, but awaits discovery or re-awakening by one with sufficient wit, tenacity, and power to root it out from hints and fractions embedded within sentient minds, particularly human ones. The Anti-Life Equation, when demonstrated briefly in a few particular episodes, has the power to enslave and control. Therefore it combines several salient features of that which we collectively tend to call "The Devil" and of the corrosive totalitarian ideologies that drenched the twentieth century in blood.

Naturally enough, with powers in the universe contending over life - one to enable it, one to swallow, control, and parasitize it - one also has a pending apocalyptic scenario where the predatory power either consumes all, or where the forces assembled to resist it stop its advance (or, better yet, drive it back).Messianic Judaism definitely contained such an element, but for Kirby the times he lived in could have provided a similar eschatological model, as the world waited to see what would become of a planet half free, half slave. Indeed, even on a national cultural level rather than a global one, ongoing conflicts posed uncompromising factions against one another in a conflict that, at least in the recently-ended sixties, had its own millennial character.

On the Block

Once upon a time, a comic book faced cancellation for sales figures drooping into figures we would read as remarkable today. DC Comics, in the early seventies, may have set sales targets unreasonably high. In afterthought, some suspect the sales figures of the books did not show the kind of weakness that the publisher's response suggested, but without both sets of numbers - how many sold and how many DC expected to sell - little valid extrapolation about whether this claim represents fact or Kirby hagiography can meaningfully occur. Infantino and the accounting boys at DC Comics, regardless of the actual numbers, came to the conclusion between them that titles like Mister Miracle, New Gods, Forever People, and Kirby's Jimmy Olsen hadn't really earned their keep, and chose to cancel his new titles and reassign Jimmy Olsen to a more Weisinger-era stable of talent.

The axe fell, really, just as Kirby got up to speed, creating a kind of interrelated piece distributed across multiple issues of multiple titles in a way that would later represent a kind of standard of continuity and a model for the crossover events of the future. So, on the editorial side, Kirby had led rather than followed, and, perhaps, moved over a decade early in redefining the scope of a comics work.

Nor had he slacked on the editorial side. Even given the difficulty subsequent creators would have attempting to use the Fourth World characters later in the seventies, eighties, and nineties (and, perhaps, until Walt Simonson's Orion demonstrated how to do it at the end of the millennium), Kirby formulated and used solid concepts, engaging premises, loud presentation, and just enough weirdness to inspire the imagination.

Kirby felt that this work, although ill-fated to an early demise, represented the presentation of approaches and forms that would shape the comics of the future. With the notion that he had delivered something ahead of its time, he also presumed that a future day would vindicate his ambition here even if the existing comics publishing mechanisms of the early 1970s had not provided a medium in which such work could live yet. And, truly, these pieces do befit the publishing model of 2000 somewhat better than that of 1970, in that the Fourth World books did originally appear as serial monthly chapters, but also interlocked as a larger work aimed at anthologization. Now in the era of massive reprint collections and trade paperbacks, where anthology and reprint figures can justify a work that didn't quite make it on the comics shelves, creators routinely approach comics with the larger scale formats in mind.

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Column 271. Completed 03-SEP-2001.