Fourth World Fridays...And Beyond

The Hunger Dogs, Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:59:00 +0000

“THE GREAT ‘TOMORROW OVERTURE’ HAS BEGUN!”

Ahem. So, when we left off this overview of “The Hunger Dogs”, Kirby’s climax to his Fourth World series, Orion had blasted in through a platoon of Darkseid’s soldiers for what seemed like his final confrontation with Stony Lonesome himself, as New Genesis hovered on the verge of destruction by the mysterious Micro-Mark, and Micro-Mark’s creator turned out to be Esak, the cute little kid who was Metron’s apprentice, somehow transformed into a hideous monster. He’s been creating mechanized weapons for Darkseid for the last decade—why? Because he wants Darkseid to kill him, something he doesn’t have the strength to do himself. In fact, he may not even be able to admit to himself that that’s what he wants. That’s pretty bleak.

Orion comes roaring in, as Darkseid once again makes a getaway on a shuttlepod. Here’s Darky’s revenge for Esak’s turning Apokolips into a wilderness of automated mediocrity: he’s going to let him face off against Orion alone, and see how well his gadgets can hold up against “livid, total rage!!!” Esak, who as I mentioned has a deathwish, seems to embrace this idea happily, and as Orion bursts in, he simply gasses him to death:

Esak then pauses for an ill-advised moment of contemplation (he hasn’t even seen Orion’s body, for pete’s sake!) as he remembers the good old days with Metron, before he left on a quest for “the ultimate object”. Esak delved further into scientific study and eventually discovered Micro-Mark in a laboratory explosion that disfigured him, and now he searches for “the machine that will erase my inner wound and restore all that was”. Which is, of course, a cue for Orion to pop back up and start blasting away at Esak. “The ultimate anger is the ultimate stimulus! It defies time! It stands firm against the hammers of change!” This is sort of the thematic center point of the whole series, as Kirby seems to be briefly rekindling the creative energy he felt he had lost, through sheer force of will.

As Esak lies dying, Orion feels pity for Esak and prays to the source to ease his passing---“see him not as a bitter pawn surprised in cruel defeat—but, only as a child, fallen upon cruel days…” as Orion watches, Esak’s face is changed back into his childhood beauty:

Suddenly, jarringly, we’re back at Himon’s, and Bekka is explaining how it is she’s managed to survive all this time, while she and Orion dance around their affection for each other:

BEKKA: Father struggled mightily with an almost impossible concept…but he solved it and used it to create an impregnable shelter for me!
ORION: All on New Genesis know “love’s” meaning…But it can never flower here! Thus, your persecution!
BEKKA: How willingly you accept that! Is “love” to be eternally outlawed on Apokalips?
ORION: You speak like an adolescent! Love, like hate, is a thing of many facets!

Yes, Kirby even puts “love” in quotation marks!

Anyway, Bekka reveals that she loves Orion inspite of his real face and the fact that he’s Darkseid’s son, so that, of course, is the point where the planet explodes.

No, I’m not joking.

That’s New Genesis, finally giving up the ghost. It’s also a last burst of creative energy for Kirby, who fittingly has chosen to portray the climax via one of his collages. And note the unapologetic use of “Star Wars” images scattered in there. Kirby almost seems to be encapsulating the whole of geeky pop culture that grew from his efforts in this one splash page, which is also the point where he symbolically brings it to an end. Talk about a torch-passing…

Anyway, Supertown itself, as you can see, survives the blast and drifts out into space, thus (hopefully) taking the population of New Genesis to safety. But something unforeseen occurs as well: the throngs of Apokalips, watching this, suddenly become aware of exactly what Darkseid’s new weapons can do, and belatedly realize that they’re sitting on silos full of these things. The slightest accident could annihilate their world, and this causes the soldiers to panic and turn against Darkseid along with the downtrodden workers.

Darkseid once again hops into his escape pod for a getaway while the hordes blast away at him, but everyone else isn’t so lucky. As the fragments of New Genesis rain down from the sky, total chaos erupts on the surface, and Apokalips begins to look like it’s living up to its name.

Darkseid, meanwhile, emerges at an abandoned station at the edge of town (or at least, one where all the soldiers are dead) and somehow immediately manages to find Himon, with Orion and Bekka. Anticipating his coming death, he’s quickly assembled…something…but whatever it is, it doesn’t save him, as Darkseid cuts him down. As he dies, he insists that Orion and Bekka leave, and Orion, rather uncharacteristically, does so. You see, Orion and Himon used the chaos to rescue Orion’s mother, Tigra—remember her? She makes her one-panel cameo in this comic here—and made it to the escape pod that Himon built (oh).

And with that, Orion seems to have reached the surprising end of his character arc. Rather than standing fast and engaging in the devastating fight we’d been expecting since the beginning, Orion has let go of his hatred and his need for combat, instead choosing to live and thus protect the life of his loved ones. He’s realized, further, that this is a far more appropriate fate for his hated enemy—not to go down in glorious combat, as he’d expected his entire life, but to be left alone, without even his tormentors and archnemeses for company, with his empire in ruins, and nothing left to do but rebuild it. Darkseid finally got his wish: his enemies will torment him no more, and the wills of the ones he has left will be utterly subservient to his. He’s alone. Forever.

In the final pages, we see a massive explosion tearing a chunk out of Apokolips, but, we’re assured, it remains in orbit. “Things won’t change when the thundering echoes fade. The Hunger Dogs will fill their bellies and strut…all too briefly! Then, Darkseid will re-build his self-made prison of suspicion, hate and murder!”

Meanwhile, the New Genesisians drift though space in an elegiac final sequence, looking tiny against the surreal, expressionist Kirby cosmos, as speech balloons emerge from it, in one of the best dialogue exchanges in the series: “I-I fear time, Highfather!” moans an unknown companion. “You have the right to fear,” responds Highfather. “Am I a—a coward?” “If you are a coward, then take my coward’s hand.” “What lies ahead, Highfather?” “Hope, perhaps. A planet called hope!”

Sure enough, on the very last page, we see Metron making his reappearance, towing a planet behind him. This, I suppose, will become New New Genesis, as he’s one day reunited with Highfather and the gang. But it hasn’t happened yet, and on that upbeat yet ambiguous note, the series ends.

And so, for all intents and purposes, did Kirby’s career. Sure, he kept cranking out work for another decade, right up until his death; he couldn’t not work, being Kirby and all, and he continued to tinker with animation, provide concepts for the array of new comic companies that were springing up, and do illustration work. But The Hunger Dogs is the last significant work of comics he ever did, and it’s an appropriate capstone, ending Kirby’s most personal work with a bang.

Except, as you may have noticed, it’s not really an “ending” as it is a handing-off to the next generation of cartoonists. While Orion doesn’t go down fighting as we all expected, he nevertheless makes his leave from the scene, leaving the field to a new generation who head out into the cosmos in search of new worlds to explore. Kirby clearly saw, by 1984, that the comics industry was changing in interesting and exciting ways, and that in some ways his brand of comics were becoming dated. Better, then, to blow the whole mess up and call it an ending, and look forward to a new tomorrow, than to dwell endlessly in the past. Essentially, Kirby seemed to be prefiguring other high-profile, paradigm-shifting superhero works of the next couple of years, including Crisis on Infinite Earths, The Dark Knight Returns, and of course Watchmen. All of these works make the case that the superhero comic as we know it was coming to an end, and that it would have to evolve, adapt, or pass phoenix-like through the fire and be reborn.

Kind of ironic, then, that superhero comics, and pop culture’s embrace of them, seem to have regressed so much since then. It’s almost as though, without Kirby out there, they’re missing their anchor. Too bad the King couldn’t stick around for a few more years to keep the ship righted, but his final legacy ought to have been more than enough: change is scary but vital, and those who cling to the past are doomed to become hollow shells of their past selves. If the superhero comic is inescapably bound up with the philosophies of Jack Kirby, we really ought to have absorbed that lesson by now.

And thus ends Fourth World Fridays…but I would like to keep this show rolling. That’s why I cannily called this blog “Fourth World Fridays AND BEYOND”, so that I can move into new territory now that I’m out of material. I’ve got some ideas for what to tackle next, some time in the new year (possibly February?) It won’t be by Kirby, but it will hopefully be semi-tonally appropriate as a companion to the Fourth World—in other words, something clever and well-conceived, a joy to read, but full of weirdness and awkwardness and insanity that I can make fun of in a reverential manner. You know: comic books.

The Hunger Dogs, Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:27:00 +0000

"VIRTUE HAS A BAD HABIT OF COMING BACK!"

Like the Fourth World saga itself, we return belatedly to life for a final installment!

Unlike the previous installment, the faux “issue 12”, the Hunger Dogs is a full-length Graphic Novel, of the kind Kirby had more or less already pitched to DC way back in 1970. Apparently Kirby submitted it as a (regular-length?) issue, met with unenthusiastic response, and was asked to pad it out to a more substantial length in order to do justice to the story. This accounts for some rather weird formatting issues, as the original pages were designed at a different ratio than the later ones. But hey, if the page composition wasn’t reaching out and grabbing you every few pages, it wouldn’t be a Kirby comic.

It’s also great-looking, with a dazzling colour job, inks (partly by Mike Royer) that actually do justice to Kirby’s pencils, and Kirby himself clearly pulling out all the stops to provide at least a little bit of closure for his masterpiece.

As for the story, it’s shakier, but when it works, it really works. Starting with the opening pages, in which the residents of “Slum 9” of Armaghetto rise up and riot against Darkseid’s cruel regime. These, you see, are the Hunger Dogs, Kirby’s name for the oppressed rabble that always makes such a hard time for tyrants and dictators. They’ve managed to penetrate further towards Darkseid’s control center than ever before, and one of Darkseid’s minions recommends an automated “sonic storm” that will punish them by remote control. But Darkseid seems to be losing it, and refuses to give the command:

Um…wouldn’t punitive measures via technology instill fear just as much as a dude with a weapon? If not more so?

Nevertheless, the point is clear. The “Micro-Mark” and its attendant automation has given Darkseid exactly what he wanted, paving the way for the Anti-Life Equation, but at the cost of his fun. Good may suffer in a regimented, numb universe, but it’s a little hard to be a force of awe-inspiring terror either. By beginning the process of stripping his followers of his souls, he’s destroyed his own audience, reducing them to mindless drones who can’t react to his awesome evillitude. Catch-22!

Let’s not forget the context here, either. In 1985, when this book was published, Kirby’s old stomping grounds were firmly under the thumb of Jim Shooter. Honestly, Mr. Shooter’s reign is something I know little about, and I wouldn’t care to weigh in one way or another in terms of praising or condemning him. I just know that a lot of superhero fans really, REALLY didn’t like him at the time, and that furthermore, Kirby engaged in a running battle with Marvel under his tenure in an attempt to get back his original art. The biggest complaint about Shooter from this era seems to be that he turned Marvel into a soulless assembly line, and it’s not hard to see this aspect of The Hunger Dogs as Kirby sticking it to Shooter. If the creation of the Fourth World reflected Kirby’s metacommentary on the Marvel Universe as it stood right after he left, The Hunger Dogs is obviously his take on where it stood in the mid-80s: with evil triumphant, and even his greatest villain subdued by mediocrity.

As if all this wasn’t enough, the very next page introduces a new subtext: that of the Cold War. The same relentless war machine that’s pacified Apokolips is on the verge of introducing horrible new weapons to destroy New Genesis—and again, it’ll be done remotely, with no grand clash of armies to satisfy Darkseid’s penchant for violence. What’s interesting is that Darkseid’s engineers argue that the New Genesisiand won’t enter into a cold war with Apokolips, because it’s “not their way” to resort to the WMDs that they’re about to deploy. So, in other words, Kirby is arguing that refusal to engage in Mutually Assured Destruction is moral, but it’ll also allow your enemies to destroy you. Certainly these were the kinds of arguments being thrown around in the 80s, though I’ve never been entirely certain that I buy it. (For one thing, the Soviets were a lot less formidable an opponent than they were made out to be…but let’s not get too far off track.)

Meanwhile, elsewhere on Apokolips, Orion has been healed (or resurrected?) as per the particularly brutal picture at the top of the page. The party responsible is Himon, still hiding out on Apokolips, serving the forces of good, and resembling Jack Kirby. The image of him bringing Orion back from the brink of death pretty much hammers the connection home. I guess the idea of injecting your own avatar into a comic is something else Grant Morrison swiped from Kirby.

Orion’s been hiding out with Himon and has apparently developed a thing for Himon’s daughter, Bekka. Wait, what? Yes, apparently Himon has a daughter who’s survived to adulthood, despite Himon’s lousy track record with getting kids killed. She seems to feel for Orion, too, though she doesn’t seem to have seen Orion’s true face yet. That’s going to be an interesting conversation.

It’s at this point that the slightly fractured nature of the beefed-up narrative starts to be felt. We jump jarringly back to Darkseid heading over to one of his control centers in Armagetto with some flowery, and borderline incomprehensible, narration overlaid on top: “Did not the Elder Gods, on the eve of their doom, leave the warning of Armagetto behind them? Is not oblivion forever a dark red line which leads the mighty to the sewers of the contemptable silent?” Do not colourless green ideas sleep furiously?

A mysterious, faceless figure meets Darkseid and presents to him “The Micro-Mark”, the latest superweapon, and one that will finally allow him to triumph over New Genesis.

While it’s not 100% clear what Kirby intended Micro-Mark to be, it sure sounds an awful lot like nanotechnology, doesn’t it? Was that even a well-known concept in 1985? Was Kirby doing a lot of reading, or did he just stumble across a very potent idea?

Suddenly, Himon pops in to taunt Darkseid. “Dance, Himon!” he growls. “Phase in and out like a dancing flea! But, in this new era--look for the shadow of my descending fist!” Darkseid seems positively giddy (by his standards) at the possibility of a worthy adversary. He pretty much admits that he’ll miss Himon once he’s crushed him like an ant beneath his boot. The two of them reminisce about the olden days like the pair of old men they are, Darkseid musing “The fiery passions…brutality and wailing…endless—ever endless…” “So it was—and so it remains, Darkseid!” responds Himon. Yes, the ever-endless endlessness remains endless. You can’t get anything past these two.

Himon grabs the super-sized package of Micro-Mark, the one with the ability to destroy a planet, and takes off before Mystery Guy can club him from behind. He’s hinted that he just might want to use it to destroy Apokolips for good and all, but Mystery Guy assures him it’s no biggie—he can deactivate the bomb by remote control. Micro-Mark’s ease of use will deny Darkseid even this defeat of his ancient enemy:

Another jarring cut to the surface of New Genesis, which is…somehow…being over-run by these monsters that eat everything in their path. Wait, what do these things have to do with Micro-Mark? I dunno, but it makes for a cool visual:

While New Genesis is thus being despoiled, “measures are taken to recover a few such as Lonar and his Battle-Horse.” Wait, recover a few? They’re just going to let everyone else get chewed up by a bunch of hairy green bush-monsters in Liberace masks?

Oh, wait, maybe they just mean that New Genesis was basically uninhabited and that there’s only a few to save. Geez, I hope so. Otherwise Highfather’s a real dick.

Speaking of which, here’s Highfather to meet Lonar as he’s levitated up to Supertown, wearing a variation on Thor’s armour. It’s pretty obvious that Lonar was going to have some far more elaborate storyline had the series continued properly, but Kirby’s once again just giving us the highlights. Highfather and Lonar have a conversation about the potential nightmare that would be unleashed if they started throwing Apokolips’s bombs back at them, and refuse to do it, thus proving Darkseid’s mob right. Again, I’m honestly not sure which side Kirby was coming down on here.

Anyway, Lightray overhears them and takes of for Apokolips, where he and Orion are once again reunited in a bout of Greco-Roman wrestling:

The reunion is cut short by a green metal monster smashing through the wall, as tends to happen. It’s another of Darkseid’s mechanical patrolmen, who, I guess, saw Lightray make his flashy entrance and has come after them. Orion’s all for ripping it to pieces (because he’s an angry kinda guy, you see) but Lightray, for once, earns his title as a more restrained tactician by reprogramming the machine to ignore them, rejoin the patrol, head back to base…and then explode, violently, wiping out a whole station. So, yay suicide bombers?

“Damn me for a flea-bitten war hound, if Darkseid himself can match your insideous talent for scheming!! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Chortles Orion. Then, there’s a flash, and Lightray is gone (for good, as it turns out). Well, that was abrupt.

Orion is uncharacteristically shaken by the sudden departure of his friend, and collapses into Bekka’s arms. “I’m afraid, Bekka! I hate the winds of change! I hate the loss of nobility and action…and war, which, in reality is ‘packaged murder’!” Wait, is he saying he hates war, or the LACK of war? At any rate, this is pretty clearly one of those moments where Kirby is really putting himself into the story. What old man wouldn’t mourn the loss of his friend and connection to youth? Or look back sadly on a life that he felt was out of his control? Bekka manages to give him a pep talk, reminding him of the good times and the good work he’s done, and he’s back on his feet.

Now another jarring jump-cut, and we get a bizarre scene in which Mystery Guy (forever off-panel) experiments on a terrified beggar pulled from Armaghetto by implanting a Micro-Mark on his chest. The wretch is released, to much anger from the assembled guards, runs out screaming, and explodes, echoing the “suicide bomber” bit from the last sequence. Suddenly we see Darkseid, as well, not even bothering to turn his head to watch this moment of triumph…because that’s how badass Darkseid is.

By the way, I believe this whole sequence belongs, properly speaking, at the beginning of the story, and was shuffled to the middle in the rewrite. You have to admit, it doesn’t make much sense for them to be testing the Micro-Mark now, after they’ve already been launching it against New Genesis for some time. But then, that means that when Orion shows up at the end of this sequence, it means there wouldn’t have been an explanation for how he survived being torn to shreds by laser fire at the end of the last issue. So I can see why they changed it.

So, um, Orion shows up at the end of the sequence, leading a charge of “Hunger Dogs” who now worship him as their inspiration and call to rebellion, beginning a real revolution against Darkseid. But Mystery Guy is still pimping his WMDs as a solution to conquering Orion, and now we finally see his face:

Yeah, freaky enough, but the real kicker is who this turns out to be. It’s Esak. Remember him? He’s the kid who rode with Metron all over the universe, and convinced Highfather to bail the Forever People out of their time-travel jam. That cute little kid has become a disfigured monster, working for Darkseid, pumping out horrible weapons and enforcing tyranny.

And here we really get to the crux of the issue: the Fourth World was written, in part, to celebrate the new generation in whom Kirby saw so much promise. Now, fifteen years later, the King seems just a tad more cynical about things, and Esak is the embodiment of that. While Kirby was probably thinking specifically about the comics industry and what it had come to, Esak makes a pretty good stand-in for the Baby Boomers as a whole, gone from utopian idealism to materialistic excess and the promotion of war for profit.

When he wanted to, Kirby could sure leave toothmarks.

(THE HUNGER DOGS article will conclude next week.)

I'm Actually In Hiding From Devilance.

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 02:54:00 +0000

Okay, so when I said “next week” I didn’t actually mean next week...

Things got away from me for a while there. I should have part one of the final installment of Fourth World Fridays up on Oct. 10th. Thanks for your patience...

The New Gods #12 (sort of)--"The Road to Armaghetto"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:01:00 +0000

AUTOMATION IS REALLY GETTING OUT OF HAND.

So that was that. In early 1973, after a steady decline and a series of compromises, Jack Kirby was finally forced, for once and for all, and with (by all accounts) significant personal dismay, to shutter his most personal creation. The Fourth World ended with Mister Miracle #18.

…Except it sort of didn’t. The series was clearly never a monster in terms of sales, but it seemed to have attracted a fanbase…one that, as the years rolled on, became more vocal in its praise for the Fourth World. Even as Kirby left DC and returned to Marvel, there were persistant rumours that the series had actually done a lot better than the top brass had reported, and the cancellation had been due more to short-sightedness. Some even said that they didn’t like Kirby’s plans for a fixed ending to the series and deliberately cancelled all of his books so that they could keep the properties and hand them off to other, less well-known (and less expensive) artists in due time. (Which did, in a sense, happen, though not for over a decade.) This all seems a little paranoid, but certainly there have always been manipulative sleazebags controlling the purse strings of the comics industry—and DC was both a large, greedy corporation and a little on the desperate side at that time.

Regardless of what was going through DC’s mind at the time, the Fourth World lingered at the edges of the newly-growing comics culture. The 70s is where the “fanboy” really got started—the collecting, the conventioneering, the obsessing over what were, then, obscure pop culture ephemera. This may be part of the reason that so many sales-unpopular series of the time—and there were a lot of them in the 70s—nevertheless managed to find fan followings in the long run. This was the era of Wolverine, Ghost Rider, and the Punisher at Marvel, and of Deadman and the Legion of Superheroes at DC.

This last became a crucial part in salvaging the Fourth World. Kirby’s characters had popped up here and there throughout the 70s, and of all of them, Darkseid in particular, had begun to resonate with readers. In 1982, Paul Levitz, writing the Legion, made Darkseid the villain for his “Great Darkness Saga”, often cited as one of the best superhero storylines of all time. And suddenly the Fourth World had moved back into comic reader’s consciousness.

About the same time, Kirby had begun working with DC again on a line of action figures, which grew to incorporate the Fourth World. With an interest in the series resumed, Kirby was asked if he would provide an ending to the saga, particularly the New Gods, and Kirby said yes. There were, apparently, some problems with this, but as Mark Evanier has insisted over and over again, Jack always said “yes” when asked if he could do something.

I’ll get into that when I get to The Hunger Dogs. For the nonce, the plan was to reissue The New Gods with a series of new covers, drawn by Kirby, and cap it with a new issue #12 that would provide a bridge between the series and the forthcoming graphic novel. The result was the double-sized issue “The Road to Armaghetto.”

The splash page shows Orion emerging from a Boom Tube, and, just to hammer the point home, an Apokoliptish minion declares “Orion is back!” The next few pages highlight how Kirby’s style had changed in the intervening dozen years: if anything, it’s grown bolder, with splashes that spill all the way out to the edge of the page. Unfortunately, it’s also a little on the sloppy side, with less detail (though a shaky inking job, by D. Bruce Berry, doesn’t help). Kirby’s art was suffering a little as his eyesight failed and his hands grew shakier. It’s still pretty fantastic design, though.

A more welcome change: Kirby has finally learned to scale back the dialogue, leaving plenty of silent panels that merely show action, giving everything even more power and dynamism than you’d normally expect from Kirby. He’s also experimenting with panel borders and page layout in a way that was becoming more popular at the time—ironically, mostly thanks to Kirby’s own devotees, like Jim Starlin. (Though, strictly speaking, what superhero artist isn’t a Kirby devotee?)

The first nine pages have Orion smashing his way non-stop through a horde of robotic patrols, which have apparently become de rigeur for crowd control and police work in Armaghetto. “Darkseid has turned to ’hangman’s humour’!” thinks Orion. “He’s transformed Apokolips into a ’mechanized madhouse’!” Ahhh. It’s good to see that the years haven’t worn away Kirby’s love for “completely random quotation marks”.

Orion is aided by a pair of street urchins, and then by a seeming stroke of luck as the pavement suddenly cracks open and swallows up a pursuing mechanoid. It turns out that this was another act of subversion by the Female Furies:

The new Apokoliptian mechanization, and the general contempt for it by the former elite, will form a major theme of the rest of the series. Right now, though, I’m a little confused. The Furies seem to have regained their former positions as warriors of Apokolips, but now they’re once again acting to help the forces of New Genesis, apparently out of sheer love of conflict. What’s more, the Furies turn on their robotic “monitor” and then on Granny Goodness herself when she runs in to check on them. Granny seems a little on the pathetic side here, actually, which seems consistant with the whole theme that Apokolips has begun to decay.

A fracas ensues, with the Furies apparently enjoying a chance at a little of the old ultraviolence, something that’s apparently been denied them in the years since the machines took over. Of course, they’re immediately put back in line with a punishing jolt of electricity from a supervisory computer installation. Mostly, this scene seems to exist just to provide a chance to give the Furies one last little bit of action…but don’t go thinking this issue, or the next one, are going to be a non-stop cavalcade of guest stars.

At any rate, this computer monitor thingie now reigns supreme on Apokolips, as we’ve seen, controlling robot patrols and watching over oppressed and opressors alike. It’s something close to Darkseid’s dream of perfect control, all wills subservient to his own, all completely controllable from a single location. And yet, irony of ironies, achieving all this hasn’t made Darkseid happy. You might even say…he’s ronery.

Sorry.

Anyway, a flunky suggests that Darkseid make use of their new, experimental technology to bring back his closest friend, Desaad, who, you’ll recall, he disintegrated via the Omega effect. Once again, the “wiping you out of existence” aspect of the Omega effect seems to have been gravely overstated.

Darkseid uses his techno-thingie, and next thing you know, Desaad is back:

Meanwhile, back in Armaghetto, Lightray catches up with Orion, much to the latter’s consternation. As you might remember from the link above, Orion ended the series by embracing the knowledge that he was Darkseid’s son. Somewhere between that issue and this one, he’s furthermore discovered that his mother, Tigra, is still alive and imprisoned on Apkolips. And there’s a prophecy, you see, that the father will meet the son in the light of the fire-pits of Apokolips, and that will decide the war. Lightray’s uncertain that this ought to happen, and has come to slow up Orion’s progress, but Orion is, understandably, hard to reason with. Lighray agrees to leave him be, but not before creating a diversion by using his solar powers to blast the various attacking gizmos to smithereens. I like this panel here, as Lightray melts an entire garrison with the force of his blast:

Suddenly, a new enemy approaches: a horde of “dog cavalry”, led by none other than Steppenwolf. This reanimated apparition knocks Orion off balance, but Lightray is quick enough on the ball to conjure up an illusion: a pile of soupbones. The dogs race towards them and bowl through, into a nearby canal. So…the guy was melting giant robots a moment ago, but when dogs attack him he turns into a Road Runner cartoon?

Orion finally manages to convince Lightray to shove off, and the two part with these awesome, wordless panels:

Megaforce, eat your heart out.

Meanwhile, Darkseid is busily resurrecting more of his buddies, the latest being Kalibak. As we’ve seen, though, the reanimants aren’t really the sharpest knives in the drawer—they’re crude parodies of themselves. This seems like Kirby displaying his disappointment at being unable to recapture the old magic, but “it’s still an impressive ‘game’,” admits Darkseid.

Orion has now managed to sneak and punch his way into his dad’s control room, and lets fly with a furious assault that, you guessed it, requires a double splash page. Which is so big I’m not even going to scan it in. “In the context of destruction, Orion transcends the term!” bellows the caption. “To oppose him is to die! To survive him is life lived in fragmented form!” To look funny at him is to have him rip your lungs out! To not say “God bless you” when he sneezes is to risk a couple of broken legs!

Darkseid uses the classic villain’s gadget, the Escape Pod, in this case a tube down which his throne disappears to merge with a rocket sled deep in the bowels of Apokolips. But Orion comes bounding after him, grabbing onto the back of the sled and smashing through the canopy as it rockets through the tunnels. Darkseid distracts Orion as the sled comes to a halt by showing him his mother, bound to a nearby rock—then tries to plug him with a concealed laser gun. Orion seems to get the drop on him: “..and now, you cruel, arrogant…!” “Yes…NOW!” yells Darkseid, and a platoon of soldiers pop up and riddle Orion with lasers (including a bunch through his head!)

Ouch. Orion then topples backwards into a firepit, leaving no body for Darkseid to salvage. Despite the seemingly fatal wounds he received, Darkseid knows Orion can never be underestimated, and he realizes that now he’ll be forever haunted by uncertainity.

See, this is what makes Darkseid such a great villain, and the series as a whole so much more interesting than most superhero punchfests. Darkseid hates and despises all life, all intelligence except his own; he’s spent his life attempting to bring about a world totally in his thrall, with no other will to oppose him. And as he draws closer to achieving that goal, he finds himself increasingly dissatisfied—the seeds of his own defeat grow from within himself. When challenged, he’s indomitable, but when there’s no one else left to put up a fight, and he’s forced to look inwards…that’s a prospect that genuinely terrifies him.

More on this next week when I start the grand two-part finale, The Hunger Dogs!

The Pause Before the Big Finale...

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 04:43:00 +0000

Sorry I didn't update this week, folks--things are a little crazy. Besides, I need to pause and gear up for the big finale of Fourth World Fridays, which will run over three weeks, starting this Friday the 12th.

Mister Miracle #18--“Wild, Wild Wedding Guests”

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:25:00 +0000

“MUCH SENTIMENT, BUT LITTLE JOY…”

(It’s just come to my attention that yesterday would have been Jack Kirby’s 91st birthday. I still say we lost him too soon…)

With Kirby’s plots getting more and more convoluted thanks to the editors' increased meddling, the supposed escape artist Mister Miracle was, ironically, getting entangled and restrained by his own book. So he did the only thing he could: he escaped. By being canceled. But as with The New Gods and The Forever People, he was able to give us something resembling a conclusion, however rushed.

This issue starts unremarkably enough, with the gang setting up an escape stunt that will apparently involve Mister Miracle crouching in a cylindrical glass tank filled with water, which in turn stands in the middle of a shallow pit. Barda’s unloading a crate of Nitroglycerin into the pit, and Shilo’s giving Mister M. a snorkel mask so he can breathe in the tank. And I’m completely confused as to how this trick is going to work. We never actually find out, either.

You see, Oberon and Shilo are grabbed by faceless hands as they crawl out of the pit, at which point weird, retro “shock grenades” are fired into it, resulting in a massive explosion. The fiend responsible? One Virman Vundabar, back from his sojourn on Apokolips and wearing a doofy hat.

“Virman’s mission seems hardly designed to generate a wedding! But there will be a wedding!” the narration informs us. And just in case there’s any doubt as to who this wedding will involve, we cut to Scott and Barda, huddling in a small tunnel Scott was somehow able to cut in half a second with his boot lasers. Man, those boot lasers work fast.

Barda mopes passive-aggressively about how she slowed Scott down, and asks “Why didn’t you leave me?” “The answer is simple--now. I love you Barda—I-I can’t live without you—“ responds Scott. Gee, good thing it wasn’t some stranger in the pit, or Scott totally would have left her to die. He only saves people he loves, you see.

The two of them fall into a clinch, and Kirby slips in some obviously self-referential dialogue regarding his wrong-headed attempt to make the book “more commercial” when it was bound for cancellation anyway:

But of course, the two are still in danger, as demonstrated by the “ground probe” that finds them. “This probe is super-sensitive! It can pick up a heartbeat!” announces Scott, right into the mouthpiece. Belatedly realizing that this isn’t the smartest idea, Scott desides to go the whole hog and screams into the probe, nearly deafening Vundabar and his minions. Scott and Barda take advantage of the downtime and pop up to subdue Vundabar, but no sooner have they done so then they’re confronted by another enemy—Granny Goodness. Looks like the Apokaliptians have decided to do away with that whole “single combat” thing and just finish the job.

Granny deploys “an invisible mass gravity beam” of the kind that Scott escaped from back on Apokolips, which grinds Scott into the Earth, petulantly whining “STOP IT!” as he goes. Geez, take it like a man, Scott. Disappointingly, he’s saved not by his usual skill but because the guy deploying the gravity beam decides to take it easy on him. The guy in question is yet another familiar face: Kanto the “master assassin” who never actually kills anyone. As regards Kanto…it’s pretty obvious that Kirby wanted to make him somewhat sympathetic, and he presumably would have defected to Scott’s side at some point…but at the same time, he’s supposedly motivated by the fact that his loyalty lies only with the highest bidder. I guess he’s the Han Solo of this series, or would have been if it had continued.

What happens next:

Yeah, they’re totally doomed. It’s not like Mister Miracle has escaped from every deathtrap he’s been put in.

On the other hand, the Apokoliptians have finally shown they’ve learned something, by shorting out Scott’s hood circuitry in advance, thus complicating matters for him. How did they accomplish this? Via some mental chicanery courtesy of the guy who was tripped up by Scott’s hood circuitry last time, Doctor Bedlam. Yes, it’s an all-star cavalcade of Scott’s archnemeses!

As if the “bomb-clock” wasn’t elaborate enough already, it’s now fired up into space (!) and, a panel later, explodes in the atmosphere. No sooner does Granny take a moment to cackle in triumph, however, than suddenly her soldier boys are “going down like ten-pins” under the onslaught of a familiar red-clad figure. Yes, it’s Special Guest Star Orion of New Genesis! He was just taping his Christmas special across the hall, y’see, and thought he’d stop by.

And the hits just keep on coming! Seems the explosion we just witnessed was Lightray, who now makes his entrance, and right on his heels come Metron and Highfather, towing Scott and his friends in a hovercraft. Yes, Highfather saved Scott’s ass, rather than his usual escape artistry. Hmmm…this being the last issue and all, I’m tempted to read a lot into this…given High-fathers’ godly nature, there’s a whole spiritual significance to him saving Scott on this occasion, when he was unable to do the job himself. Again, it seems like I’m catching a glimpse of a more elaborate story that Kirby was forced to cut short. It’s an interesting theme, though.

The Apokoliptish villains apparently at bay, Scott and Barda say goodbye to Shilo and Oberon, who are forced to leave before the godly shit goes down. They get a nice couple of goodbyes:

Meanwhile, wouldn’t you know it, there’s going to be a wedding, as decreed by The Source, and even the bad guys are invited. Except that there’s one particular , rocky-faced bad guy who tends to show up fashionably late, and they’d rather get the whole thing over with quickly, before he can show up, get drunk, and hit on the bridesmaids. Metaphorically speaking. It’s time for a mythological shotgun wedding!

Apparently it’s a quick matter of Scott and Barda declaring themselves “eternal” with each other, exchanging a smooch, and having Highfather tap them with his Wonder-Staff. So Scott, the master escape artist, ends the series with a Ball and Chain. Wokka wokka wokka!

No sooner is the job done than a tornado appears on the horizon, heralding the arrival of Darkseid. The gang piles into Highfather’s little barge jobbie, and the gang phases off to New Genesis, with Orion tossing off a final threat that he and Darkseid will meet “on the day called ‘Last Battle!’” And the New Gods are gone from Earth.

Oberon and Shilo, not having gotten very far, emerge from the rocks, only to find a solitary figure standing, watching the spot where the New Gods vanished. “Have you been out in the storm all this time, mister?” asks Shilo. “I am the storm,” replies Darkseid casually. Realizing there’s something terrifying about this guy, the two mortals take to their heels, leaving Darkseid to have the final word, describing Scott’s wedding and the Fourth World saga itself:

“It had deep sentiment, yet little joy. But—life at best is bitter-sweet!”

…

And that, or so it seemed at the time, was where the Fourth World would end. Sure, the characters would show up again—Mister Miracle joined the Justice League later on, there were various revivals. But that was it for Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, the original saga as conceived by its creator. It would forever be an unfinished symphony, ending with a whimper instead of a bang.

…Or so it seemed for a decade or so. But wouldn’t you know it, many years later Kirby did indeed get a chance to put a capper on his most cherished creation—and if not precisely satisfying, it certainly was an astounding bit of work.

Tune in next time, when we learn that “Even Gods Must Die!!!”

We apologise for the interruption...

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:47:00 +0000

I have to skip Fourth World Fridays this week--I'm busy at the Toronto Fan Expo. I'll be at the Durham Comics Guild table--please stop by and say hello!

Mister Miracle #15-17--“The Real Big Barda”/”Super Trouble”/ “Murder Lodge”

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 01:20:00 +0000

WHEN NO ONE ELSE WOULD COME, SHILO, YOU ALWAYS CAME…

The transformation of Mister Miracle into a standard-issue DC superhero sort of worked, and sort of didn’t. In a sense, yeah, he fit in from the start—a relatively angst-free, iconic character surrounded by assitants and a faithful Girl Friday/unacknowledged love interest. Even the fact that he’s literally a “god” plays into the common perception of DC’s characters as mythological entities. And yet…this was still a Kirby book, and as a result it almost couldn’t help sticking out.

DC, in the 70s, was in a bit of an awkward spot. Despite what a lot of people assume, Marvel didn’t outpace DC in the sales department until the very end of the 60s; in fact, DC’s fatal flaw was in underestimating this upstart company. For most of this era, DC continued to grind out the kind of goofy, kid-oriented stories we associate with the Silver Age…and they were rewarded for it. Marvel’s audience skewed older and was more passionate about their product, whereas DC was a reliable publisher of ephemeral entertainment for young kids. In fact, I’ve actually heard it suggested that DC’s mistake was abandoning this kid’s stuff in the first place, that while Marvel’s growing popularity would have outstripped them anyway, DC could have continued to corner the younger kid’s market and thus weathered the storm up until the present day. Certainly, by the 80s, DC was regaining a bit of its luster by writing old-fashioned, optimistic, (mostly) kid-friendly superhero stories, thus distinguishing themselves from the increasingly “grim ‘n’ gritty” Marvel.

But in the 70s, it seemed that a change was needed, yet none of the top brass at this old-school, incredibly square publisher knew exactly what that was. Some interesting DC comics came out of this era, many of them involving Neal Adams, but it was the wrong time to launch new books; Marvel had had the advantage of being a small, scrappy publisher under the Aegis of an artist-friendly management during a time of relative economic stability, whereas DC was a conservative publisher with a fusty brand that hadn’t been updated in decades, hitting the skids during a time when a revolution in youth culture was affecting all areas of entertainment. They needed a new direction, but they couldn’t afford to stick with the new and more experimental books that might have carried them in the long term. And The Fourth World was a victim of that.

Still, it’s kind of weird to watch Mister Miracle regress to the point of gaining a kid sidekick--possibly the last superhero ever to try and use this schtick to appeal to new readers. I guess the fact that the kid in question was black was supposed to provide a new, hip take on the old formula, but it was still a bad idea, and I doubt it was Kirby’s. He may have been an old hand even then, but his work was all about looking to the future, not rehashing old, formerly-successful conceits.

At any rate, with issue #15 we meet Mister Miracle Jr., Shilo Norman. Incidentally, this issue doesn’t seem to have an official title, but it’s broken into chapter headings, one of which—“The Real Big Barda”—is referenced in the previous issue as the overall title, so that’s the one I’m going with. (Did that make sense? Because that title sure doesn’t.)

I mentioned earlier that I felt Kirby improved as a writer as he went on…but this particular issue sees him backsliding something awful into his “tell, don’t show” habits of the earlier issues. The first couple of chapters each open with a narration box that seems to pitch the concept of the story to us, like we were studio executives:

“Although this incident contains the bizarre elements that characterize the exploits of our hero, this is essentially a detective saga—the fast and thrilling attempt to stop a crime about to be committed in the wildest way with the wildest weapons.” (That’s all [sic]. Kirby has discovered periods.)

A police detective named Driver arrives, young Shilo in tow, at Mister M’ house as he rehearses his latest stunt: to escape from a metal cylinder before it’s crushed in a giant nutcracker wielded by Barda. And yes, the symbolism of Scott’s super-strong girlfriend wielding a nutcracker is not lost on me. By the way, Barda here is wearing an outfit that evokes her classic red metal bikini:

…But she changes back to street clothes pretty fast. Seriously, was this an editorial edict? An early example of “depowering the heroine so as not to make girl-fearing geeks nervous”?

Anyway, Scott escapes (yawn) and Driver, after dutifully registering his astonishment, explains why he’s here. Shilo is a witness to a murder—that of his own brother, as it turns out—and his testimony will be crucial in bringing down a local mobster named Mister Fez. Fez is clearly in with Intergang, though with the Fourth World stuff being played down as heavily as it was at this point, it’s never explicitly mentioned. Given Shilo’s importance, they obviously would like to rub him out, something they attempt to do almost immediately, with an anonymous hooded mobster chucking a grenade in through the window. Shilo shows his spunk by picking it up and throwing it back again, but the grenade doesn’t go off—Scott already neutralized it with his hidden gadgetry and blah blah blah. The point is, Shilo’s got spunk, and Scott and co. are obviously capable of protecting him.

Meanwhile, we meet Mr. Fez:

He’s building a gigantic gun that will “jam the brains” of the hotel residents next door, enabling him to loot their pockets while they’re unconscious. Shilo’s brother was one of their drivers, who saw too much of what they were doing—that’s why he had to be killed.

Back at Casa Del Free, Shilo is somewhat grumpily being put to bed, but Scott and Barda suspect something’s up, and wait outside his door. Sure enough, Shilo does the old tie-the-bedsheets-together dodge and escapes out the window, headed out to confront his brother’s murderers. Obviously this is a deliberate “don’t Narc to the police” moment, which is a nice bit of characterization, but it’s still pretty suicidal on Shilo’s part, even if we are hastily informed that he’s a Judo expert. Fortunately, Scott and Barda are on his tail, and pitch in to help him clean up the assortment of faceless hoods. Less fortunately, the heroic duo are promptly taken out by a smaller brain-jamming gun (Wielded by a guy named, um, Jammer) and Shilo is strapped across the barrel of the huge cannon. Oh no! They’re going to…brain-jam…his torso…to death!

Um, that part my not have been too well-thought-out.

At this point I don’t even have to mention that Scott and Barda were only pretending to be unconscious, do I? And Scott used his circuitry to block the brain-jamming? And that Barda saves the day by ripping up the cannon, while Scott disarms Mr. Fez? Oh yes indeed:

Yes, Scott. You’re special. You’re very, very special. Good for you.

Anyway, the cops arrive to mop up the scene, and despite some simmering resentment, Shilo sees that Mr. M and Barda saved his ass, so he agrees to be Scott’s apprentice and learn the escape arts… “Lieutenant Driver—I think you’ve bullied Shilo into a career!” proclaims Scott. And on that happy note, we end the issue.

OK, this is a really weird one. Shilo is getting his first lesson in escape artistry when he sees, well, this:

…When did Scott become such a prick? “Yeah, yeah, Shilo. Giant insect-man, standing right behind me. You crazy murder-witnessing ghetto kids are always having elaborate hallucinations, aren’t you? Ha ha! But it’s nothing I can’t casually dismiss for no particular reason, despite all the insanely weird stuff I’ve encountered over the course of my brief career.”

As is required by this kind of scenario, none of the others believe Shilo, either. The insect-thing materializes and dematerializes several times, and Shilo gets so frustrated that he…somehow escapes from the hand-shackles Scott had put him in. Distracted momentarily by his success, Shilo forgets what jerks the others are being…until the bug materializes again and ropes in Barda and Oberon before disappearing. With them gone, Scott starts to take Shilo a little more seriously. Playing a hunch, he activates some circuitry in his glove and detects some nearby “infinitely tiny footprints”—you see, the bug-thing is rapidly growing and shrinking, rather than teleporting, and it’s shrunk Oberon and Barda down to near-microscopic size.

Wait…Scott got all that on a “hunch”? After not believing a word of it a moment ago? That’s some hunch!

The next time the insect appears, Shilo jumps him and is shrunk down alongside him. He manages to overpower the bug with his patented, Austin Powers-style Judo CHOP, but it gets away and now Shilo’s lost in a subterranean world of bug-people.

Um…I’ll spare you the gory details. Shilo uses his various newly-acquired gadgets to fight off various bug-monsters, until he comes face to face with this guy:

Yes, a tiny mad scientist who’s breeding bug people is the culprit. Of course.

He traps Shilo by the novel trick of enlarging him until he’s pinned by the tunnel, unable to move. Professor Egg then steals his superior molecules to use in another one of his insectile creations, one which hatches looking like this:

Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be an Afro.

You can see how this is going to play out, right? Shilo escapes and vanquishes the bug that kinda looks like him, thereby demonstrating his worth as a budding escape artist and overcoming his symbolic shadow-self. Right?

Well, no. What actually happens is that…it all turns out to be a dream.

Yes. Seriously. He banged his head on some crates while he was leaping around, chasing the giant bug, and everything since has just been a dream. But wait—if that part was all in Shilo’s head, what about the giant bug itself?

Oh, you’re not going to believe this. Turns out they have a visitor:

So…he thought the polite thing to do would be to torment Shilo with visions of giant insects before they’d even been properly introduced? And how did Shilo see him in his visions before they’d even met? Or was the whole dream part of Professor “Exe”’s little gag as well? Because that’s one elaborately nasty prank to pull on a kid. And is that supposed to explain why Scott and co. were all blowing him off before? Damn, Shilo, you were right to run away from home last issue.

Another interesting point—again we have elements of the Fourth World showing up without being acknowledged as such. In this case, it’s the Evil Factory/Brigadoom all over again, except this time it’s a totally different evil scientist creating genetic horrors in a microscopic hideout. And, leave us not forget, this time it’s just a dream. Never forget that.

Think that was contrived? Would you believe that the next issue is even more so? Albeit in a hilarious, rather than infuriating, way?

The series seemed to be regressing as it went, to the point where Kirby’s now swiping from Abbot and Costello movies. Mister Miracle, Barda and Shilo once again blunder into danger, this time while their car breaks down in the middle of a tour. Of course this happens in a backwoods somewhere, and of course it’s run by this guy:

He’s just a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania.

Shilo makes the connection that widow’s peak + heavy eyebrows + devil beard + rubbing hands together in anticipation = EEEEEEEEEEVIL, but Barda admonishes him for judging people by their appearance. Ah, yes, but Barda, you’re in a comic book. Of course people who look evil turn out to be evil. By the way, note the classic “if we have the characters point out how clichéd this is, it’s not clichéd anymore!” trope.

In fact, no sooner have they laid down in their beds than Barda is electrocuted and Scott is dumped down a chute. Shilo, who with his RAMPANT PARANOIA avoided getting into bed right away, is spared long enough for the sinister dude—his name’s Peppi, believe it or not—to come barging in and start swiping at him with a sledgehammer. Shilo puts him out with a judo CHOP and then finds himself running a gamut of traps, proving that he finally did learn something about escape artistry. Finally, he’s thrown into the “Inferno Room”, which is basically a gigantic, fiery oven, by Peppi’s hulking assistant, Mungo. Shilo escapes, unconvincingly, by using his jet boots to instantly put out the roaring inferno (somehow he’s not troubled by the metal walls, which must have been white-hot even after the flames went out). He escapes and frees Scott and Barda.

Meanwhile, we check in with Peppi and Mungo, and we learn exactly what’s going on here. See, they run this motor lodge as a trap for runaway mob informants, and they kill them and collect the contracts the crime syndicates put out on them (so they’re Intergang agents, again, sort of). But…the motor lodge is said to be in the middle of nowhere. I can’t imagine sitting there in the middle of nowhere, hoping that people who are wanted by the mob will just happen to blunder in, was a particularly lucrative business until now. But if you think coincidences are starting to lay a little thick on the ground, wait until you see this:

Yes. Seriously. You saw that.

Peppi and Mungo were actually angling for a criminal gang who just happen to consist of an Amazonian brunette, an African-American dwarf, and a bandaged guy who sort of resembles Mr. Miracle. Unbelievable. It’s more and more clear to me that Kirby was using plots he’d conceived of before the order came down to prune the Fourth World elements, because just having Peppi and Mungo be Intergang agents would have allowed them to try and whack Mr. M, no further explanation necessary.

But then, of course, this issue wouldn’t have been anywhere near as gloriously insane.

Mister Miracle and his coterie burst in, Peppi puts out the lights, and a three-way battle ensues, involving a lot of blind firing with tommy-guns. Mister M. gets to do the only thing that comes close to an actual escape by dodging “Mad Merkin”’s bullets and rounding up Peppi (and Mungo, off panel). Shilo socks Little Bullets, and Barda takes on Della with a filing cabinet:

Thus it is that the police arrive to find “a festival of felons!” tied up and ready to be imprisoned. And they would have got away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!

…

As you can see, Shilo pretty much took over the book for these three issues. Again, I suspect this was an example of the editors flailing around a bit desperately—“Marvel has all these hip books with kid protagonists! Do that!” Although that doesn’t really explain why the teen-oriented Forever People were cancelled—but maybe their whole flower power schtick was seen as out-of-date in ‘73. At any rate, even with only three issues of a failing book, Shilo became an established figure in the DCU, popping up here and there over the years. Most recently, in Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers miniseries, Shilo has actually become the new Mister Miracle and is a huge, worldwide celebrity, while Scott and the other New Gods have all mysteriously gone missing (which is thematically appropriate, given Shilo’s role in the original series). Like many other Fourth World elements, Shilo’s apparently playing a major role in the current “Final Crisis”.

But back to 1973. With only one issue of Mister Miracle left, it would seem the whole enterprise was about to end with a whimper rather than a bang. Fortunately, Kirby was able to give his characters something resembling a proper send-off…

Mister Miracle #12-14--"Mystivac"/"The Dictator's Dungeon"/"The Quick and the Dead!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:29:00 +0000

WELL, NOW IT'S JUST ANOTHER COMIC ABOUT TALKING POLYNESIAN IDOLS AND GOOGLE-EYED SATANISTS.

So here it is: the beginning of Mr. Miracle’s ignominious descent into (gasp) (choke) working for a living.

The comic lasted another seven issues beyond The New Gods and The Forever People, but it took a distinctly different tack. From this point on—except for the final issue—Mister Miracle was transformed into a far more conventional superhero book. And a DC superhero book, no less. That means less sprawling continuity, angst, and edginess and more arbitrary standalone adventures involving Scott foiling the schemes of bizarre but solidly terrestrial supervillains. Oh, and a teen sidekick. But we’ll get to that.

Since the Fourth World doesn’t play much of a role in these next six issues, I’m going to run through them fairly quickly. That’s not to say they’re totally devoid of interest, though. Take issue 12, “Mystivac”. It seems to have just as much to say about where Kirby was at this point in his life as many other Fourth World stories…which, with his most personal project slowly withering on the vine, was not a good place. So it’s not surprising that here, for the first time, we get a villain who actually hatches a credible scheme to defeat Scott Free. “Credible” in comic book terms, of course.

The issue starts with Scott escaping from a torpedo before it impacts its target, as shown on the cover. As usual, Oberon and everyone else makes a lot of worried noise before Scott turns up, safe and sound, in the water. Yawn. What’s more interesting is that Ted Brown, Mr. M’s new manager, has apparently persuaded an entire naval base to participate in this publicity stunt. What the hell, the Vietnam war just ended, it’s not like they had anything better to do, right?

Also as usual, Mr. Miracle is being observed by a hostile presence—in this case, supremely rich sportsman and gambler named Colonel Darby. You know he’s rich and nefarious, because he’s a colonel. He has a butler and a limo. He wears a monocle.

Even in 1972, this strikes me as some incredibly clichéd and lazy characterization. However, to give Kirby credit, I have a sneaking suspicion that Darby was a last-minute replacement for Funky Flashman. Like Darby, Flashman has a loyal manservant, is fanatically greedy, comes up with crackpot schemes, and probably has it out for Scott specifically after what happened last time. But, like I say, Mr. Miracle seemed to be sloughing off its existing continuity to be more “commercial”, so no Funky. Normally I’d bemoan this, but one dose of Funky is probably all any of us ever needed.

So anyway, Colonel Darby’s plan is simple: now that Scott’s making a name for himself as an infallible escape artist, he’s going to place a substantial wager against him and fix one of his escapes. How is he going to do this? Via Mystivac:

Before we can learn more about this bizarre being, we have a bit of low comedy back on the base—seems that the Female Furies are busily mopping up the sailors for making passes at them:

Waaah-waaaah.

Now it’s time for the Colonel to put his plan into operation, by having Mystivac place a phone call:

Yes, Mystivac has the power to command people with his voice. Again, there’s a possible thematic link to earlier issues that’s been severed: Mystivac’s power seems an awful lot like the Anti-Life Equation. What’s more, he’s using it against Scott, the very symbol of freedom and irrepressibility, and subconsiously implanting within him a death wish—which for once gives us reason to think Scott might actually flub an escape. Indeed, during his next rehearsal with the Furies, Scott moves so sluggishly that he would have been crushed by a boulder if Barda hadn’t leapt in to block it with her body.

What I want to know is, given how many times they’ve been convinced Scott was done for, how did Barda know that THIS time was the one where she had to intervene? Though, thinking about it, Barda always tended to have faith in Scott before…so actually, I guess that’s a nice bit of characterization. On a side note, notice how Barda’s wearing civvies here? For some reason, she’s abandoned her bikini/armour combo, and never wears it again for the length of the series. Apparently another aspect of Mr. Miracle’s “New direction” was an attempt to conceal that Barda was a superhero, too, downgrading her to Scott’s girlfriend and assistant. She still has her super-strength, though, so I’m not sure what the point is.

Anyway, Colonel Darby makes his deal with Ted Brown, then places he and Scott’s other pals under his power. Scott escapes, but he’s still got that lingering death wish slowing him down as Mystivac attacks. By the way, check out this panel:

Not only does he have Wolverine’s claws, they make almost the same noise! John Byrne must have been reading this series…

Anyway, Scott fights back, mentally, with the help of Motherbox, and defeats Mystivac, leading to the bizarre revelation that he’s a tiny alien in an exosuit, like that Men in Black guy:

Darby attempts to cheat once more and knock off Scott via a handgun, but Scott gets the drop on him, and all ends well. Ted actually decides to turn down their winnings, since it left such a bad taste in all their mouths—even though it seems like they well and truly earned it.

You’d think that this battle for Scott’s subconscious would be a bigger deal, thematically—and in fact, I wonder if Kirby had something like this planned as a dramatic climax later on. But here, it becomes a symbolic struggle for Kirby’s own soul. Replace “death wish” with a desire to sell out (a theme referenced throughout the book as it is) and you realize that the real point is Scott attempting to retain his own identity in the face of pressure from the people who control the purse strings. Is Scott and Ted’s decision to turn down the money Kirby’s way of declaring his independence? Or is it an example of letting his characters remain pure in a way that just wasn’t possible in real life?

Issue 13, “The Dictator’s Dungeon”, sees Ted abducted by a hovering vehicle right in the middle of one of Scott’s escapes. He and Barda manage to come along for the ride, overpowering the ape-like pilots with oddly Oriental clothing. These, you see, are sentient Yetis from a lost kingdom in Tibet, ruled by one King Komodo, who has taken an interest in Ted for reasons unknown. Scott and Barda are ejected from the plane, but manage to land safely and make their way to the distant palace:

That panel is kind of baffling to me. As you may know, the Swastika actually originates in south Asia, where it’s a simple good-luck charm; the Nazis are the ones who appropriated it to their own ends. In other words, an oriental temple is a pretty likely place to find a Swastika, all things considered. I’d call this an example of ignorance on Kirby’s part, except it’s hard not to think that this issue was inspired by him glimpsing Swastika’s in some South Asian temple in the first place! But then why would he talk about how unusual it is to see them in Tibet? Did Kirby see a picture and just assume there were a bunch of escaped Nazi war criminals hiding in the Himalayas? …Or should I say…HIMMLER-LAYAS?!?

Sorry, I promise I won’t do that again.

Anyway, as it turns out, Scott’s right to be suspicious, as they then come across a Hindu-ized statue of Hitler as a god named “Dafura” (get it?). Ted confirms this when they catch up to him, though they’re then immediately knocked unconscious by some kind of force blast. Waking up in a tiny cell, Ted explains their predicament: “King Komodo” is in fact a Nazi war criminal named Albert Von Killowitz, who’s managed to use his technical genius to take over this remote valley and enslave the Yetis. “Dictator Komodo, is probably closer to the truth!” rages Scott, hilariously. Yeah, the nerve of this guy, portraying himself as a kindly, democracy-loving king when he’s really a murderous tyrant.

Von Killowitz attempts to kill them all by dumping acid from the ceiling of the cell, but Scott saves them by holding up his cape, which is treated to be acid-proof. Komodo/Killowitz decides to have some fun with Scott, and promises freedom for him and his friends if he can survive a series of escapes. Naturally Scott doesn’t expect him to keep his word, but he volunteers anyway, because, hey, he’s Mister Miracle.

The first trap comes while Scott is walking down a cylindrical corridor, only to dscover…HE’S IN A GIANT GUN!

Scott escapes, supposedly, by cutting through the barrel with his boot-lasers again, but come on!!! That’s a bullet in that panel, streaking towards him, about two inches away, and he hasn’t even begun to escape! “The timing must be faster than lightning!” thinks Scott as he wiggles free. Yeah, you’d think.

Scott next dodges a pendulum-axe before getting sick of this game and using his telepathy.

Wait…telepathy?!? Freaking telepathy?!? And it works, too, enslaving King Komodo to his will and allowing them all to leave abruptly, the now-passive Von Killowitz in tow. Seriously, what the hell, Kirby? I know your heart wasn’t in it at this point, but this is just insulting!

The issue wraps up with an even more abrupt explanation for why Von Killowitz wanted Ted—he had been in Korea (in the army, apparently) when he had been separated from his patrol, wound up in the Himalayas, and saved by a band of Mongols. Uh…Kirby apparently thought that Asia was about the size of Ireland for all those elements to exist within walking distance of each other. Anyway, the leader of the Mongols turned out to be Von Killowitz, who Ted immediately recognized. No doubt he had the “Nazi war criminal trading cards” as a kid. Von Killowitz, Herr Murderstein, Doktor Professor Stabenfunfel…collect ‘em all!

Anyway, Ted escaped somehow—we never find out how, because we’re out of pages—but Killowitz decided to track him down and eliminate him just to be on the safe side. Despite the fact that Ted hadn’t mentioned anything about his experience to anyone until now, and it was venturing forth that ended up getting him caught. Ah, the irony.

There’s some talk about how a weight has been lifted from Ted’s shoulders now that this affair is over. So apparently this is what’s been haunting him since he appeared. Uh, again, Ted, you could have just informed the authorities that there was a Nazi war criminal at large in Tibet at any time and spared yourself the angst. Oh well.

Finally, issue 14, a story which prompted one of my favourite lines ever from a comics review, from The Savage Critic’s Jeff Lester: “The whole thing is a bit like someone had tricked Fellini into directing an episode of Scooby-Doo.”

Like most issues of Mister Miracle from this late era, it begins with the characters simply blundering into some kind of nefarious plot, or having it come to them (I guess most of Mister Miracle’s enemies in the earlier issues came to him, as well, but there was a reason for that.) In this case, it’s a dude with a piñata for a head, running frantically away from a mob of creeps in robes and masks, who dogpile on the piñata guy and then basically ask Mister Miracle “What’re you looking at?” I love that they’re offended that anyone could find this bizarre in any way, shape or form.

One of the berobed types, this one not wearing a mask but incredibly creepy-looking anyway, throws a capsule (?) at MM and Obie, knocking them unconscious. Mister Miracle actually avoided the capsule’s effects, however, and just decided to lie on the ground watching them leave until Oberon came around. That’s what he says, anyway.

At any rate, the cult’s lair (because, naturally, it’s a cult of Satanists we’re talking about) turns out to be “only yards away”. Mister M’s approached is watched by the freaky dude from earlier and an even freakier woman with a terrible haircut. The designs here are incredibly creepy.

“Madame Evil Eyes”, as we shortly learn her name to be, greets Mister M. at the door with…laser beams that shoot from her eyes. These incapacitate Mr. M long enough to put him in, you guessed it, a deathtrap. He’s handed over to the grip of a gigantic stone idol…unless it’s actually supposed to be a living demon? It breathes fire on him, Mister Miracle gets out of it, blah blah blah. Though Mme. Evil Eyes’ gloating is pretty funny:

Yeah, Satan has such a good track record. And I love the sheer dowdiness of Mrs. EE. This whole thing is starting to remind me of this.

As a side note—what was it with comics and Satan in the 70s? It’s like comics had been holding their breath for a decade and a half, just waiting for a chance to get back to demons and skulls and grotesques they’d been indulging in before the comics code came down on them like a ton of bricks. I mean, I know The Exorcist was a hugely popular movie, and there were other devil-oriented movies both before and after, and that trend was bound to filter into comics, but there was so much enthusiasm for it. Heck, Kirby himself was already doing “The Demon” as a separate series at this point, which made it seem like an editorial mandate or something.

Escaping, MM and Obie stumble on the guy they originally saw trying to get away from the cult; Oberon has just enough time to recognize him as “’Ears’ Watson!--A top hood!” before a hand emerges from a secret panel and zap Ears with a freeze ray. Comics Code!

Some more uninteresting deathtrap shenanigans ensue before Mister Miracle gets the drop on Mrs. EE and unveil her as the head of a smuggling ring, with the satanic cult thing just a cover. Because nothing deflects the attention of the authorities like pretending to be a satanic cult. But uh-oh, the “Evil Eyes” gimmick is real, and the Madame isn’t going to refrain from using it on them:

You’ll be astonished to learn that Scott is able to combat this psychic attack with his usual array of gadgetry, and the two of them leave the supine Madame Evil Eyes to the authorities, as Scott thinks wistfully of Barda.

That’s actually the most memorable thing about this issue—there was a brief sequence I didn’t mention where we saw Barda examining her feelings for Scott, and now we see Scott reciprocating. Now, you may be saying, “Duh, of course they’re going to get together” but what’s funny is the way Kirby didn’t seem to have much interest in uniting the two romantically up until this point. It sure seems like he was headed in that direction eventually, and obviously the two had chemistry, but it was that kinda Mulder-Scully thing where it seemed like it was going to be more powerful for being unacknowledged by the characters. And it’s strange that we don’t have the two falling into a clinch until after the book devolved into a typical superhero yarn.

Mister Miracle #11--"The Greatest Show Off Earth!!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:07:00 +0000

MISTER MIRACLE SELLS OUT

So one of the things that I keep fixating on, when discussing Mr. Miracle, is the fact that we never seem to have any idea of just how he operates, on a professional level. Is he world-famous? Is he still making a name for himself? Does he shun the limelight? He certainly seems to prefer to do his escaping far from any potential audience, but there have also been throwaway references to charity events and so on. As I mentioned way back when, I get the distinct impression that Kirby was trying to make Scott as anti-materialistic as possible, in keeping with the counterculture vibe of the Fourth World. On the other hand, it also seems that he’s trying to make himself into a symbol, opposing the forces of Apokolips. Hence his bizarre, self-contradicting career of calling himself a performer while simultaneously keeping all his performances secret.

However, things are different now; as you may recall, Scott’s mentor Thaddeus Brown turned out to have spawned a son, Ted, who showed up on Scott’s doorstep last issue, hat in hand, planning to set himself up as his manager. His radical idea is to have Scott give “performances” to “audiences” in exchange for “money”.

What’s funny about this is that it corresponds with the slow decline of the Fourth World saga, and seems to represent, on some level, Kirby selling out his ideals. The Forever People also recently got jobs. Even Kirby was obviously figuring out that the 60s were over, and the materialistic 70s had begun. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened to overlap with the period in which Kirby started backing away from the more personal aspects of Mr. Miracle, turning it into “just another superhero book”. So it’s ironic that this is one element that actually improves the book, or at least causes it to make more sense.

At any rate, Ted Brown’s slick promotional idea is to make a demo tape of Mr. M doing his thing—along with Scott’s merry band of helpers, who have apparently officially expanded to include not only Ted, Oberon and Barda but the rest of the Female Furies, as well. They all get in on this act, which consists of Barda hefting a very tall pole with Scott balanced on top in restraints, Burnadeth igniting a pool of gasoline at its base, Lashina cracking the pole, Stompa kicking it over, and Ted taping the whole thing. While Mad Harriet, um, stands off to the side and cackles. Oh, and Oberon gets to wear a ridiculous costume and do his usual vital routine of yelling, “Work, Scott, work! Escape from that deathtrap! By which I mean, the thing which is in immediate danger of killing you!” And he gets to jabber on and on in this fashion via the magic of comics, in which huge word balloons can be crammed into a panel that realistically portrays the second or two it takes Scott to escape. Chris Claremont knows it! Now, so do you!

There’s the usual utterly predictable moment where all the characters think Scott’s bought it in his latest escape, but no, he’s still alive, yay, how surprising. What is nice is how Barda is the one character who has total faith in Scott’s ability to survive, even if she does lose track of him for a moment. “You kept your eye on the fire—instead of me!” winks Scott as he swings down from a nearby tree branch. “Nonsense! My eyes never left you!” retorts Barda. Oooh, methinks I detect a hint of romantic frisson between these two crazy kids.

In the meantime, though, Scott is being watched by an enemy, in the second most common trope of this series. In this case, it’s Doctor Bedlam again, or more precisely, one of his “animates”, the faceless robots which he uses as shells for his consciousness. I already mentioned how disappointing it is to me that the supposedly soulless and personality-less animates talk of their own volition, even when Bedlam’s not around, but hey, I think I’ll do it again. It’s the very embodiment of Kirby’s unfortunate tendency, which I assume he picked up from Stan Lee, to over-explain everything via text. (By the way, to skip ahead a little, Kirby does eventually grow out of this tendency…too bad it takes him over a decade.)

Anyway, again a single animate is seated and becomes the vessel for the Doctor, with much unnecessary exposition. He and his crew then immediately reveal the gigantic pseudo-UFO they’ve got hidden in the underbrush. “The Ceri-skiff!” Bedlam calls it. “Made to snare and kill Mister Miracle!!”

Meanwhile, Oberon is relaxing from his latest Mother Hen panic attack by admiring himself in the mirror:

Suddenly, his image turns ghastly…um, ghastlier, that is…and he finds himself in the grip of terrifying illusions once more. Scott rushes him and saves him by remaining calm and naming their visitor, at which point he withdraws. Um…I’m not sure why the Doctor bothered to attack Oberon, since the only thing he accomplished was to alert them to his presence. But I guess it’s a point of honour sorta thing…I mean, being a supervillain obviously isn’t about winning, so I guess it’s more to do with making an entrance.

Anyway, the Animates come bursting in and a fight ensues, one in which even Oberon gets to dismantle one of them—naturally the Furies make short work of them as a group. And once more, the Animates just can’t shut the hell up, announcing loudly their intention to destroy Scott’s Mother Box before actually doing so. He does get off a shot at Scott’s shoulder and seems to fry MB, though immediately afterward Barda throws him out the window.

So now—you guessed it—Scott’s decided to once again head out and walk right into the bad guy’s trap. Of course, at this point it feels a lot more like simple, and well-placed, confidence that he’ll be able to get out of anything, but he sure doesn’t go out of his way to give his archnemeses a hard time, does he? For good measure, he insists that Barda not follow him. Mr. M is a cocky bastard, isn’t he?

Anyway, a few panels later he’s strolling on board the Ceri-Skiff to confront the Doctor:

“Despite the fact that we’re sworn enemies, I don’t take setbacks lightly!” adds Bedlam, vying for the coveted Non Sequitur Award (villainous speech division). Scott responds properly by punching him in the face, but of course he’s jumped out of the body, leaving behind an empty animate (albeit one which keeps the Doctor’s clothing, for some reason.) Then the doors to the skiff slam shut, and it rockets into space, immediately throwing itself into a meteor swarm and convincingly bashing Scott around, hardly leaving Scott the time to move, let alone escape. I guess, for a guy who gives Scott plenty of warning that he’s about to try and kill him and practically dares him to escape—which is something that, if you haven’t been paying attention, he always does--the Doctor doesn’t mess around once the actual deathtrap has been sprung.

The ship rises up into the atmosphere and heats up to incredible degrees, yet, somehow, conveniently, Scott survives. “I can sense your presence, Doctor Bedlam!” he announces. “And, also—your failure to kill me!” Well, yeah, you generally would sense that you hadn’t been killed. Perceptive of you, Scott.

Now it’s up, up, up into deep space, and a killing chill sets in…yeesh, don’t people bother to insulate their spaceships these days? As Scott wraps himself in his cape to fight the cold, the Doctor returns to the Animate to drink in what he believes will be Scott’s final moments, and to be a big stupid lame-o who sows the seeds of his own defeat because Kirby needed to wrap things up conveniently. Ahem, sorry. At any rate, he knows Scott’s about to crash into the moon and die, but suddenly a pinging comes from…Scott’s head. And before Bedlam can make a move, a beam from Scott’s forehead has woven an “electro-web of micro-cosmic atoms” around the Doctor, from which his consciousness can’t escape.

A web.

Morbo?

“MIND TRANSFERENCE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!!!”

You guessed it—Bedlam ends up trapped in the Animate as it crashes into the moon, dazzling onlookers back on Earth. Hey, thanks for the free promotion, Doc! Come clean, you’re not really a super-villain at all, aren’t you? You’re just bashful. You really just want to help Scott any way you can, don’t you?

And of course…Scott then teleports back to Earth. You know, teleportation? The thing which he swore he wouldn’t do in previous issues, because it was cheating?

And if you think that’s bad—

He duplicated Mother Box’s circuits into his hood. Without giving us any indication or setup. LAME. DUMB. DEUS EX MACHINA.

This issue is classic Fourth World, in that it’s a pretty good concept that’s executed in a way that seems calculated to annoy with its awkwardness and inconsistency. There really, really needs to be more set up, and more consistant rules, for the wondrous devices Scott pulls out of his butt in a given issue.

Fortunately…or unfortunately…it’s not really a concern for the rest of the series. Mister Miracle continues, but the Fourth World more or less vanishes for most of it, and with it all Scott’s annoying gadgets. I tend to peg the sudden decline of Kirby’s storytelling in this issue to his knowledge that his baby was being ruthlessly pared down, and the attendant cooling of passion for the project. As it turns out, though, the Fourth World would endure…though we’ll have to wade through some crap before we get to glimpse it again.

The New Gods #11--"Darkseid and Sons!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 05:27:00 +0000

THE BATTLE TO END ALL BATTLES! FOR THIS SERIES AT LEAST!

If DC was going to cancel all but one of the Fourth World books, why oh why couldn’t New Gods be the one that survived? It was clearly the most crucial of the books, and probably could have carried on and completed the continuity of the Fourth World saga by itself. Of course, that very quality seems to be what made the DC brass uncomfortable, so they “salvaged” the book that could best stand alone—Mister Miracle—and threw out the rest. (Though, years later, The New Gods was the book that DC revived and which led to a sort-of conclusion for the series…but more on that in a few more installments’ time.)

At any rate, this too is the end of one of the Fourth World books, meaning that Kirby now has to fold up a few plot threads faster than he otherwise might have done. We get a taste of this right away as we open with Kalibak, now in police custody. I think it’s pretty clear that Orion’s battle with Big K was cut short at the end of issue #8 because these two form the main connecting narrative between the various issues of this book, and Kirby had a big, rousing, possibly issue-long battle between the two of them planned out for later. (Exactly how long the Fourth World saga was planned for isn’t clear, because Kirby was such a creature of whim, but he seemed to suggest that it would have lasted about 24 issues each—in other words, we didn’t quite get to the halfway point.) It’s a shame that we couldn’t get a few more issues between their first battle and his big return; it would have allowed for a nice lull before the big storm.

But anyway, we’ve got one of the most amusing and, in a way, touching themes of the series spelled out right here in this splash panel…with, as I said, Kalibak in police custody.

They’ve got a god in police custody.

You just know that if this series had been done today—or even in the 70s, but by a different artist, which obviously never would have happened, but anyway—that he’d be under the control of the federal government, possibly buried deep in a top-secret underground penitentiary and patrolled day and night, thus making for an amazing escape sequence later on. But nope, not in Kirby-land. Here beings of awesome cosmic might are nothing New York—excuse me, Metropolis--cops can’t handle.

Granted, as the expositionary cops relate to Commissioner Kiernan, “it does take all of this city’s electrical power to hold him”, but…wait, all of it? Because I’m pretty sure Metropolis wasn’t plagued by massive blackouts in the last two issues. I’m also not sure what the power is doing, exactly, since they’ve got him in a weird isolation tank:

And again, the NYPD…or the MPD…or whatever, is perfectly capable of jerry-rigging a super-powered tank to contain an alien god with superstrength. That’s why they get paid the big bucks!

Well, maybe keeping that juice flowing is costing them too much, and that’s why Kiernan makes the boneheaded decision to let Kal go so they can arrange a truce. Seriously, this is the exchange:

KIERNAN: Do you hear me, whoever you are? Start talking peace, or do your fighting elsewhere!
KALIBAK: I can do neither--in here, Earthman!
KIERNAN: If I thought for one second—that you could be trusted--
KALIBAK: Why not? My war is not with your kind—and I’m willing to carry your message!

Well, I’m convinced! That whole business of you wrecking up downtown? That’s all in the past.

Of course he immediately bursts free of his shackles and blasts through the wall. But he does seem willing to carry Kiernan’s message, so I guess…Yay? I’m sure the monstrous caveman who already trashed half the city will be extremely sincere and effective in delivering the message of negotiation. And Orion seems highly receptive. I’m sure this won’t lead to another block-shattering fistfight.

Oh, look, here’s Orion, practicing the reasoning skills that have made him such a qualified diplomat:

Fortunately, before he can thoroughly re-enact the average Van Halen tour (or possibly the Wyckyd Sceptyre party tape), Claudia Shane bursts in and announces that Kalibak has escaped. Orion crows that this means he’ll have to leap into battle, in defiance of Lightray’s call for patience, but Lightray responds that since Kalibak’s headed this way anyway, they might as well sit back and relax.

Meanwhile, Darkseid is in the Omniscient Master Villain’s Plotting Room, which is standard issue for folks like him. It’s the room in which you stand plotting, and henchmen run up and deliver exposition at you (or, on occasion, you view things via a screen or scrying pool.) The latest bit of news is that Kalibak has escaped, and Darkseid is preparing himself for a final conflict between the two. Desaad is confused over Darkseid’s ambiguity over who he wants to win; Darkseid snaps back that he doesn’t have to explain his motives, then proceeds to explain his motives. See, back when Darkseid was just a little pebble—a chip off the old block, you might say—he was in love with the sorceress Suli…who, as we now learn, is the mother of Kalibak. Darkseid’s mom, Heggra, had arranged for him to marry Tigra, and had Suli poisoned by Desaad, a fact of which Darkseid is apparently well aware. Yet he keeps Desaad around as his close personal confidante, even favouring him over the more effective and less duplicitous Glorious Godfrey. I know they say to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but this is ridiculous.

Kalibak has, in the meantime, reached his target, and is shaking Dave Lincoln’s apartment to pieces (that guy’s going to have to move when all this is over.) Suddenly it’s Lightray who’s the impulsive one, diving out the window take on Kalibak before Orion can take the stairs. Lightray charges at Kalibak with a “Nova Blast” which, for some reason, requires him to ram into him full speed instead of just hanging back in the air where Kalibak can’t reach and shooting off energy bolts. Kalibak shrugs off the first one, then grabs on to Lightray and pummels him to a pulp. Uh, good one, Master Strategist.

Orion, you’ll recall, can’t interfere in personal combat, so he’s forced to hang back and watch helplessly. But once Lightray is unconscious, he leaps into battle.

On the other side of the city, an old friend springs into action. Paralyzed Vietnam vet Willie Walker has once again become The Black Racer, and he’s headed out once again to collect the soul of one who’s time has come: “An angry god!” Well, that narrows it down…

The rest of this issue can be summed up in a single sentence: “Orion and Kalibak beat the shit out of each other.”

…OK, there’s a little more to it than that. See, Kalibak seems to be a lot more powerful than he ought to be, which is why he was able to blow off Lightray’s attack earlier. He’s even able to project energy from his hands, catching Orion by surprise and letting Kalibak bring a building down on him.

Darkseid is watching all this on his Hi-Def, and besides being surpised at Kalibak’s newfound power, it’s pretty clear that deep down, he’s rooting for Orion. Suspicious, and tipped off by a minion, who says that the source of Kalibak’s power is emanating from somewhere in his own fortress, Darkseid goes looking and finds Desaad, using that siphon-thing of his to feed of the roiling emotions of the battle, and giving Kalibak a boost. Wait, I thought the siphon fed off fear, not violence?

More to the point, there’s an interesting idea that isn’t spelled out as such. Desaad seems to realize that Darkseid’s sentiment for Orion is throwing things out of whack, providing the one chink in the emotional armour of this otherwise perfect tyrant. So he’s helping Kalibak behind the bosses’ back…despite the fact that this is the kind of thing that you’d think Darkseid would want him to do. This actually plays into the ideas we’ve seen touched on with Barda, where she respects Darkseid as an ideal, but feels that the actual Darkseid doesn’t live up to those ideals, and as a result, she goes against him. Here, though, it’s portrayed simply as Desaad being a weasel. Darkseid, possibly riled up by his recent recollections of what Desaad did to the love of his life, employs The Omega Effect. Unlike the Forever People, however, Desaad is apparently destroyed for good. Apparently Darkseid’s one of those villains who has a free hand when it comes to killing his own men, but is a big softie when it comes to killing people who pose an actual threat. “No, sire! NO--! screams Desaad. “Desaad doesn’t even have time to scream!!” lies the narration. Then, poof, Desaad is nothing more than a fading patch of light.

Orion pulls himself from the wreckage and suddenly finds Kalibak an easier opponent. “We must be brothers, you and I!” announces Orion out of nowhere. “Different sides of the same coin! True sons of Darkseid—the essence of his creed of total violence!” “Were Darkseid my father, he would have but one true son!” sneers Kalibak. “Kalibak! Kalibak!” he clarifies. “Die, Kalibak!” shouts Orion, launching himself at Kalibak’s face. “If we fight as sons of Darkseid—only one may live!” I’m not sure if this is some kind of metaphor, or if they’re somehow spontaneously figuring this out….

The Black Racer swoops in to claim his victim…but WHO? WHO? Could it be Orion? Or is it Kalibak, the guy who’s being pummeled to a pulp, held aloft and helpless?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s Kalibak.

The Racer leaves, taking Kalibak with him. Hey, he never did get around to delivering that message of peace, did he? Oh well, too late now. Anyway, with two panels left in the series, Orion faces forward and declares, “I can deny it no longer!—to others or to myself! I AM DARKSEID’S SON!!--Armed and ready with the heritage bequeathed me!—The ultimate ferocity! When I clash with Darkseid--THE WAR WILL END!

Ah, but nothing ever ends, does it, Orion? Certainly the war between the New Gods rages to this day. Your series, however, does end. Right here.

Please Stand By...

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 06:20:00 +0000

As may be obvious by now, there won't be a Fourth World Fridays entry this week. I'm catching up with a major project right now, as well as dealing with some family issues. We'll return next week.

The Forever People #11--"Infinity Man Returns!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:13:00 +0000

KEEP ON TRUCKIN’.

So the last two issues have seen the Forever People renting an apartment, getting jobs, and just generally showing signs of giving up their hippie lifestyle. Which may have been timely, given that the 60s had been over for two years at this point, but it did seem to run counter to what made the book interesting. The FP’s weren’t really meant to settle down, as evidenced by what happened last time they tried to do that…and sure enough, more or less the same thing happens this time around. Namely, a minion of Darkseid shows up, trashes the place, and sends them scurrying off.

This time, though, the threat comes not from a suicide bomber or a lone religious maniac. This time the threat is a name spoken in hushed whispers across the Fourth World:

I think it’s the red short-shorts that add that extra soupcon of intimidation.

Devilance is apparently one of Darkseid’s big guns, as we see when Big Bear moves in to grapple with him and he tosses him aside. I would ask why Devilance wasn’t sent in to take care of the FP’s right from the start, but it’s pretty clear that Darkseid mostly just enjoys jerking these kids around, teleporting them willy-nilly and throwing them back in time, even in situations where he has them at his mercy. At any rate, Devilance doesn’t seem to be messing around, and it’s only the timely intervention of the police, responding to Mrs. Magruder’s call, that gives the FP’s time to teleport away. Dev just contemptuously shrugs them off and flies out the window, using the first of many functions he’ll demonstrate on his wonderful lance.

The Forev Peeps haven’t wasted their moment; they’ve teleported, using Mother Box, to an abandoned mine shaft “a vast area” away. Despite the efficacy of their hiding place, and the fact that they can seemingly teleport away anytime they feel like it, Mark Moonrider knows that they’re only temporarily safe. “What’s going to happen to us, Mark?” frets Beautiful Dreamer. “Devilance won’t give up until we’re imprisoned on Apokolips—or dead!” “We’ll keep calm and plan a defense, Beautiful Dreamer!” responds Mark, sort of condescendingly. “It’s all we can do!”

I guess I should mention here that this is the final issue of The Forever People. Like The New Gods, it was brought to a screeching halt by low sales; unlike The New Gods, it wasn’t revived by Kirby later on (there was at least one revival, in 1988, by J.M. DeMatteis and Paris Cullins, about which I know nothing). It’s hard not to see this issue as a compilation of several issues and ideas Kirby probably wanted to run throughout the series. As mentioned, the natural inclination of the comic was to be a travelogue; introducing Devilance, a relentless, Terminator-type pursuer, to keep them moving from place to place, would have been a logical addition to the strip. The ending here also would have been more satisfying if it had capped a storyline covering several issues, but it’s still pretty good.

Which brings me to Infinity Man. What? Yes! Infinity Man! You know, the nigh-omnipotent being that the FP’s used to be able to call upon to get them out of a jam? And whom we haven’t seen hide nor hair of since the above-linked issue #3? Well, as you’ll recall, that issue had Darkseid zapping Infy with some kind of ray that reversed the little Captain Marvel/Voltron-style switcheroo that the Forever People had learned how to do. It turns out that this was actually a permanent thing, which is why the FPs hadn’t been able to call on him since.

And that’s both cool and logical—as I mentioned, it was getting a bit silly that the FPs could just call on this omnipotent being anytime they felt threatened. But, y’know, it might have helped just a tad with the storytelling if Kirby had, I don’t know, told us any of this stuff. As it is it kind of comes off like the FPs just wandered off and forgot Infinity Man even existed. Almost as if they’d partaken too heavily of some kind of chemical substance. Which is clearly ridiculous.

Anyway, Infinity Man was banished by the power of Darkseid to “a corner of the Universe where time, space, and matter change and merge”:

Some kind of barrier prevents him from going back to…wherever it is he normally hangs out when the FPs aren’t using him. Actually, it’s kind of weird that we’re just now seeing the guy “apart from” the FPs, and this seems to confirm that they’re definitely separate entities. But who knows; these are gods, after all. The idea of “taking on an aspect” is one found throughout literature. Um, though I have to admit you don’t usually see multiple people taking on the same aspect.

At any rate, this pocket universe isn’t a complete craphole; in fact, there’s a lush, beautiful, and uninhabited world nearby, to which Infy keeps returning when banging against the walls of the Universe tires him out. This planet is apparently called “Adon”. If you read 52, the recent DC “event” series, you may remember that, near the beginning, Animal Man, Starfire and Adam Strange were all banished to a paradisical planet on the other end of the Universe…where they encountered Devilance the Pursuer. It’s for this reason, and others that will become clear, that I think that Adon was that same planet, and this issue therefore seems to have had a big impact on 52.

Speaking of Devilance, it turns out that he’s tracked down our hippie friends, and they’re soon engaged in further combat. Mark tries his Megaton Touch, but it misses, and Devilance lunges forward—into a pit filled with goopy, comic-book lava. The blast was just a distraction to entice him forward, and Beauty had whipped up an illusory floor for him to step out onto. But Devilance is merely trapped for a moment, allowing them to teleport away once more.

This time they wind up on a remote island in the South Pacific, covered with giant stone heads…that look nothing like the famous Easter Island heads. It’s like Kirby read about Easter Island somewhere and decided to draw his own interpretation without bothering with visual reference:

Anyway, Devilance is on them almost instantly. This time the plan is for Vykin to use Mother Box to separate him from his lance, without which he’s “considerably weakened!” Vykin uses his “Magna-Waves” to tap the lance in a little cyclone, and Big Bear rushes in to pummel him, but once again Devilance cleans his clock when his lance somehow figures out a way to return to his hand. Man, Big Bear’s looking like a chump in this issue. In fact, it’s freakin’ Serifan who rushes into save him, using one of his Cosmic Cartridges to once more pull a convenient, never-before-mentioned power out of his ass and encase him in some extremely heavy metal. And that’s the only time you’ll ever hear “Serifan” and “heavy metal” used in the same sentence.

The FPs, allowed a momentary break in the action, retreat to the jungle to mull what to do with their pursuer. “We can’t kill Devilance!” mutters Beauty. “Our creed is non-violence!” puts in Big Bear.

…excuse me?!? Non-violence?!? And it’s Big Bear of all people saying that? I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, Bear, but you yourself were doing some pretty serious pounding as recently as a few pages ago. And you’re in a freaking Kirby comic. You really think you’re going to be allowed to be non-violent? Only girls get that option.

What I assume he meant was that they don’t kill. But they waste precious time talking about it, and wishing vainly for news from The Source, and next thing you know it looks like Devilance is free again. Smooth, guys.

The Forever People try to hold him off with logic, pointing out that they can just keep holding him off forever, resulting in a stalemate. Devilance blows that aside by saying that he’s willing to kill, and the Forev Peeps aren’t, so he’s bound to get the upper hand eventually. But just as things look bleak, the Mother Box rises into the air. “Is she calling for the ”contact ritual?”” asks Beauty. “Yes!” responds Vykin, “She strongly senses a contact with Infinity Man!”

You see, Infy has been thinking furiously back on Adon. “The young Forever People! They are the key! In the magic word ’Taaru’, which links us as one, destiny shall do what the powers of time and space command it!” He then…thinks very hard at the barrier that blocks him off from the rest of the universe. Back on Earth, Moonrider says that he thinks they can access Infinity Man now, after months of being unable to make contact, and Infy senses their presence.

Oh, Infy. All this time and you’re still a big, walking, omnipotent deus ex machine. It’s a shame you didn’t think of this “thinking hard” trick back when the FPs were trapped in Desaad’s amusement park of doom.

Anyway, the ritual kicks in, and suddenly Infy is standing there, ready to take on Devilance. It’s the battle of the dudes in short-shorts!

The battle mounts as Infy tries to grab Devilance’s lance away, resulting in a series of more and more “energetic” panels, until finally the island itself explodes, leaving only Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid and Sun floating on the open ocean. Oh, wait.

Suddenly, we cut to Darkseid and Desaad, watching all this mayhem from…somewhere. “Thus, blind destiny writes an ending well beyond the wisdom of Darkseid himself!” intones Darkseid. With Infinity Man destroyed, the Forever People are now trapped on Adon…forever. But hey, if you have to be banished someplace, this is about the nicest planet you could ask for. Cheerfully accepting their lot, the Forever People walk forward to begin exploring their new home.

“A moment stirs! A moment lives! A moment Passes on! The young Forever People, for this moment, turn their back on Earth and face heir future on this new world! Will they return someday? Destiny will answer this question, too!”

Seriously, thematically, this is a great ending. It’s hard not to mist up a little as you see the fivesome walking off into the lush, pastel-coloured rococo landscape. The sixties were over, and it was becoming clear even to squares like Kirby that the utopian visions the counterculture had nurtured were drifting away, becoming an impossible dream. If the book had continued, it probably would have been forced more and more into a conventional format, with the FPs giving way to and compromising with the forces of mundane reality. With this abrupt ending, the fivesome never has to make that compromise, and can dwell on forever as a platonic ideal, romping amongst fields far beyond our ken. It was a long, strange trip while it lasted, but they were always strangers here, on this place called Earth. Shine on, you crazy diamonds.

Mister Miracle #10--"The Mister Miracle To Be"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:32:00 +0000

TO BE? OR NOT TO BE? THAT IS THE QUESTION.

The fourth and final volume of the Fourth World Omnibus collection kicks off, appropriately enough, with Mister Miracle—appropriate, because he’ll be dominating the first 2/3rds of this collection. That is, before we leap forward 15 years and Orion takes center stage again. But more on that as it comes.

If you’ll cast your mind back a couple of issues, you’ll recall that Scott and Barda had returned to Apokolips for some cathartic foiling of Granny Goodness’s plans…though he still hasn’t quite managed to defeat her for good, so I’m not really sure what the point was. But she’s definitely been weakened by virtue of the fact that the Female Furies have seemingly all gone over to Barda’s side, and in fact the “big four”—Stompa, Lashina, Mad Harriet, and Burnadeth—are all returning to Earth with her and Scott as this story opens.

Unfortunately, it seems that (apparently for the first time ever) they’ve miscalculated and sent a Boom Tube to the wrong place—a bland-looking grassy plain that the Furies immediately proclaim to be a dump. Scott, more sensibly, points out that it’s an improvement on Apokolips…which is, of course, a cue for the explosions and ammo. While Barda dodges the fire of an automated machine gun, Scott crawls underneath it and disables it just in time. The other Furies, conveniently, hang back off panel while this is happening.

No sooner has Scott succeeded than a sinister bld fellow in Khakis and his array of goons pop up, guns trained on Scott. “You ’all-nation’ agents are getting increasingly ingenious!” he proclaims. Despite Scott’s proclamations of innocence, the guy prepares to open fire, and Scott is once again forced to kick, dodge, and scurry his way out of the gunfire as he takes out the agents, spouting limp one-liners like “I get a kick out of meeting people I don’t like!” Even Scott admits to himself that this is a horrible cliché once the guys are all rendered unconscious. I guess either Kirby was becoming aware of his limitations as a writer—there are more and more of these self-criticizing moments as the series goes on—or else someone else was poking him about it.

At any rate, the Furies, Barda included, have run off somewhere, and Scott somehow decides that they preceded him down into the hatch from which Baldy emerged. Um, yeah, no doubt, Scott. Just be glad there isn’t a killer on the loose, because that whole “splitting up to wander off down a dark corridor alone” routine tends not to work so well in those situations. Actually, they usually lead to trouble in superhero comics, too.

And indeed, no sooner has Scott emerged from the elevator than he’s greated by…a disembodied head. The Head of the World Protective League, as he calls himself. In classic villain fashion, he proceeds to show Scott around his “Tinker’s Shop”, as he calls it, where his men are preparing an “orbital plague bomb” with which they plan to hold the world for ransom. Yes, that “protective” moniker applies in the sense of “protection racket”. This is standard supervillain stuff, of course, but adding that little flourish is a clever touch. Actually I think it would have been even neater if we’d started off by assuming that they were a bunch of good guys, and then the play on words had shifted our perceptions.

At any rate, the Head has been labouring under the assumption that Scott and the Furies are a bunch of secret agents, sent to disrupt their plans. Because secret agents have a tendency to show up in flamboyant, brightly coloured costumes and set off your evil lair’s defenses, don’t you know. At any rate, Scott helpfully waits until the Head is ready to hit him with a brain beam that renders him unconscious.

Meanwhile, the Furies are waking up in a cell, enclosed by foot-thick glass. Apparently the Head saw fit to render them all unconscious and take them prisoner, while allowing Scott to wander right up to him. Well, you’ve got to give props to the head: he recognized that the Furies are a lot more of a physical threat than Scott. What he failed to notice is that Mad Harriet has secret “power spikes” secreted in her knuckles…

Whoa, “Snikk”? And this was two years before a certain Canucklehead burst onto the superhero comics scene. Oh Kirby, is there anything in comics you didn’t anticipate?

Mad Harriet carves a hole in the glass, and Stomp kicks it out, freeing the Furies and knocking out the guard. Across the room, the Furies find another prisoner, one who starts smarmily demanding they free him. Turns out he’s “Mike McKracken of the All-Nations Agency!”, super-spy and secret agent (though not so super that he can avoid getting captured, it seems.) He immediately pours on the Neanderthal charm with Barda, which gets her to rip the bars out of his cell, at least, though only for the purpose of wringing his neck. McCracken, in case it isn’t obvious, is a parody of the numerous 60s-era superspies with out-of-control libidos who worked for vague UN-like international organizations; pairing him with the Furies is an amusing bit of snarkiness on Kirby’s part. While Kirbs wasn’t immune to sexism himself from time to time, this whole storyline is undeniably a shot fired at the rampant chauvinism of the previous, supposedly enlightened decade.

At any rate, before the Furies can get sufficiently angry at McCracken to polish him off, security shows up, leading to a standard slugfest, with the Furies making short work of the flunkies. Uh, I guess the Head was too busy to knock them out again long-distance?

Specifically, he was busy with Phase Two of the Generic Supervillain Five-Year Plan: put your hero in an elaborate deathtrap instead of just shooting him. This is often sort of elided over in Mister Miracle because the villains have heard of his fame and want to see if he’s Really That Good, but The Head has no idea who he is, so why bother?

Oh. Right. Floating Heads always have an array of random mental powers, so I should have figured on plot-convenient telepathy, too. At any rate, is there really a lot of suspense in seeing Mister Miracle bound hand and foot and thrust into a hyperbaric chamber that is promptly flooded with “death gas”? To no one (outside the comic)’s surprise, the chamber is opened and the empty shackles fall out…and when the thugs peer in, baffled, Mister Miracle comes flying out feet-first into them. Scott grabs the head and takes it hostage, as the villains stand agape at Scott’s ability to overcome his mental powers. The Head, however, has at least figured out Mister M.’s use of hidden gadgets, and calls a penalty in the form of a huge psychic blast that puts Scott out again.

This time, it’s the arrival of the Furies that saves him, particularly Lashina, but the Head still manages to get away…dragging Scott’s limp body behind him on a magnetic tractor beam. Before the Furies can catch up, the Head has arrived at the launch site and throws Scott into the germ-carrying rocket.

Hmmm. This is starting to look a little familiar. Fortunately, there’s a twist at this point: a magnetic pull drags the Head towards the rocket’s hull and affixes it there as the rocket takes up…then explodes in the upper atmosphere.

Damn, Scott, that’s cold. I mean, yeah, he was insane and evil and a threat to the world, but that doesn’t usually stop superheroes from sparing their enemies’ lives. The traditional out is for the villain to somehow be foiled by his own devices and fall down a pit, or be eaten by his own monster, or something. But that was Scott just flat-out executing the guy. Also, I kinda hope that rocket got high enough before exploding that the germs aren’t going to trickle down to Earth and infect everyone.

The Furies catch up to find Scott waiting calmly in the control room, ready to deliver one of his patented expositional speeches about how he escaped (in brief: by using his usual assortment of Deus Ex Machina Gadgets.) Surprisingly, though—possibly because Kirby suddenly realized he had five pages left—we get a little additional drama as they track down Barda’s missing mega-rod, which is in the hands of a leprechaun:

…Or an evil research scientist, whatever.

They catch up with him pretty easily—boy, that was gripping—and, after taking back the Mega-Rod, give him four hours to evacuate the base. Then McCracken sabotages the base to explode and Barda whisks the batch of them away.

But there’s still some pages left, and they’re given over to an epilogue in which we check on the long-absent Oberon. Or rather, the left-behind-for-three-issues Oberon. Left to rattle around Thad-now-Scott’s old house, Obie’s going a bit stir-crazy, so he’s delighted to receive a visitor: Thaddeus Brown’s son, Ted, who is only just now bothering to show up. Seems he’s been walking the Earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, trying to find himself, and possibly running away from his father’s long shadow. However, having received a letter from Oberon some time back, he’s finally realized his calling in life: to be a PR man.

Yeah, I thought that was a little anticlimactic too.

It’s especially ironic given the whole counterculture tone of the Fourth World Saga up until this point…but then, change was in the air for Kirby when he produced this issue. Let me note briefly that Scott, Barda, and the Furies arrive home with impeccable timing, and Ted promptly decides he’d love to help promote their act, thus ending the issue with a new phase in Mr. Miracle’s life about to begin.

Anyway…it’s about this time that Kirby apparently started to learn that the Fourth World books weren’t selling that well. Combined with the brewing economic times affecting America in general and the comic industry in particular during the 70s, Kirby seems to have suddenly realized that the good times of (relative) experimental freedom and personal expression that he’d enjoyed for a decade were about to grind to a halt. DC wanted concepts out of him that could compete with Marvels’ for the burgeoning fanboy dollar, but they weren’t really willing to let the King stretch his creative muscles in a way that would really accomplish this. For their purposes, they were getting Kirby at his least commercial—or at least, that’s how it must have seemed then. As I’ve argued before, I think Kirby was right on the cutting edge at Marvel, but here he was too far ahead of his time. By the late 70s, the cosmic vision of the Fourth World would have been completely suited to comics and pop culture in general, but at the time it was still a slowly-budding market.

That wasn’t good enough for DC, which was only just starting to lose its grip on the #1 spot in the comic book market. A lot of people don’t realize this—for all Marvel’s passionate fans throughout the 60s, they were a pretty small segment of the market compared to that of DC and some of the other giants, like Dell. It wasn’t until after Kirby left that Marvel started to overtake them, and the explosion of fanboy fervour which has been associated with comics ever since has distorted the historical view. It was unfortunate timing on Kirby’s part; he’d been part of a team of underdogs on their way up, but now he was suddenly allied with an industry leader starting to enter a decline. It was the worst of both worlds: he got a nervous, conservative boss that hated to take chances, without the commensurate money and readership that might have counterbalanced it. Though I should note that some blame corporate backstabbing rather than genuinely low numbers for the cancellation of the Fourth World—but more on that later.

The long and the short of it is, Kirby could probably sense that the game was winding down, as this comic not only sets the stage for the future of Mister Miracle, it also seems to reflect a listlessness and a growing lack of interest on Kirby’s part. The next phase of the Fourth World saga is a little depressing, but it does have something that at least vaguely resembles a happy ending….

The New Gods #10--"Earth--The Doomed Dominion"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:43:00 +0000

DOES WHATEVER A...BUG OF UNSPECIFIED SPECIES DOES.

So. Last issue dealt with the “Bugs”, the subterranean dudes in costumes insectile life forms who mutated from biological weapons loosed upon New Genesis in the great war. We learned that one of them, Forager, was an adoptee, probably a New God himself, and that he was loyal to “Prime One”, the brains of the colony who ended up being sacrificed to the new order when Mantis, stooge of Darkseid, took over. Barely escaping with his life, Forager hightailed it to Earth to warn Orion of the coming invasion.

We open on Mantis charging up in his power coffin as he did the first time we saw him. Rising from the coffin, Mantis gives a less-than-effective rallying speech:

MANTIS: We go to Earth! And there Mantis will make you the Masters!! There you shall rule instead of run!!
BUGS: We hear you, O Mantis!!
MANTIS: Hear further! Hear how this war between Apokolips and New Genesis will end with victory—for us!!
BUGS: We know, Mantis!

Not exactly the St. Crispin’s day speech. “Yeah, yeah, shut up already, great Mantis.” But they go along with Mantis’s poorly-explained invasion plans anyway, almost like they have no individual wills of their own. Like they’re some kind of…hive creatures or something.

Oddly, Mantis promises them powers such as his own ability to charge and drain energy, and that each other them will rule a part of Earth once its conquered. Since there appear to be roughly fifteen sqadrillion bugs, I’m wondering just how tiny the patches of land each bug is going to be allowed to rule over will be. “Hey, you! This is my clodpile! Stay within your boundary marker!” But then, these guys don’t have a lot of experience with individual will-to-power, being bugs and all.

Meanwhile, on Earth, Forager has stopped to do what he does best—steal food—and is being pursued for his troubles by a pair of comical stereotype chefs with poofy toques and everything. He proceeds to hop all over main street, frightening and unnerving pedestrians, and eventually runs straight up a building thanks to his “foot adheso-grips”…almost like a certain well-known wall-crawler belonging to a certain company Kirby had recently vacated.

Kirby’s role in creating Spider-man has always been a little cloudy—the character, obviously, is usually accredited to Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, the latter of whom claims he was inspired by a childhood radio program called “The Spider!” But Kirby had, unquestionably, pitched a few variations on a character known as “The Human Spider” or “Spider-man” to various comic companies (including MLJ, forerunner of Archie) throughout the 50s, so he probably got the ball rolling at least. I wonder if Forager is meant to be another twist on this character Kirby never got to realize his own way at Marvel. Certainly there’s a vague resemblance:

Also like Spider-Man, Forager finds himself relentlessly pursued by the cops, who eventually pick him up in a net while he’s trying to enjoy the loaf of bread he swiped. They carry him off to the station, where his path is fated to cross with Orion’s. As you might recall, the cops had busted into Orion’s apartment last issue and arrested him, assisted by the extremely reluctant Dave Lincoln. As Lincoln is quick to point out to DA Mason Hartwell, they’re not really equipped to contain Orion and Lightray and are, as a random cop admits, only holding them “because they’re cooperating”. “…And that’s true!” adds Dave, redundantly. In response, Hartwell blusters that “Taking ‘guff’ is not my prime attribute!” He then adds that he has a +2 Sword and over a thousand hitpoints, and is ranked as Lawful Good.

He proceeds to get into a dick-waving contest with Orion, insisting that he needs to get Darkseid’s, um, side of the story before he can exonerate Orion for the damage he caused battling Kalibak. (Of course, they do have Kalibak in captivity, but apparently he doesn’t get to give a statement.) At that moment, the cops drag Forager in, and sighting Orion, he starts pleading with him for help. “You called me by name!” marvels Orion. “You!” adds Lightray, “A lowly New Genesis ’bug’!” Forager manages to get their attention, though, by snatching off his helmet and revealing the godlike face within, and alerts them that Mantis is coming.

Elsewhere in “the city” (this is all still happening in Metropolis, right? Man, Kirby really didn’t like being forced to tie this into the DC Universe) Mantis is emerging with his army within sight of a couple of comical hobos making a two-panel cameo. The bugs, riled up by their leader’s crotch,

storm forwards into the city. On spotting this advancing horde of monsters armed with heavy weaponry, the people scream and run, including one understated gentleman who bellows, “Someone get the police! They look dangerous!” (Just once I’d like to see that in a horror movie. The monster comes looming into view, and the doomed redshirt yells, “That thing looks dangerous!” before being eaten.)

Orion and Lightray prepare to smash some bug carapaces, but Hartwell still isn’t letting them leave. “If you gimmicky goblins take one more step—I’m ordering my men to shoot!” You can practically hear Orion’s eyes rolling as the three Eternals teleport themselves away, and Dave Lincoln drily notes that Lighray moves at the speed of light to the bemused cops, now standing in an empty cell.

What happens next is pretty straightforward; Orion, Lightray, and Forager intercept Mantis and his crew and start with the punching. It’s not really made clear whether Orion and Mantis are evenly matched; remember, Mantis took on Infinity Man and, at least briefly, fought him to a standstill. If Orion can beat Mantis, that suggests that he’s the equal of Infy. But then, all we get to see is Orion holding him off for a while, so maybe he couldn’t actually beat Mantis if it came to that. That may explain why Lightray zips off to attempt a new strategy. He finds it in the form of a very convenient “sonic research” lab, one with an elaborate transmittal device Lightray plans to use to broadcast sound waves (generated by himself) and foil the bugs. The startled scientists are understandably dodgy about this, but Lightray takes an uncharacteristically harsh line, and besides, a moment later the scientists spot the bugs swarming across the city. “Start the sonic transmitter!!” sputters one. “…and hope that we’re on the right side!” responds the other. (Hmmm…there’s a whole theme here about the various New Gods not being immediately recognizable as “good” or “evil” to the average citizen, isn’t there?)

Forager leaps into the fray, trying to hold back his former colleagues:

FORAGER: There’s no victory in this for you! Mantis is using you as tools!
BUG: You lie, traitor!
FORAGER: Then I’ll fight you to the death!

Boy, that didn’t take much.

Orion and Mantis are pretty much deadlocked in combat, until Lightray’s sound beam hits, causing the bugs to clutch painfully at their ears. Rather anticlimactically, they create a boom tube and run off, seemingly never to return.

There’s a pretty big problem with this issue: the New Genesisians are supposed to be noble and enlightened heroes of virtue and equality, but again we see that they treat bugs like dirt, despite the fact that they’re clearly sentient beings. Now, I could buy that Kirby was trying to show us that the New Gods aren’t perfect, that they need to learn a lesson about treating supposed “lesser beings” with respect. That certainly seems to be the intent. But he kind of throws a monkey wrench in this by having Forager be one of Orion’s kind, and further by showing him to legitimately be superior to the Bugs. He can make decisions on his own, he has human emotional attachments, and he’s just generally the saviour of his adopted species…with said species being shown, otherwise, to be mindless, violent cannon fodder, apparently completely deserving of being gassed, shocked, and starved by the New Gods. I’m sure Kirby didn’t intend things this way, but the subtext here certainly comes off as arrogant and chauvinistic.

But hey, bug warriors invading Earth. That’s cool.

Please Stand By

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:57:00 +0000

For only the second time since I started this project, I'm going to have to miss this week's Fourth World Fridays installment. I've got a nightmarishly busy weekend crammed with work, plus a few family obligations.

Back on the 27th! By the way, I believe FWF will actually be coming to an end sometime in September, at which point I'm going to attempt some new material.

The Forever People #10--"The Scavengers!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:48:00 +0000

"DON'T LOOK SO SURPRISED, YOU RAT! YOU CAN'T KILL A DEADMAN!"

“Among their strange experiences on the planet Earth, four young adventurers from New Genesis have stumbled into the most bizarre involvement yet! Fate has put a restless Deadman in their path!!” Um, four young adventurers? Is Beautiful Dreamer ever going to be taken seriously? Anyway, we’re on the second-last issue of The Forever People, and sad to say, Kirby’s still sidetracked with reinventing Deadman. The wheels were beginning to come off the whole enterprise at this point, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still enjoyment to be had.

We open on a really bizarre (and typically Kirby-ish) robbery as a daredevil hanging from a trapeze suspended from a supersonic plane drops onto a high-tech “pollution-free engine”. He activates the drivers’ ejection seat by remote control, takes over the steering by himself, and drives the car away to be stripped. And that, children, is why we’re still driving gas-guzzling, carbon-emitting vehicles almost 40 years later. You can blame…The Scavengers.

Yes, The Scavengers, a high-tech operation that steals things for top buyers. As the toad-like director explains, “This is a super-age--of super-tools--used to serve the super-seller! And “The Scavengers” are a super-firm, geared to peddle super-merchandise!” Well, that makes super-sense! Thanks, super-ugly-face!

This continues the tradition of the characters in the Fourth World often reacting quite cavalierly to the New Gods. It does make a certain amount of sense—this is the DC Universe, after all, and these folks regularly see Superman and Wonder Woman zipping past—but it doesn’t explain why they’re not consistant about it, with characters occasionally going “Oh my god! You’re stronger than ten men! It’s not possible!” and so on. Either be blasé towards superhumans, or don’t be, average bystanders! Pick a reaction!

Anyway, continuing in their M.O., Toad-face is giving a guy in a fez an assignment to steal the “pyramid of Gazi”, by which I assume he means “Giza”. Apparently they have a super-rich backer who wants an authentic pyramid on his estate.

Yes. That’s right. He wants the scavengers to swipe one of the Great Pyramids and put it on his own land. Because, after one of the world’s most recognizable landmarks vanishes, no one will ever suspect the guy who suddenly has a pyramid in his backyard. It’s probably a good thing for all concerned that this plan appears to come to nothing and isn’t mentioned again.

Meanwhile, the logical gaffes keep on coming, as the Scavengers have been observing the Forever People, and now have footage of their latest exploits. Shot from “in hiding” in their basement. Yes, supposedly there was a villain crouching in their small basement, with a camera, able to get a perfect view of their activities, and none of the FPs noticed. Yeesh.

And what were they up to? Using New Genesisian technology to make a new body for Deadman. Remember the “Follower” Mr. Miracle employed way back when? That’s what the gang have dredged up, a Follower in the shape of Deadman’s traditional acrobat getup. (By the way, if I was a spirit forced to wander the world, and I had a chance to get my body back, I’m pretty sure I would ask for a version without creepy makeup and a flamboyant leotard, especially if I’d been forced to wear it throughout eternity up until then anyway.) We also learn that the Followers are actually biological instead of technological, and can be grown from “anything organic”. The toad-faced guy shows a particular interest in the Follower’s form, as he appears to recognize Boston Brand, and in the final panel of this sequence we see that he has a hook for a hand. Uh-oh.

Remember how Serifan was all being a sexist jerk in the last issue? And how Beautiful Dreamer seemed to be slowly increasing in height and musculature? Both of those things reach absurd proportions on this splash page:

OK, to be fair, she’s revealed to be standing on a box in the next panel, but she still looks as though she could crush Big Barda between her thighs. Despite this, she remains completely passive towards Serifan’s condescending dickishness, and his demand that she to drop what she’s doing and meet up with the other FPs. The person she does stand up to is the photographer, who’s, y’know, paying her to be there, and thus isn’t crazy about her leaving. She foils him by assuming the appearance of a hideous hag, causing him to fear for his sanity and bolt from the room. Ha ha! Take that, photographer! That’ll teach you to expect me to work in exchange for money!

A moment later, we learn that Beauty isn’t the only FP to have joined the ranks of the gainfully employed:

So awesome. And since the other three make no mention of getting a job, you just know Beauty and Big Bear were going to be carrying the rent. But then, that’s a pretty un-hippie thing to be doing, isn’t it? I wonder if Kirby was starting to realize that he’d missed the counterculture boat here and was attempting to get with the times (“the times” being the materialistic 70s). Again, this being the second-last issue, it’s hard to say if this was supposed to represent a new direction for the series or if it was just a pit stop into satire, but I’ll have more to say about this in the final issue.

Anyway, despite the apparent excitement caused by the Forever People getting together to give Deadman a new body (which Beauty describes as “like a big birthday party!” The hell?) Mark, accompanied by the ghostly Deadman, has decided to go upstairs and have a snack, courtesy of Trixie Magruder, their new (temporary?) landlady. This leaves the Follower unguarded, allowing a Scavenger operative to sneak in and steal it (it helpfully starts to follow his every move without any further prompting besides the guy standing near him). Oooookay…I’m not seeing why Deadman isn’t *already* in this body—I mean, it’s nice to wait for everyone and all, but I don’t think Boston really needs the company of a gang of kids he just met last issue before gaining the thing he’s been wanting for so long. Why would he leave it unattended?

Oh, right. Narrative convenience.

Of course, Mother Box quickly sounds the alarm—just a little too late—and Deadman is immediately chastising himself while running down the stairs (couldn’t he just pass through the floor?) but the Scavenger is gone. In fact, with typical Kirbian transition speed, the Follower is already back at the base, and being tested. This is how the Scavengers test it: by setting a beefy guy in boxing trunks to give it a punch. The Follower, of course, reflects his actions and punches him back, knocking the guy out. Wow, the Scavengers use their time wisely.

Toad-face, meanwhile, is haunted by the fact that the Follower looks like Boston Brand—with whom he clearly has some kind of history, wink wink nudge nudge—and has come close to sussing out exactly what the Follower is meant for. Fortunately, just as he makes up his mind to destroy it, Boston shows up, enters the body of the Follower, and violence ensues. Especially once Boston spots the Director’s hook-hand. The FPs show up and join the melee, smashing through a wall of steel-hard glass just in time for Deadman to be hit by a “frost beam” that freezes him solid. “See the look on that face!” Declares the ever-douchely Serifan. “Deadman’s very atoms have been locked to that body, so he can’t leave it!” So maybe you could, I don’t know, HELP HIM, you moron.

Meanwhile, the Director is unleashing another of the Scavengers’ ill-gotten weapons: an army of “Mechan-apes” from a “fully automated robot circus”. Oh, of course, that makes total sense. Not only that something like that would exist, but that an international criminal organization would want to steal it. If the mechan-apes don’t work, no doubt they’ll unleash some of the other terrifying weapons they’ve stolen: a length of string, a shiny button, and a quarter.

Of course, the mechan-apes make for a rousing fight scene. “Whoever built these things should have foreseen their being used with evil intent!” declares Big Bear as he demolishes them. Yes, of course. How could someone build robo-apes and NOT foresee that they might be misused by the hook-handed master of a gang of petty thieves? It’s just common sense, really.

The Director makes his getaway in a classic Blofeld-esque go-cart on a track, but is stopped by Beautiful Dreamer projecting a horrible monster up ahead. He bails out and surrenders, but the FP’s troubles aren’t over; his underling, referred to only as Manager, has stayed behind to unleash more exhibits from the Robot Circus on them, including a knife-throwing machine. Fortunately, Vykin uses his technical savvy to disable it, as Serifan thaws out Deadman. Grabbing hold of a trapeze, the undead avenger swings up to the Manager’s glass viewing box, smashes his way in, and knocks him unconscious.

So there you go—both the Scavenger operation and Deadman’s killer, brought to justice in one fell swoop, right? Well, not really. The Director reveals that his is just one of many Scavenger depots…and each one is headed by a guy with a hook for a hand. D’oh! Sounds like Deadman has his work cut out for him. To that end, Serifan gifts him with the blue cartridge from his hat, which will keep him bound to the body he now occupies, so he can continue in his quest to track down his killer. On that note, the FPs bid him farewell.

I have no idea what happened to Deadman in the immediate aftermath of this story. It seems like the suits weren’t too crazy with Kirby’s reinvention of the character, because every time Deadman’s shown up since—chronologically, the next time I’ve seen him is in Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing in the early 80s—there’s been no talk of robot bodies, blue cartridges or Scavenger depots. It’s not really that surprising to me, either; I mean, Kirby’s new paradigm for Deadman pretty much robs him of his distinctive power—the ability to posess people—and turns him into just a schmuck with a robot body (a super-strong, bulletproof robot body, of course, but still.) Further reinventions were probably inevitable, and it’s probably appropriate that Deadman, the ghostly superhero, is never able to rest in peace, constantly resurrected by fan writers, while never quite returning to life either.

Mister Miracle #9--"Himon!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:45:00 +0000

CONSIDER YOURSELF! AT HOME! CONSIDER YOURSELF! PART OF THE FURNITURE!

When I began this project, I’d read pretty much all of The New Gods and a healthy chunk of Kirby’s Jimmy Olsen. I knew of Mister Miracle from a handful of other sources, and The Forever People were mostly a blank to me. As a result, I started mentally filling in the blanks on both of these two characters before I actually got around to reading up to the end of their respective series. The FPs are and were pretty straightforward (though it’s a bit of a shame that we never get a direct recounting of how they ran off to Earth from New Genesis), but my take on Mister Miracle’s backstory ended up being quite off-base; I’d assumed the guy ran off from Granny’s orphanage, which no doubt resembled a high-tech prison/brainwashing centre, when he was quite young, and spent years kicking around Earth before meeting up with Thaddeus Brown.

This issue proves me quite wrong. I’d already gotten a pretty fair inkling, over the course of the first two omnibi, that Apokolips was quite different from how I’d assumed it to be thanks to the brief glimpse in the first issue of The New Gods. Thanks partly to Kirby’s constant evocation of 1984 and Adolf Hitler, combined with the degree to which the Fourth World inspired George Lucas, I’d been picturing a regimented hellscape of constant military discipline and repressive authority figures, under the unforgiving boot of the ultimate totalitarian, Darkseid. And while this is partly correct—it’s a hellscape alright, and Darkseid loves both his militarism and his authority—Apokolips turned out to be something a lot weirder. As I’ve noted before, there’s a surprising amount of personal liberty of Apokolips, extending even to the military recruits. This makes it far more interesting than a lot of “evil empires” we’ve seen in comics, yet it still enforces Kirby’s ideas of control and freedom in surprising ways. The Apokaliptians are brainwashed in early life, and then turned free more or less to do as they please—as long as what they please is basically in line with Darkseid’s plan. Otherwise, they seem to be free to fight with each other or develop their own “personalities”—most of which seem to be Granny’s mockery of the very idea of individualism rather than a true expression of self-worth.

For now, though, let’s dive into this issue that recounts Mister Miracle’s past, and reveals that the inspiration for Apokalips owes more to Dickens than to Orwell.

We open with a gang of Darkseid’s thugs landing in “Armagetto”, one of the slum-like mining stations on the edge of those blazing, continent-sized fire pits scattered across the face of the planet. A lavish double-page spread (which I’m not going to scan in because it’s too awkward) gives a terrific sense of proportion, showing the Cyclopean architecture towering over the tiny residents, and in turn, the gigantic hellfires blazing away behind them, filling the horizon. Quite an awesome shot here.

This is where the “Lowlies” toil in the service of Darkseid, mining and refining the raw materials to build the weapons and tools Darkseid requires. The goon squad, looking more Lucasian than ever, pours forth at the behest of their superior, “district protector” Wonderful Willik (in classic Kirby fashion, as noted in the last entry, the henchmen are basically interchangeable, but Willik gets a distinctive uniform.)

Willik’s come to track down a known dissident and troublemaker known as Himon, who they believe they’ve managed to trap in this section. The mewling hordes are indoctrinated in the creed of Apokolips—“Die for Darkseid!”—and thus grovel willingly, begging to be able to finish Himon themselves, but Willik’s more of a “Kill everyone and let Darkseid sort ‘em out” kinda guy…and that’s just what he does, ordering his men to take flamthrowers to the mob. As the flames roar up (despite the lack of bodies, this is a pretty brutal scene for a Comics Code approved entertainment!) a single, blurry figure, protected by a forcefield, stands amongst the flames. This is Himon, who, like Mister M. is a technology-powered master of escape, and Willik suspected that he’d be able to survive the flames. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have thought too far ahead, as he now can’t reach Himon without stepping into the fire, and a “dyna-blast” simply ricochets back on him, allowing Himon to make his escape.

Or just barely. Himon nearly teleports into a wall, but is pulled to safety by the young Scott Free, who, we learn, has become his protégé. I should mention at this point that there were a number of little short stories in the back of prior Mr. Miracle issues that detailed Scott’s life in Granny’s orphanage, bucking authority and being contacted by Metron, who basically tended to pop in and taunt Scott, forcing him to question his existence. We now learn, rather abruptly, that this quest eventually led him to Himon, almost in spite of himself. Kirby has a thing for shifting ephiphanies and major decisions offstage at times, and this is one of the big ones.

Still, Scott’s far from convinced by Himon’s ragtag band of orphans, who he’s put to work building and maintaining the gadgets he uses to slip through the fingers of Darkseid’s goons.

Here’s where Kirby’s stated “Oliver Twist” influence comes in, with Himon as a benevolent Fagin amongst the hellish industrial slums. Himon also bears a curious resemblance to Kirby himself, and since Kirby was reportedly very engaged in mentoring the new generation at this point, it’s not hard to see where all this comes from.

Here we get an interesting insight into Mother Boxes. We were told a while back that not just anyone can use one, and that’s confirmed here with one of Himon’s charges, the subtly named Kreetin, who can’t get the Mother Box he just constructed to work, even though “every gadget it needs is in it!” Himon tells him, rather patronizingly, that the Mother Box doesn’t work “because you don’t work! What is there about you that doesn’t work, Kreetin?”

Also among the orphans is Auralie, an escapee from the Female Furie training division, and it’s this that blows their cover. A young Big Barda, wearing a simpler version of her familiar costume, comes bursting in, following a tracker in Auralie’s uniform. To her credit, though, she just wants Auralie back, and in fact doesn’t want her to get in trouble with Granny, which means she’s not going to squeal on Himon. In spite of this, she and Scott can’t help blustering at each other a little, with Barda twisting a metal pipe around his neck, and Scott blasting it to pieces with his sonic disruptors. This sublimated display of affection is interrupted by yet another gang of intruders blasting through the door (yeesh, Himon’s not actually that good at concealing himself, is he? He must move around a lot!) This time it’s a mob, and they want Himon’s head. The orphans fade out en masse, but Himon’s forced to stay behind to help Kreetin, and is captured.

Kreetin is let go by the mob, and immediately scuttles off. Metron immediately shows up. In his noncommittal, passive-aggressive way, he prods Kreetin about his cowardice, but Kreetin is a pure pragmatist, happy to let his mentor be killed if it means he gets away. Metron, despite his implicit contempt, remains noncommittal and doesn’t try to force Kreetin into anything—which isn’t surprising, really, because Metron’s not one to be judging anyone after that crap he pulled with helping Darkseid invade New Genesis. I like to think he’s learned his lesson, and that’s why he doesn’t interfere directly but does try to nudge people in the right direction.

There follows an odd two-page montage of Darkseid’s troops trying over and over again to execute Himon via a ridiculous series of traps, much like Scott regularly puts himself through; and like Scott, Himon escapes, over and over again. Finally, we cut to Himon meeting with Metron on the outskirts of town. Metron greets Himon as “master of theories!!” and Himon declares Metron to be “master of elements!!”—with Metron revealing that Himon basically designed all the technology Metron uses, including the Mother Box, Boom Tube and Mobius Chair. Man, that’s quite the resume. It also seems sort of backward—I would have said Himon is the earthbound master builder, and Metron’s the “idea man” who floats freely about the cosmos, but whatever. The two are apparently conspiring to help Scott escape, despite knowing that this will wreck the truce between New Genesis and Apokolips, but also knowing Scott needs to make the decision himself.

Now it’s suddenly time for the obligatory “traitor turns them all over to the villains” scene, and yes, the traitor in question is Kreetin. He’s executed by Willik for his trouble, and then we abruptly see the various young apprentices of Himon, literally “hung out to dry”, their dead bodies suspended from a “Magna-ring”. We, the audience, see them dead even before Scott and Barda do; Barda’s been summoned to attend the death of Auralie (we glimpse part of her dead body, electrocuted in a massive device, which again seems a little gruesome for this era of comics). Barda is horrified, and obviously this lays the groundwork for her eventual about-face. As for Scott, Willik is apparently leery of putting to death a member of the military hierarchy, despite Scott’s suspicious behaviour of late, and has them dragged off by his waiter. Yes, his waiter. That’s after the guy’s brought in his dinner, of course. Oddly, Scott and Barda go peacefully, and Willik tucks in his napkin to enjoy his meal—

Yes, the next panel is a large explosion.

The waiter was Himon, of course, and he leads them off with a rousing pep talk, revealing the secret of his Mother Boxes: they’re a direct link with The Source. In other words, they’re spiritual computers, and only someone with higher aspirations can use them. Scott, meanwhile, is vaguely remembering his mother, and bursting into tears in Himon’s arms.

An unspecified amount of time later, Scott escapes, having been “stripped of this rank! His mechanisms taken!” Boy, talk about compressed storytelling. Scott dodges Parademons and dog cavalry all the way to the edge of Armagetto, where he’s suddenly saved by Barda and the Furies (who apparently don’t hesitate to commit treason against Darkseid if Barda commands it.) Barda takes out a hovering vehicle with a thrown pile of wreckage. As they pass beyond the borders, Scott and Barda suddenly find their bodes growing heavy due to the area being saturated with “mass-gravity atoms!”. In spite of this, Himon and Metron are waiting for him over the next rise, standing on either side of a Boom Tube, offering him a chance to escape to safety. Not only that, but even Darkseid is there, standing behind Scott, booming, “I’ll not stop him now! If courage and bravery took him here!—Some of it was MINE!” It’s the most overtly stylized and symbolic sequence we’ve seen in this book so far, with Himon, Metron and Darkseid all seemingly taking the form of symbolic figures, chattering in Scott’s head, but taking no action to help or hinder him.

DARKSEID: If he leaves Darkseid, he’ll still find Death!
HIMON: If he leaves Apokolips, he’ll find the universe!!!
SCOTT: Let me be Scott Free—and find MYSELF!

And with that, he’s through the Boom Tube, Darkseid’s war with New Genesis is triggered, and Darkseid gets to do his usual speechifying before we fade out.

Evanier reports that Kirby was starting to realize his books were about to come to a screeching halt as DC prepared to drop the axe, so it’s not surprising this book seems a little rushed; as mentioned, there were a series of little “Young Scott Free” back up features throughout the comic, and I assume that the events of this issue would have been seen in that format had the book been allowed to continue. But the writing was on the wall, and Kirby knew it, so he obviously felt the need to get this info out of the way. It’s too bad that we miss out on a few revelations (like exactly how Metron led Scott to Himon), but it’s still pretty well done, all things considered.

The New Gods #9--"The Bug!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:42:00 +0000

YOU MIGHT EVEN SAY IT...BUGS ME.

Here’s a weird thing I’ve noticed about Kirby: he’s really, really not interested in uniformity, even when it’s thematically appropriate. One the rare occasions when he has a group of characters wearing identical outfits—like the Justifiers or the pointy-headed guys who work for Granny Goodness—they’re just background rabble with no real personalities, almost always under the guidance of a more colourful and distinctive leader. Any other gang is usually going to have a widely variegated look to them—I already commented on the Female Furies, who are all radically different from each other despite all being part of an elite military unit, and in a larger sense, there’s the Apokoliptians in general: they may inhabit a ferocious, Darwinian hellscape under the total control of a monomaniacal egotist, but they sure value individualism! (Which leads to a powerful, if possibly unintended, theme of the saga: just because you’re not forced to dress the same and march in lockstep, doesn’t mean you have any real “freedom”.)

This tendency of Kirby’s is repeated in this issue of The New Gods, as we meet…THE BUG. As random as this character seems in the context of this story, Kirby was clearly laying the seeds for it in prior issues, once again making The New Gods seem like the most carefully planned of the Fourth World comics.

As you may recall, back in issue #7, we were informed that, during the epic war between New Genesis and Apokalips, the latter employed biological weapons against the former. The details were a bit vague, but apparently the result is that the caverns of New Genesis are swarming with sentient, semi-human insects who regularly swarm to the surface to raid New Genesisian supply depots. We see this in action in the opening pages of this issue, as the puny “Forager” leads a troop of bugs to an (unidentified) food source, overwhelm the sentries on the walls, and make off with gigantic sacks full of some kind of nosh. “Remember—everyone must try to make it back to the colony!” declares Forager, somewhat unnecessarily. I mean, I know the Bugs aren't big on thinking for themselves, but was there a big chance that several of them were likely to lay down and die if he hadn’t said that?

Anyway, as the Bugs dash off, the New Genesisian monitors come swarming in with, you guessed it, bug spray. Swooping overhead like crop dusters, the deadly fumes take out a seemingly large proportion of the fleeing bugs. I gotta say, this whole scene makes me a little uncomfortable. I already mentioned that the Apokoliptish folks don’t always act like clichéd bad guys, and in some ways display traits that are usually elevated to heroic status; now we see the New Genesisians acting uncomfortably like villains, attempting to wipe out a whole race of clearly intelligent beings. What’s really off about this is that the Bugs mostly resemble human beings in bug costumes (each one appearing like a different insect species, no less). It’s possible that the colorist accidentally coloured them pink instead of green, but still, these guys talk and think and generally behave like sentient beings, and the Monitors (who are consistently portrayed as a little on the fascist side, again, for such a freedom-loving planet) just wipe them out indiscriminately.

The New Gods, as a comic, only lasted a couple more issues, so it’s hard to say what Kirby had planned, but I can’t help but see this as a glimpse at the future. Was he planning to subvert the audience’s perception of New Genesis as a utopia? Is it possible that the others aren’t aware of the Monitors’ ongoing campaign against the bugs? Were the Monitors (who, incidentally, wear identical costumes) going to be revealed as villains later on? As the “cops” who clash with the young hipsters throughout the series, it’s a role that would certainly fit them.

Anyway, Forager makes a get away by diving into the water, below the fumes, and makes his way back to the mound.

Meanwhile, Orion and Lightray are resting up on the roof of a building from their clash with Kalibak last issue, which in typical fashion, means a lot of speechifying about how the dark night has given way to the dawn. At least from Lightray; Orion, of course, is still a grumbling, bloody mess. “Let the coming light be bright and strong,” pronounces Lightray. “Let it play upon these wounds—let it bring things that wash—the pain—with pleasantries—“ he trails off as a woman in a pink coat walks out onto the balcony. “Go on—you’ve got the floor—“ she says. Lightray, always happy to receive an invitation to pontificate, lights up like a Christmas tree.

The woman, Eve Donner, is a wealthy playwright, who recognizes the two companions from “that top-secret police battle in the city last night!” Uh…if it was top secret, how does she know about—oh, never mind. Anyway, Eve ruminates about monsters as we get our first real glimpse of Orion this issue:

Back on New Genesis, the bugs are tearing into the fruits of their labour. Apparently forager gets the special privilege of being allowed to eat alone, as a reward for his good work, but that doesn’t spare him the Bug’s tendency to fight over food, as a large, tusked bug wanders over and tries to snatch his meal. Forager puts up a good fight, but it is ended by the arrival of “Prime One”. If this was “Starship Troopers”, Prime One would be the Brain Bug—not the leader of the colony (there’s a queen, of course) but the one who does the thinking and strategizing. Prime One has always taken a special interest in Forager, and as he takes him aside into a private chamber, we see why: Forager is a human in a bug suit.

…Which doesn’t make him any different from the rest of the colony as far as I can see, but you get the point. Anyway, Foragers’ alien feelings of compassion and imagination have inspired Prime One to think of forging a truce with the Eternals above. Before this idea can be explored much further, though, the invasion alarm goes off, and Forager is called away to join the Bugs in defending their colony against what’s described as “The armored killer species!” We don’t even get a good look at these things, except that they seem to be gigantic versions of the Bugs.

“But, on Earth, ‘peace’ is the momentary word!” (I thought ‘Grease’ was the word, but OK.) Orion is…no kidding—sunbathing on Eve’s balcony, his hideous face still visible. There follows another of these scenes in which normal Earthlings meet with Orion and Lightray and we get a kooky clash of cultures. While these often seem like space-filler to me, I think I see what Kirby was doing: Orion is slowly building up a crew of followers, like any God, new or old. Eve is particularly significant because she has a whole “beauty and the beast” thing going on, crushing on Orion despite his horrific visage and all that. She starts falling into the New God’s pattern of speechifying, but starts as Orion opens his eyes. “A pity!” he proclaims. “All that flowery crud ripped off—by untimely fright!” Eve reacts with appropriate ire, and Orion, dismissing his sunbathing as “the practice of lizards and idiots”, jumps to his feet and starts shouting, rattling the very rooftops with his anger.

Back to the bugs; the mysterious invaders have been driven off with the help of an old comrade, Mantis. Mantis, of course, showed up in a prior issue of the Forever People, and as a dude in a bug suit, it’s not particularly surprising to learn that he’s related to the bugs, though his exact relationship is a bit foggy. One thing’s clear, though: he’s angling for Prime One’s job, and apparently he’s passed the interview with his defeat of the invaders. The problem for Prime One is that the bugs don’t really have a retirement plan—deposed Prime Ones are killed by the queen (the “All-Widow”) in a ritual sacrifice. Forager, who considers Prime One a father to him and is burdened by those all-too-human feelings of familial affection, can’t help but step in and interfere with the ceremony, rousing the ire of the other Bugs. Prime One accepts his fate coolly, but as he’s being led off he tells Forager that it’s his responsibility to carry out his plan to form an alliance with the New Gods. He knows that Mantis is a tool of Apokolips, and despite his supposed agenda of freedom from the New Genesisians, siding with Darkseid will only end with their being oppressed by a different group. The only hope is to make contact with the “Eternal” on Earth who could use his help and try to forge an alliance with him.

When Forager asks how he’ll make contact with Orion without being squashed, Prime One calmly informs him that he’s one of the Eternals himself, which Forager doesn’t take well. “No! I don’t believe it! I’m a bug! If you’re a bug—then—I AM A BUG!” he screams. Prime, however, steps calmly down into the pit to be killed by the All-Widow. Forager, however, raises a ruckus, and the All-Widow puts out a hit on him, as well.

Back on Earth, the scene is wrapping up rather cryptically as Orion recovers his composure and prepares to leave. Eve, who’s gone from affection to fear at Orion’s temper, now says she feels sorry for him—“You’re big--! But not bigger than what’s eating you! Your enemy, Darkseid, will use it against you!” Orion responds that he will use his wits against Darkseid, and “though I pay for victory with death—I shall seek you out in that final moment!” In response to her consternation, there follows this cryptic exchange:

ORION: At that moment, madam--you’ll have the choice of greeting me with scorn—or a tear!
LIGHTRAY: It would mean our victory, lady! You shall judge Orion! –and none shall do it for you!

As they take off, Eve wishes for Orion to find some kind of peace in the future.

Despite the fact that not much has happened to Orion in this episode, plot-wise, his story here demonstrates that Kirby’s writing was improving dramatically as the series went on, and it’s a great encapsulation both of the characters and the themes of the comic.

I’ll have more to say on this in a moment, but first we have to wrap up the story: Orion finally returns to Dave Lincoln’s apartment, only to find the police waiting to arrest him for massive property destruction. Yeah, you’d think. Meanwhile, Forager makes a desperate escape from the colony, now bent on killing him. As Matis opens a Boom Tube to Earth, Forager leaps through, yelling defiance, and makes his escape to Metropolis. To be continued.

It’s issues like this that make me so frustrated that Kirby was unable to finish this story properly. Sure, he was often sloppy and haphazard in his plotting, relying heavily on deus ex machinas and awkward plot spackling or exposition, and he’s constantly described as a guy who made stuff up as he went along. But it seems pretty clear to me that he *did* have a plan in mind for The New Gods, and scenes like the one with Eve Donner drive that home. Clearly, the big finale was being forshadowed here—besides being a fairly poignant “what might have been” moment, where Orion rejects the possibility of happiness in order to complete his mission, there’s some intriguing thematic stuff being set up. How was Darkseid planning to exploit Orion’s psychology? How was Eve going to redeem him and save the day by “judging” Orion? Tragically, we’ll never find out the answers to these questions.

The Forever People #9--"The Monster in the Morgue!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:56:00 +0000

"I-I'M BACK! DEADMAN'S WORK IS NOT FINISHED!!"

One of the more common traits among comic book writers these days is their willingness to go back and resuscitate older properties by reimagining them in new forms. This tendency is probably most closely affiliated with Alan Moore, who turned Swamp Thing into a truly memorable character, and Frank Miller, with his distinctive take on Daredevil and Batman. The modern standard bearer for this is Grant Morrison, who’s been busily reinventing the DC Universe for years now. But as with so many things, Kirby did it first.

We’ve already seen his attempt to put a new spin on Jimmy Olsen, and, by extension, Superman, but his ideas were too bold for DC’s flagship character, and the result was the cancellation of the title. But someone must have liked Kirby’s take on Supes, because almost immediately after the Superman experiment failed, Kirby was handed the reins to another, less pivotal character. The logic, clearly, was that Kirby’s bizarre touch would be more useful applied to a character that didn’t find an audience the first time around, as opposed to a character that had been beloved in his current form for decades. The only problem is, Superman, as an icon, invites reinvention, as we’ve seen in decades since. A more recent, obscure character is less likely to be adaptable, unless the concept truly didn’t work—and the character they chose was Deadman, who, simply put, did work.

As you may know, Deadman was created in the late 60s by Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino, though he’s usually associated with rising star Neal Adams, who took over the art after a few issues. Deadman was a circus performer who was mysteriously murdered in the first issue, but became compelled to walk the Earth in spectral form in order to find his murderer. His power was that he could possess the bodies of anyone nearby, using them to accomplish his goals. The gritty premise, combined with Adams’ famously realistic artwork, did a lot to issue in the Bronze Age style of comics, and secured a cult following, but the comic was cancelled due to low sales after a year or two. Still, DC knew they had something worthwhile on their hands, hence their handing him over to Kirby.

It probably seemed like a good idea on paper, and it might have worked with another character, but Deadman and the King just weren’t suited to each other. For one thing, Kirby had repeatedly indicated that he wasn’t as happy working with other’s characters, and had deliberately attempted to keep the Fourth World free of other DC Universe trappings—which must have made it frustrating that it so rarely worked out that way. For another, Kirby honestly didn’t seem to like the character—Mark Evanier quotes him as saying, “How can you have a superhero with no body?” but, as is becoming clear the more I read about him, Kirby never said “no” to a challenge—and thus it was that Deadman ended up in a two-issue story in The Forever People.

I’ve sometimes wondered if I’m reading too much into what seem like metafictional winks throughout this series, but given the above context, it’s pretty obvious Kirby was extrapolating from the situation into the comic when he opens with a pseudo-Frankenstein mad scientist trying to raise a patchwork creature from the dead. The scientist, “Doc” Gideon, is even referred to as an “obscure dreamer”, much like Kirby himself…and the fact that his experiment fails doesn’t speak well of Kirby’s own mindset at the time.

But in fact, the Doc’s crackling electrodes have had an effect: they’ve recalled Deadman from beyond the grave (and cancellation). As I understand it, his comic had ended with his finding the man who killed him (a man with a hook hand, in a nod to “The Fugitive”) and being allowed to merge with the infinite. But now he once again walks the Earth; can science really undo the will of mystic destiny?

Meanwhile, the Forever People have just been walking down the street, minding their own business, when they’re thrust into another exciting adventure! Boy, trouble follows these kids around like cat hair on a tuxedo! Does that metaphor make any sense? Of course not! Moving on!

It’s the classic “old lady being mugged” bit, of course, and there’s not really a lot of suspense involved in wondering if a couple of goons with guns can overcome five superpowered hippies, one of whom has a “Megaton Touch”, another of whom can left a Mack Truck, and a third of whom has a hatband full of little thingies that can do pretty much whatever the plot requires at that moment. Needless to say, when the cops, rather lamely, show up on the scene, Big Bear has the thugs, and their car, well in hand. The old lady, one Trixie Magruder, argues their case for the cops, who realize that the FPs have put paid to a rash of burglaries in the neighbourhood.

Doc Gideon happens to be passing by, and as it turns out, Mrs. MacGruder is his landlady, but being a jerk, Gideon does anything possible to avoid having to get involved, sneaking up the rear stairs. Unbeknownst to him, though, he is being followed by the incorporeal Deadman. On entering his apartment, Gideon hits the books, and we learn that his experiments have incorporated research into the mysticism of Rama Kushna, the deity that guides Deadman’s fate. Man, science has gotten, like, so uptight these days. Scientists get hot under the collar at the mere mention of intelligent design or holistic healing, let alone dabbling in the dark forces man was never meant to know! How much we’ve lost since the seventies. All I can say is, when some Cthulhu cultist discovers a cure for cancer, they’ll be sorry, that’s for sure.

Gideon’s intense flipping through the book, sardonically observed by Deadman, is interrupted by “all that cackling and gabble” coming from Trixie’s room, where she and Beautiful Dreamer are having a midday slumber party. It seems that after 9 issues, someone finally got the nerve to tell Beauty that the tattered slave-girl rag she’s been sporting doesn’t really do her any favours, aesthetically. You’ve got to commend Beauty for her pure-minded rejection of sartorial vanity, and hey, I sure didn’t have a problem with her gadding around in what looked like a slightly overlarge napkin, but that thing probably was getting a bit stinky by now, so it’s probably a good thing that Trixie gives her one of her old dresses to wear:

And then, almost instantly, Serifan barges in, takes one look at this fairly nice dress, and decides to meddle by shifting it into a new form:

God, Serifan is a DOUCHEBAG. And what’s wrong with Beauty, anyway? She’s passive even for a Kirby heroine! This little clothes-swap is more than she’s done in any preceding issue, and it’s basically consisted of two people forcing her to wear clothing she didn’t really have any interest in, but has just passively accepted them.

The fact that this dress suddenly seems to have amplified her physique to va-va-voom levels, and that her proportions will continue to slowly grow to absurd levels over the course of this and the next issue, is small consolation. Seriously, you’d think a hippie chick like this would be all, I am woman, hear me roar, you know? Instead she’s got less personality than Mother Box.

At any rate, Beauty immediately blends into the background again so that Serifan can brag about his cosmic cartridges, showing off yet another ability we’ve never seen before—the ability to bring a semblance of life to inanimate objects. And who just happens to be looking on as he does this? Yep, “Doc” Gideon, who immediately sees the value this power could have in his reanimation experiments. Well how conveeeeeeeenient.

For some reason, Kirby immediately recaps the previous page, with Trixie and the FPs reiterating how awesome Beauty looks now (Beauty herself, of course, just hangs her head and stays quiet.) Despite this disrespect displayed to her property, Trixie thinks the FPs are a hoot and invites them to stay in her apartments without paying rent.

Doc Gideon breaks up the love-fest by introducing himself and reminding Trixie that he was invited to “one of your exciting séances tonight.” He reiterates to the FPs that Trixie is “a fine medium”. Without further delay, Trixie changes into a fortune teller’s costume and the gang gathers around the table with the usual trappings—crystal ball, brazier fill of smoking stuff, etc. It’s made almost immediately clear that Trixie’s a fake, so when strange lights start flickering around the table, she's more terrified than the others. (According to Big Bear, it’s courtesy Beautiful Dreamer’s illusion power, but she looks as blank-faced as ever while this is happening) While everyone is thus distracted, Gideon manages to snatch the “animating” capsule from Serifan’s discarded hat (by the way, is a hat really the best place to keep these objects of unimaginable power?)

Suddenly, by the will of the spirits and the power of coincidence, Trixie has a flashback to her days as a circus fortune teller, and a young acrobat named Boston Brand…who, surprise surprise, happens to be floating around in disembodied form at this very moment, now going by the name Deadman. Called forth by Trixie, he demands to know why he once again has been called forth to walk the land of the living. Trixie, terrified, blurts out that the man he thought he killed wasn’t his killer at all—the hook was on the wrong hand. D’oh!

Overwhelmed by stress, Trixie passes out, and the FPs are sufficiently distracted not to notice the absence of both “Doc” and the relevant cartridge for a few crucial moments…but eventually Serifan clues in. “I—I think we’ve been pre-occupied with the wrong incident!!”

Sure enough, Doc is already back at the morgue—man, that place must be right across the street—and taping the cartridge to the head of his monster, which almost immediately springs to life (no Frankensteinian finger-twitching here!) After a panel’s worth of triumphant crowing, the Doc suddenly realizes that he’s called into existence a huge, unruly creature who’s disoriented and pissed off, and that he has no discernable way of controlling it. Gee, there’s this book called Frankenstein, Doc. It details pretty specifically the potential pitfalls of tampering in God’s domain. You might want to check it out.

Naturally, a classic rampage follows:

…and quickly spills out onto the street. The Forever People (but not Beautiful Dreamer—seriously, this is some hardcore sexism right here) quickly home in on the beast, or rather, his cartridge, via Mother Box, and end up doing battle with him in front of a theatre showing, you guessed it, Frankenstein movies. That’s just a little too cutesy for me.

Turns out, because the creature is powered by Serifan’s cosmic cartridge, it absorbs the various rays and energy bolts that the FP throw at him—Vykin’s “Repelli-force”, Mark’s Megaton Touch—and send it back. Mark notices a small lump beneath the monster’s bandages, but is thrown away before he can snatch it. Serifan catches him with an anti-grav ray, but while that’s happening, the monster somehow manages to slip away. Vykin, with a sarcastic “Don’t bother helping me!” is able to de-magnetize himself (he was stuck to the wall by his own “magna-force”)…and then Big Bear wanders up, indicating that he almost snuck out of the superhero melee to go catch a movie.

Big Bear is AWES—wait, that’s actually kind of dickish. But he’s still awesome.

So who will stop the creature’s mindless rampage? “Doc” Gideon sure isn’t—he was rendered insensate by the creature and is being hauled away by the police. Meanwhile, the creature has made his way into the sewers, where he’s wreaking havoc on the main gas pipeline. Deadman, however, is on the job, and he’s decided to step in…literally. However, his attempt to possess the monster is blocked by the inverse energy from the cartridge, or some such gibberish. Deadman fights through the pain as the gas mains begin to explode left and right, but just as the citizens are gearing up for their Godzilla movie act as the flames pour out onto main street, the explosions suddenly stop.

The Forever People eventually show up to assess the damage, and Serifan makes up slightly for his recent jerkishness by capping the gas line. Shuffling through the rubble, the Forev Peeps dig up the monster’s body, apparently unsalvageable…but talking. Deadman is, of course, using the thing’s barely-used vocal cords to explain his plight to the FPs. The issue ends with Serifan pulling yet another Deus Ex Machina out of his hat to give Deadman a body by “compact[ing] the few atoms that still cling to you!” and allowing them to meet face to face for a while. The FPs shake his hand and pledge to help him find his killer. For at least one issue longer.

All things considered, this wasn’t too bad. If Deadman had to be injected into the Fourth World Saga, the Forever People was probably the best place for him, since, with the departure of Jimmy Olsen, that was the “random encounter” book without a tight plotline; by their nature, the FPs are able to meet and thus incorporate all kinds of characters into their storyline.

At any rate, this “free atoms” thing is only a temporary fix, so we’ll have to wait until next issue to learn what Kirby had in mind by way of giving the character a real body…and rest assured, it’s a doozy.

Mister Miracle #8--"The Battle Of The Id!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:43:00 +0000

HE'S LUMP! HE'S LUMP! HE'S IN MY HEAD!

I’ve already talked a bit about the subtext of the Fourth World, but it’s a little funny how inconsistent it is. Sometimes the saga is as superficial and broad as any other comic of the time; more often than not, though, the sheer power of Kirby’s stream-of-consciousness storytelling creates something resonant and fascinating. And I don’t mean to say that all the interesting stuff in the Fourth World is there by accident, either; it just seems like a lot of it comes straight from Kirby’s subconscious, without a lot of filtering. Kirby was uniquely capable of channeling his imagination directly onto the page, without necessarily trying to force an authorial interpretation; that’s one of his greatest strengths.

Still, it’s clear that sometimes he did have a specific idea for what he was trying to say, beyond a simple allegory (and he almost never slipped into straight sermonizing). Those are the times when the Fourth World is at its most fascinating, and this issue is one of those times.

The issue opens with Barda making her way back to the Female Fury barracks, leaving a trail of beat-up henchmen in her wake. “You ‘kill-crazy’ she-wolf!” Grunts one. “You’ll pay for this!” First of all, on Apokolips, isn’t being called “Kill-crazy” kind of a compliment? And secondly, she hasn’t really killed anyone. Maybe that’s what “Kill-crazy” means here. “You’re so crazy, you won’t kill!”

Perhaps I’m overthinking this.

The next pages are one of the very best two-page spreads in the entire saga—the interior of the Female Fury barracks, where the Furies are fighting (still?) over who gets to be the new leader now that Barda’s gone. Kirby seems to have blown through a whole bunch of designs here, all of them pretty great, in that distinctly Kirby “too-much-is-not-enough” way. I especially like the pirate chick:

But the girl with the two-foot-long steel finger, the green ersatz Catwoman, and the girl with mind-bogglingly enormous wing-flaps are all pretty cool too. It’s like a van full of hippies, a bunch of S & M enthusiasts, and a group of mythological Valkyries all collided and got their costumes mixed up.

Anyway, Barda shows up and reasserts herself: “I’m still in command! Make no mistake about that!!!” she announces, tossing several random Furies around. Wait, so she defected for several months so she could consort with Apokolips’ Public Enemy #2, and she’s still in command?!? Apokolips has a more flexible approach to military discipline than I would have thought. But then, given that they still haven’t chosen a new leader in all that time, maybe it just comes down to whoever can beat everyone up.

There’s some more extremely nice art—Kirby was on a roll—as we see the captured Mr. M crossing a bridge over a steaming, noisome pit somewhere deep within the fabled Section Zero. Turns out the pit is full of malformed, pathetic creatures (“whinning [sic] freaks” as the guard calls them) who are apparently there as punishment. What’s odd is that they’re never actually explained, but the implication is that these are what’s left of those who failed the challenge that Scott’s about to face.

The instant he enters the room, Scott’s knocked out by a tranq gun (so…Mr. World’s Greatest Escape Artist couldn’t get away from a couple of guys with sticks?) and some creepy ninja technicians prepare him for “‘psycho-merge!’--the ‘mind hook-up!’” “—with the Lump!” “Yeah! The Lump just loves intruders—in his world!” (That was sarcasm.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is all being done for the sake of Granny Goodness’s amusement. Scott and The Lump will battle to the death—but not in any conventional arena:

Granny enters with her typical bravado, and along with her come two familiar faces: her pupil Virman Vundabar, and the ever-ambiguous Kanto. “I was dropped into a deep pit!!” says Virman, clicking his heels as he bows to Granny. “But Virman Vundabar, with the proper tools, was out of there in record time, Granny!” Um…is that supposed to impress us? The fact that he climbed out of a pit? Someone’s pretty desperate to curry favour with the boss. Kanto, meanwhile, elides Granny’s questioning by claiming that, when he had Scott within his sights, he “merely chose not to succeed” because he knew Scott was on his way to this arena. “Bully for you!” sneers Granny Goodness, clearly as unconvinced as the rest of us are. “Get this show on the road!!”

But before that can happen, there’s one more audience member to arrive—who the guards describe as a person of high rank, but who “bears the status of ‘non-being!’” “This can be none other than the infamous ‘mystery prisoner’ of Section Zero!” thinks Virman. Who do you think it is? Go on, guess.

Yep, it’s Tigra, who, as you may recall, happens to be Darkseid’s wife. I’m not quite sure what the deal is—are they divorced? Because I’m not really sure why Darkseid didn’t just do away with her, if he found her so embarrassing. Could it be that ol’ Stoney Lonesome actually bears a spark of human feeling for her?

Oh yeah, and that son of hers, of course, is Orion, who she’s never met and has no idea who his real parents are. But Tigra seems to know that fate will drive them together eventually. It always does, doesn’t it?

But now it’s time to start the show. Mister Miracle awakens in a vast plain inside the mind of The Lump, observed by Granny and her compeers. A panel later, he’s knocked out by a familiar pink arm. “You’re the Lump!!” observes a quick-on-the-uptake Scott. “B-but not like you were on that table!” You know, I hate to nitpick, but technically Scott didn’t see him on the table…

The long and the short of it is, The Lump occupies a mental realm of his own devising—apparently on a permanent basis, which isn’t surprising, considering that he’s basically a useless wad of flesh in the real world. Whereas here, he’s a useful wad of flesh. “Life without form”, he calls himself. He can shift both his own shape and the landscape around him, though curiously he never alters his own self-image to something more pleasing to the eye. He can, however, transform his physique into pure muscle, grow or shrink, spout spines, breathe fire, or change—

Um, yes. Anyway, the point is that The Lump hates company, and he controls the mental realm in which Scott finds himself, so he’s seriously outmatched. Scott attempts to make peace and calm down the raging sac of pink goo, but the Lump is on a serious ego trip, and he’s not big on conversation.

The battle rages for a while, and it’s a corker—Kirby embraces the possibility of a shape-shifting warrior to its fullest. But Scott, of course, is an escape artist, so you know it’s only a matter of time before he finds a way out.

Meanwhile, Barda’s been busy, apparently having won over the trust of the Female Fury Brigade once more. I guess that whole business of Stompa, Lashina, Mad Harriet and Burnadeth trying to kill her a few issues ago is all in the past, huh? Anyway, the sexy Gilotina manages to do the old “seduce the guard” trick (made more plausible by the fact that these two know each other, and he’s been hitting on her for weeks) and renders him unconscious, allowing a flood of Furies to swarm into Section Zero and overpower the operators.

Back in The Battle in the Id, Scott is faring poorly against The Lump, but once he’s at the thing’s mercy, being crushed in his rubbery grip, he at least manages to get him to listen. As Scott points out, killing him just means that more intruders will enter the Lump’s realm, again and again, and the Lump will just have to keep killing them, forever, at the whim of Granny and her servants.

But the Lump keeps up his death grip, and just as things look bleak, the Furies burst in. Tigra, who had been watching the battle with contempt, takes up the cause with glee and blows away the guards. Kanto, as ever, remains neutral, but Granny can’t resist cackling that Scott is dead, and that Barda is a traitor. This really sets her off, as she gets ready to crush Granny: “Why, I’m the purest, most superior product you ever turned out!” Again, we have this weird case of divided loyalties on Barda’s part—she seems to think she’s still being loyal to Darkseid in some weird way, and that it’s OK to whomp on Granny and her minions because they’ve strayed from true loyalty. Since, as we’ve seen, the code of Apokolips seems to allow for some pretty vicious infighting, I guess she may have a point. Nevertheless, Barda seems willing even to defy Darkseid to get Scott back, and is on the verge of crushing the life out of Granny in a berserker rage, when Scott himself pops up.

Yep, it’s another “See, I escaped! Now let me tell you how!” denouement. But in this case, it was pretty reasonably set up; Scott managed to close his case to the Lump by breaking off a piece of glass, which had been fused out of the ground by the Lump’s fire-breathing, and using it to show him his reflection. Getting a glimpse of himself sent the Lump screaming in terror, deep into the recesses of his mind, and Scott was able to escape. Scott demonstrates by holding up the piece of glass he used…in the mental landscape…which he’s now somehow holding in the real world. Oops.

I make fun of these books a lot here at Fourth World Fridays, mostly due to the awkward dialogue and sometimes erratic plotting. But when you really start to look for them, it becomes obvious just how many ideas Kirby packed into this series, and you start to get a little staggered by his genius. If he’d only been a little better at consistently conveying those ideas, the Fourth World might easily stand as the greatest comic book series, like, ever. This issue is one of his best, with a lot of meat to chew on. What is the Lump, exactly? Is he a personification of Kirby’s own fears? Every artist risks withdrawing too deeply into his own imagination and thus, losing the ability to relate to others or face the outside world, a process that is portrayed pretty concisely here. The Lump really is Scott’s opposite number, but whereas Scott uses his talents to set himself and others free, the Lump withdraws into extreme solipsism and becomes a tool of the forces of evil.

Heady stuff. Kirby was really hitting his stride here; it’s too bad that the very next issue we’ll be looking at saw the beginning of corporate interference in this book, and the slow decline of the saga as a whole…

Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #148--"Monarch of All He Subdues!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:38:00 +0000

YOU KNOW WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE WITH A FLYING SAUCER? LEFT THE DAMN VOLCANO SOONER.

You know, referring to a villain as “Monarch Of All He Subdues” sounds impressive until you think about it. Of course you can be monarch of stuff if you subdue it. But what if you can’t subdue anything?

Speaking of which, Superman being defeated by a cage? Lame. Almost as lame as expecting us to believe that Superman is going to face a challenge in the form of stone walls that crunched together, as he did last issue. Gee, do you think the monumentally powerful Man of Steel is going to escape?

Sure enough, he busts loose and frees Jimmy and the Newsboys within moments. No sooner has that happened than Victor Volcanum appears on the classic viewscreen to harangue the group. No supervillain’s lair is complete without one!

Volcanum is gearing up for his single-handed conquest of Earth, alluded to last issue, by changing into some Napoleonic military duds and filling them all in on his backstory. It seems he was a daring scientist and balloonist a hundred and ten years ago and crashed in this volcano while attempting an Atlantic crossing. Trapped in a burning underworld with nothing to eat, Volcanum used his scientific knowledge to extract nourishment from the volcano in the form of that flaming liquid he drinks. Hey, it’s the world’s first energy drink! And it works really well, having made him immortal, plus causing him to grow several feet over the last century.

But wait—when Jimmy and Co. first awoke last issue, Volcanum was offering them dinner. If he hasn’t left the volcano since the 19th century, where did he get that food from?

My gosh! I’ve found the tiny plot hole in this otherwise immaculately logical and plausible scenario!

Anyway, Dr. Volcanum also figured out how to build an army of robot slaves, because why the hell not? And since then he’s lived in luxury, growing slowly more isolated and paranoid, until Jimmy happened to drop in on the very day he had planned to emerge to conquer the world. Good timing, that.

On that note, Volcanum signs off and sends his robots to crush the lot of them, and again, I’m having a hard time seeing how these guys present a huge difficulty to Superman, a guy who can pretty much bench-press an asteroid. Sure enough, they go down even more easily than expected, due partly to their rather moronic decision to line up neatly s that Superman can bean them all with a single rock:

Continuing down the passageway, they face a gigantic, flaming gout of lava which presents a more believable challenge for Superman, who’s forced to rapidly gouge a fissure in the rock to divert the flow of lava. Nonetheless, it comes WAY too close to the Legion. (As movie, comic book, and video game makers don’t seem to understand, lava is melted rock, which means it’s very, very hot. Like, so hot that even standing near it would produce enough heat to fry the skin off your face. If you can see a lava flow, and you’re not in a helicopter, you’re standing way too close.)

While Superman is distracted, Jimmy and the gang encounter an unusually chatty robot, Boxxa, who feels the need to explain that he was programmed for “bouts” to amuse his master, but is currently on guard duty, before attacking. Jimmy, despite being way outmatched, puts up a heroic, desperate fight, which loses something due to the fact that he’s still wearing the dorky green robe Volcanum dressed him in, which looks more than a little like a dress. (I guess a man gets very, very lonely after spending a hundred years in a remote volcano.)

Jimmy luckily manages to put down the mechanical pugilist, by finding the button to deactivate him—which is, natch, located right on the front of his collarbone just below the neck. In other words, in about the most vulnerable spot. Good job, Dr. Volcanum.

Possibly because all these laughable threats are making them cocky, Superman and friends proceed into a tunnel, in which they’re hit by a “brain blocker” that renders them unconscious. Dr. Volcanum then packs up his flying gondola with enough fire-water to keep him going for a while, and abandons his home to greener pastures.

A mere two pages later, Jimmy has jerked himself awake to find himself in Dr. Volcanum’s inner sanctum, where Superman is already awake and tinkering with things. We see that the Doctor has yet another villainous staple ready to hand—the miniaturized model city, with accompanying model of his devastating doom weapon, which he can use to enact the destruction that he’s never going to be able to cause in real life. Sure enough, it turns out the little model gondola has a functioning hyper-sonic projector (!) that reduces the city to rubble, helpfully cluing Superman and Jimmy in on his evil plan. (So…that model was built to be used once and then self-destruct, and Dr. Volcanum never actually bothered to use it?)

Rounding the corner, Superman and Jimmy are reunited with the Newsboys, the Whiz Wagon, and Angry Charlie, who appears here in his final panel, ignominiously strapped to the Wagon’s hull once more. The whole group takes off and escapes seconds ahead of a vast explosion—not eruption, explosion—that destroys the entire volcanic island.

As the Doc approaches Metropolis, he’s engaged in a dogfight by Jimmy and the Whiz Wagon gang. Despite the fact that his “hyper-spinner” weapon is located on the bottom of his gondola, is not articulated, and seems like it would be a real bitch to aim at a moving target, V.V. somehow manages to get the drop on the Wagon and nearly get shaken to pieces until Superman saves them. Continuing with the whole recurring theme of “threats that Superman is able to deal with ridiculously quickly by virtue of the fact that he’s Superman”, this is accomplished in two panels by Supes smashing his way onto the bridge and ripping out the weaponry circuits. Superman then makes his plea to the Doc:

Wow, along with everything else, Dr. Volanum invented Objectivism back in the 1800s? No wonder he went evil.

Realizing that he’s only got a page left in the issue in which to indulge his fetish for destroying his own equipment, Volcanum hits the self-destruct button. We get the obligatory sanctimoniousness from the hero (“And so ends Volcanum’s madness!”) before the issue wraps up abruptly with the whole gang literally flying off into the sunset, and back to Metropolis:’

And…that’s it. Yep, that was the final issue of Jimmy Olsen, not just for Kirby, but for all time, as DC, feeling the beginnings of the downturn that hit comics in general and their company in particular during the 70s, cancelled the book. Unless I’m greatly mistaken, they’ve never resurrected it, either. Jimmy Olsen is one of those concepts that belongs unqualifiedly to the Silver Age, which was just ending at the very moment Kirby was producing this comic. Could Kirby’s touch have brought Jimmy Olsen into the modern era, had he been given the leeway he needed? It’s hard to say, but he gave it a good shot anyway.

The New Gods #8--"The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Sat, 03 May 2008 04:59:00 +0000

AND BY 'TERRIBLE', HE MEANS 'TOTALLY AWESOME'.

Can you remember aaaaaaaall the way back to New Gods Issue #5? That was the one where Orion uncovered Intergang’s jamming device and embarked on a three-issue odyssey out to sea, ending with the cacophonous conclusion aboard The Glory Boat. But also in that issue, Kirby laid down the seeds for another storyline, one that comes to fruition now, three whole issues later. While Orion was doing battle with the Leviathan of the deep, none other than Kalibak the Cruel, his old enemy from way back in the first issue, has come to Earth in order to…well, mostly to smash stuff. Actually, he’s pretty much another blunt instrument in Darkseid’s “dominate and subjugate” operation. Darkseid likes to keep a lot of really powerful dudes around without too much in the way of brains. Wouldn’t you?

Kalibak has come tracking down the Earthlings who Orion rescued from him, and he’s found them in the persona of Dave Lincoln, P.I., and Claudia Shane, Simple But Worried Secretary. Who’s pretty much right to worry at this particular moment, as a gigantic neanderthaline gentleman comes smashing into their apartment, bullets bouncing off him. “Orion once snatched you from my grasp!” he bellows. “Now I’ll use you as bait--to destroy him!!” “You’ll need our consent to do that, Kalibak!” Replies Dave. “And you’ll have to get it from my gun!” As tough-guy lines go, that one lacks a certain something. Let me see if I can do better:

“You’ll need a permission slip for that, Kalibak! A permission slip…of justice!”

Or:

“You’ll need a signed affidavit for that, Kalibak! And I happen to have two notaries willing to make it legally binding right here--my fists!!!”

OK, maybe not.

“I sure hope this gun can bring him down!” yells Lincoln, continuing to fire at Kalibak, who of course keels over dead immediately. No, of course he doesn’t. Bullets working? In a Kirby comic? Fuggedaboudit. Dave then throws his gun at Kalibak, because that’s likely to bring him down after unloading his gun at him point blank didn’t. (Hey, I’d probably do the same thing in his situation. That doesn’t make it any less stupid.)

And cut to the police station. The issue I linked to above, you may recall, also introduced the titular Terrible Turpin, the gentleman who compared his headgear to an alien spaceship via the world’s most tortured analogy, and who, at the time, seemed to be fulfilling the standard role of “grizzled chief who yells at the hotshot detective”. However, as we’ll see in this issue, there’s a lot more to his character.

At the moment, he’s being dressed down by his superior, the commissioner, apparently for caring too much. It seems that commissioner Kiernan, who Turpin trained from a rookie, is concerned about his old mentor’s determination to confront the godlike beings who are leveling Metropolis with their struggle. As cops burst in to inform them of the Kalibak situation, Turpin leaves with them, with the chief’s threat to bust him down to crossing guard following behind him. Yes, this issue is totally a 70s cop movie.

Meanwhile, Lightray and Orion, fresh from their explosive confrontation with the gigantic pink penis-whale known as SPAWN, have touched down on a rooftop, where they “humourously” go unnoticed by a pair of canoodling lovebirds. “And so it is with the romantic young, Lightray!” Pronounces Orion dourly. “Part fantasy, part truth—all comedy!!” “Not to them, Orion!” responds Lightray. “It’s reality to them!”

There’s a pointless digression, first as Lightray marvels over the elevator (“what a fantastic curio!”) and then they encounter a swingin’ 60s chick who invites them to a costume party. Orion, naturally, declines—“and that means ’no,’ female! Frivolity is far from my thoughts!!” All this takes two pages. Take your time, guys. It’s not like a homicidal, monstrously powerful caveman is tearing the city apart.

At least Turpin is doing something, racing to the scene of Kalibak’s rampage. Actually, he’s probably overcompensating a little: “King Kong on a rooftop is no more dangerous than a nervous punk with a pistol!! The idea is to give as good as you get!!” Seems dodgy to me, but then, the story’s not called The Measured Response of Reasonable Turpin.

The cops have put up their standard barricades and called in the SWAT team, which apparently draws Kalibak’s attention for just a moment:

He then throws a power-blast from his laser-shooting club that trashes a bunch of cop cars and hardens Turpin’s resolve.

Meanwhile, Orion and Lightray are crashing Victor Lanza’s pad and lounging about while his wife offers them fruit. Can you handle the pulse-pounding excitement?!?

But don’t worry. This *is* a Kirby comic. The little woman turns on the TV, and Orion is finally galvanized into action by a glimpse of the chaos unfolding on the screen. In fact, he’s so galvanized that he picks up the TV, over Lightray’s exhortations to be careful with that “authentic electronic period piece”. Jeezly crow, Kirby, we get it. Our most sophisticated, 1970s-era technology is like a bunch of toys to these futuristic visitors. We should look upon their works and despair. Yadda yadda yadda.

Turpin is holding the fort with bulldog-like tenacity, demanding, amusingly, that the invulnerable super-being from beyond space surrender himself for questioning. And when Kalibak replies with a threat, Turpin responds by, well—

And then Kalibak throws a chimney at him.

But Turpin just will not stop. Even as he lies battered and bleeding in a pile of bricks, he’s tossing concussion grenades at Kalibak, which is a sufficiently surprising move to knock Kal off the roof. But only for a moment. As police start to swarm up onto the building, Kal pops back up with another force blast, picks up Turpin, and prepares to dash him to the concrete ten stories below. He’s saved only by Orion’s timely arrival.

Seriously, Turpin’s attack sequence is so awesome that once Orion arrives and we start getting a true superpowered smackdown between these two mortal enemies, one we’ve basically been expecting from the first issue, it feels like a step down. At least for a moment as Kalibak puts Orion down with his club and turns on Lightray. L.R. employs his “solar thermo-beams” to try and melt Kal’s club, but to no avail—Lightray’s about to have his head crushed when Orion pops back up again, wrestles the club out of his hands, and—

The two start exchanging blows, raving about who’s the better fighter, and how they’ve been drawn to trade blows over and over again for some mysterious reason. Of course, Orion being Darkseid’s son and all, he and Kalibak are brothers, so their unawareness of this fact lends a certain poignancy to their struggle.

Back at the ground level, Turpin, clothes in tatters, his face an unrecognizable mass of bruises, is still trying to struggle to his feet, and when Lightray offers him help, he threatens to book him, too. “No super ‘muk-muks’ are gonna use this town—as—a—fight arena!!” he chokes, while waving the cops to bring in his secret weapon: a gigantic electronic device that will employ all the power generated by the entire city to shock Kalibak into submission. Seriously, can this series just be about Turpin from now on?

Both Kalibak and Orion are looking the worse for wear as their epic fistfight takes them to the top of a neon sign. Kalibak levels a mule-like kick to Orion’s face, then retreats to the top of the sign, taunting Orion to climb up and meet him—but he’s taken aback to be met by this:

Just as it seems the battle is going to be decided once and for all, Lightray swoops in and snatches Orion away from the sign, just as Turpin employs his superpowered zapper to take down Kalibak. In a very nicely rendered couple of panels, Kal plummets to the ground, where Turpin, supported by two cops, chokes out a little soliloquy (basically, “This is our town! One super-muk-muk down…eight zillion to go!”) before collapsing. The art makes it seem like he’s dead, though the dialogue hastily assures us that he’s still alive. (A concession to the comics code? Or just Kirby not finding it in himself to kill off a character he clearly had a lot of affection for?)

Dave and Claudia arrive on the scene, having conveniently managed not to do anything to help, and to have been well out of the line of fire for some reason. There’s a brief epilogue where Lightray awkwardly tries to change the subject away from Orion’s sudden attack of the Uglies, but Orion, straightforward as ever, won’t let it drop. Finally, Lightray responds that “I saw scars--both new and old—taken in the cause of New Genesis!” and Orion, in a rare moment of emotion, calls him a good friend before putting his helmet back on.

Seriously, this whole issue is pretty awesome, and the whole theme of a comparatively powerless, but unrelenting and borderline insane policeman trying to bring a super-being to justice is really well handled. It’s got a great, human element to it that this series sometimes lacked, and for once the Orion-Lightray relationship actually seems human…in fact, that final scene is all the more effective because they briefly drop their florid, convoluted manner of speech. It’s no wonder Kirby listed this issue as one of his favourites.

The Forever People #8--"The Power!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 05:24:00 +0000

FIGHT THE POWER!

As I mentioned in another entry, I really like that the unifying theme of the Forever People is that they’re basically on the world’s weirdest road trip. This month’s destination is a ghost town, though as is fairly typical for Kirby, there’s a lot of other elements thrown in…probably a few too many, in this particular case, but we’ll get to that later.

At least Kirby sets everything up in the first couple of pages. We’ve got a ghost town, separated from anywhere else by “The Barrier That Bates Built” and guarded by “an army that Bates bought.” That would be “Billion-Dollar Bates”, this issue’s villain…sort of…but we don’t meet him just yet. Instead, we cut to “the depths beneath the estates that belong to Bates” (Kirby also rhymed “Gates” with “Bates” earlier, making it clear that he was going for some kind of Beatnik poetry here, but thankfully he drops it by the end of the page.)

One of Bates’ soldiers is here being overrun by a group of really-creepy pink alien dudes who call themselves “The Sect”.

But the effect is immediately undercut by the exposition-packed conversation the soldier is having with them (while firing wildly, his expression not at all matching up with his words) in which he makes it clear that “The Sect” is actually a group founded by Mr. Bates, and that the “aliens” are just dudes in pink masks. Furthermore, they’re intruders who are here to infiltrate Mr. Bates’ mansion and The Sect. That’s a lot of exposition to cram into two or three panels, and like I say, a lot of it actively negates the creepiness of the scene. As it turns out, there IS a reason for this incredibly belaboured set-up, but for now all you have to know is that the pink dudes are bad, and they’re trying to infiltrate the other group of pink dudes…who are also bad. Um.

Anyway, the sentry is taken out, replaced with more impostors who talk completely naturally:

FIRST SENTRY: Hear that!? It means the “take-over” is complete!!
SECOND SENTRY: As our comrades are the sect--we are the sentries!
FIRST SENTRY: Do your job--sentry! Alert the upper levels!!

Nothing suspicious there! “Good evening, fellow human! Boy, we sure are unable to breathe pure nitrogen and ingest metals, aren’t we! Ha ha! Now let us discuss last night’s sporting event!”

Meanwhile, because everything always seems to happen at once, the Forever People are materializing in the middle of town. Yes, materializing. They suddenly have the ability to move along “the electron road”, which, as far as I can make out, is some kind of random plot-based teleportation that takes them anywhere that might make for a good comic book, and they trotted it out now for the first time because, um, they were getting bored?

Of course, they manage to appear right in the midst of a group of mercs, who immediately start badgering them with questions—for an unrealistically long length of time, actually—before deciding to get violent and attempting to exterminate them with extreme prejudice. Oh, that’s ridiculous. As if a mercenary warrior employed by a fantastically rich person who essentially owns an entire town would use excessive force on innocent people just because they got too close.

For some reason, the FPs all run for cover, moving (as the soldiers say) “like greased lightning” out of the way…but Big Bear just sits in the middle of the road on the Super-Cycle, trying to fix it, and quickly getting ticked off (in a polite sort of way) about the constant gunfire. Eventually, he politely throws a truck at them.

To change things up a little, I’ll say this time that Big Bear is an impressive and entertaining fellow.

No exaggeration—a full four pages are spent re-establishing that Big Bear is a) very strong and b) impervious to pretty much all weaponry, thanks to the “free flowing atoms” that “reinforce his body structure.” But then, the rest of the comic is relatively (for Kirby) light on action, so I guess we needed this here. This also seems to make clear that the other New Gods aren’t invulnerable the way Bear is, which seems kind of arbitrary, genetically speaking. But I guess that’s mythology for you.

The mercs eventually get the hint and dash off, just as Serifan phases in with the Mother Box. You’ll recall that he was separated from the rest of them via an “Alpha Bullet” and wound up in Japan, where Sonny Sumo had bequeathed the Mother Box to them. (Hey, does anyone else think that “the Adventures of Sonny Sumo with Mother Box in ancient Japan” would make, at the very least, a good miniseries? I’m hearing that Sonny is featured in Grant Morrison’s upcoming “Final Crisis”, so it’s not totally out of the question.) Anyway, the team is reunited, to much rejoicing, including a hilarious moment where Big Bear calls Serifan a “copy-cat cowboy”. He’s laughing and looking happy, but man, that cuts a little too close to home, doesn’t it? “You wussy John Wayne” would have been my choice of words.

This month’s Literary Reference to the Book Kirby Was Reading At The Time is “1984”, which will be driven home later in the issue, but for now it makes its appearance in the form of a telescreen, on which the gigantic head of Billion-Dollar Bates makes its appearance.

Bates tells them to obey the orders of the soldier that’s about to arrive, which causes the Forever People to laugh and blow him off, ‘cuz they’re like, slaves only to the open road, man, and can’t dig your “rules”. Except that as soon as the soldier arrives, they do indeed start jumping about and following him with military precision. Clearly, Bates has some manner of mind-control powers…wait, isn’t that kind of a recurring theme in this book? You don’t think he’s…

We cut to the interior of Bates’ lavish mansion—he’s a tubby dude in the traditional (for 1971) brown jacket and string tie that connotes a fat cat Texas billionaire. I mean, I don’t know for a fact that he’s from Texas, but that’s how Kirby draws him. He proceeds to expound on “the Power” that he’s had since birth, that’s made him a champion of industry and multi-billionaire snake oil salesman—since, of course, people can’t resist buying whatever he’s selling. His audience, seated at a dinner table, display an odd antipathy considering they’re his dinner guests—until we discover that they aren’t his friends at all, but a number of officials, journalists and nosey types who figured out that Bates had this Power. Rather ghoulishly, Bates has used his powers of compulsion to keep them all prisoner without bars or chains, and toys with them as cruelly as the comics code will allow. He forces one guy to put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, which the man unhesitatingly does, though fortunately for him the gun isn’t loaded. Then he leans in really close to one attractive blonde woman and simply leers at her, “you see now, what it means to antagonize me!” as he suggestively fondles her shoulders. This is an effectively chilling sequence, to say the least.

Bates then mentions how his plans to extend his rulership to the entire world are in motion. “O’course, it’s gonna take a little “mumbo jumbo” to satisfy the sect! But I owe it to ‘em!” Uh…here I was thinking that the sect were a group of mindless followers that you entranced with your magical powers. Why would you need to dress it up for their sake? Just tell them to shut up and follow.

Down in the caves under the mansion, the Forever People are being led around by the mercenary, who tells them to wait for Glorious Leader…and they find themselves powerless to leave. Serifan points out that Mother Box could phase them out of the cave, but Mark is dead set against leaving. Like the others, he’s figured out that Bates possesses the Anti-Life Equation, and must be stopped before Darkseid figures this out.

Except…am I missing something here? Wasn’t it Sonny Sumo who had the Anti-Life equation? You know, the guy who Darkseid had totally at his mercy, and decided instead to randomly send through time, to where he couldn’t reach him? I thought they said that there was but a single mind that possessed the secret of the Equation, but now we’ve suddenly got two. Unless Sonny’s descendants somehow ended up in Texas. OK, fine, I guess I’ll just have to take it as read that there are a bunch of people on Earth with the Anti-Life Equation stuck in their heads.

The Sect re-enters the room and drags the Forev Peeps off in chains and stocks, then drag them off to Bates’ little torchlight rally, where they’re paraded as symbols of man’s helplessness before “the power”. Or maybe it’s how they’re shackled by disunity without the guiding hand of Bates’ superior will. He’s a little inconsistent with his metaphors here. This is where the 1984 references get overtly dropped, with Vykin calling it “Double-Think” (which it isn’t really).

This night of all nights, Bates is getting ready to put on the “stimulus hat” which will extend his power somehow, even though it seems to me that all he really needs is to make a few phone calls to various world leaders, instead of hanging out in the basement wearing a funny hat. In fact, that’s even better advice than you’d think, because the hat doesn’t quite behave as predicted. Instead, it places him in Slytherin House.

Wait no, I mean it builds up a tremendous store of energy and then renders him unconscious. The supposed high priest of the Sect barely has a moment to cackle in triumph before Bates is spirited out of his grasp by an invisible force and sent flying round the corner. At the same instant, the FPs vanish from their shackles. Yes, it turns out they had a plan after all—the Sect members didn’t actually chain them up, it was all an illusion cast by Beautiful Dreamer. If Mark didn’t waste a moment to pop up on a nearby balcony and taunt them instead of running, they probably would have gotten away clean with the insensate Bates. Smooth, Mark.

The fake Sect members snatch off their masks, revealing the high priest to be none other than Desaad, and another, imposing Sect member blocks the FPs’ passage. Big Bear uses Bates’ body as a shield, but this backfires—sort of—when a jittery merc pumps him full of lead. “Mister Bates—when I saw him in their hands—I—I—reacted--too fast--!” he wails. But he doesn’t react too fast when the gigantic Sect member lands a hearty blow on the merc’s head, possibly killing him. Sure enough, the Sect member is Darkseid in disguise. Man…I just realized that Darkseid’s been in every single issue of “The Forever People” except the one where they’re trapped in time, and that’s because of Darkseid. He’s a great villain, but I think Kirby came pretty close to overusing him here…I mean, the Fantastic Four didn’t fight Doctor Doom in every single issue. He’s part of the over-arcing tapestry of the stories, but this is an ongoing comic book, there should have been room for another minor villain or two.

The next scene is, seriously, one of the weirdest in the entire Fourth World saga, as the two mortal enemies confront each other—and proceed to toss insults back and forth. Let me remind you that this is a Kirby comic. The man needs no excuse whatsoever for superbeings to get in 4-page long fights that level city blocks. And here we have Darkseid confronting a whole batch of New Gods under desperate circumstances, and the result is a glorified “Yo’ Momma” contest. But what’s really weird about it is the way the Forever People just stand there and obey as Darkseid begins barking at them like a drill sergeant. They get all flustered and start trying to make excuses for themselves as he berates them and starts boasting about his high rank being equal to that of All-Father’s. He even grabs Big Bear’s nose and tweaks it, and Bear just sort of looks rattled. That’s not the Big Bear I know! Where’s the overwrought indignance, the throwing of r immensely heavy objects?

I don’t know if this is supposed to be some kind of residual effect from Bates’ mental commands—but if it is, why would they be obeying Darkseid? They were told to obey the mercenaries. Besides, Bates is dead. You’d think that would put the kibosh on his telepathy.

The scene continues to get weirder as Mark declared that Darkseid’s “tricked” them. I fail to see how yelling at them constitutes a “trick”, especially since they were the ones who decided to roll over like a bunch of neutered puppies as soon as Darkseid began asserting an ounce of authority, but it seems that, the whole time, he’s been saturating them with “invisible Omega beams.” The FPs now fade away like phantoms. But, as Desaad guesses, Darkseid hasn’t killed them. Of course not. He just teleported them back to their Cycle and sent them on their way with the lame excuse, “Greatness does not come from killing the young! I’m willing to wait until they grow!!” “We could have fared worse!” Declares Mark as they take off into the sky. “He’s a strange enemy!!”

Uh, yes he is, Mark. If by “strange” you mean “completely arbitrary and lackadaisical”. Also, “kinda stupid.”

Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #147--"A Superman In Supertown!"

noreply@blogger.com (Prankster) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:29:00 +0000

THE MORAL IS, NEVER TRY TO FIT IN ANYWHERE.

When Kirby first took over the writing and art chores on “Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen”, he envisioned a sprawling storyline similar to what he’d been doing over at Marvel, one that would tap into the fundamental angst of Superman’s existence and help flesh him out as a character. He even laid the seeds for it in The Forever People #1, the first Fourth World comic to actually be drawn. But DC was the more institutionalized and corporate of the superhero publishers in the early 70s, and it still hadn’t quite sunk in that what Marvel had been doing for the past decade was going to dictate the future of comics. As such, they were heavily resistant to change. They could see that this Kirby kid was a hugely popular artist, and that hiring him would give their sales a bump, but they couldn’t take the additional step of trusting him to really do his thing. Time has proven Kirby right about many, many things, and one of those things was the fact that Superman wasn’t going to be cool anymore in the new fan culture. He needed a new hook, and Kirby wanted to lay the groundwork for that. This was all too radical for a publisher that was only just beginning to see its numbers enter a steep decline after several decades at the top, so they put the kibosh on Kirby’s plans. Naturally, most of what he wanted to do with Superman—particularly exploring the idea that his great powers and near-omnipotence isolate him from the very humanity he’s so devoted to saving—has since been done by other writers, and in fact you can argue that it’s *the* most compelling dramatic angle one can take when writing the Big Blue Boy Scout, but as ever, Kirby was cursed with being ahead of his time.

As you can infer from all this, Kirby eventually grew a bit sick of “Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen”, and—perhaps not coincidentally—the sales entered a tailspin. Which in a way was good, as it meant Kirby didn’t have to draw the book for very much longer. Sensing this, Kirby decided to bang out a truncated version of the Superman story he’d wanted to tell in this, his penultimate issue of SPJO.

So Jimmy’s in Scotland, recovering from being a Caveman. Yes, apparently being genetically regressed to an ancient hominid is something you get over, like the flu. Just take his temperature and give him hot soup every so often, and he’ll be fine in a week or two. Oh, and don’t let any ravenous, psychotic bug-monsters come bursting into the room where he’s staying.

…Dammit, people, what did I just say?!?

Apparently the Scottish police are kind of lax about letting their genetic aberrations run wild in hospitals. But as it turns out, Charlie only eats…chairs. Because he likes the chemicals used to treat the wood. He’s also calmed by Gabby’s voice, thus making him possibly unique in the animal kingdom. Actually, I guess he’s pretty unique anyway. Certainly the dialogue confirms him as “the last o’ the beasties we had under lock n’ key!!” with no mention of exactly what happened to all those other mythical animals. My guess: Unicorns seem like fine eating in the country that deemed Haggis to be edible.

Anyway, Gabby slips Charlie a knockout pill, and Tommy declares that he’s now their responsibility for some reason. The Loch Trevor police force is, obviously, happy to have him out of their hair, so the Newsboys make their plans to ship Charlie back to America.

Meanwhile, we’re picking up where we left Superman—in his much more interesting plotline, which fortunately dominates this issue. If you recall, some Apokoliptish troublemakers posing as a rock band had destroyed a disco…as is pretty much the duty of any half-decent rock band, come to think of it. But Superman happened to be in this disco, and he tracked them to a series of tunnels underneath that led back to “The Project”. The rockers headed home through a Boom Tube, but Superman is now just in time to catch another Tube with a figure emerging from it. Supes, of course, has an only semi-complete knowledge of the New Gods, and thus immediately assumes this guy is from Apokolips. What he doesn’t know is that this guy, who calls himself “Magnar”, is pretty much his equal in strength, and is able to put Superman in a judo hold and toss him down the Boom Tube. Superman emerges in New Genesis, and immediately realizes that this sunny, garden-like world could never be home to the evil beings from Apokolips. Because, as we all know, your taste in decoration is directly linked to how good or evil you are. Sunny, flowery, nature world = good, oppressive stone carvings, fire pits, and darkness = evil. It’s just common sense. In a comic book.

Anyway, Superman’s attempts to reassure his captors fall on deaf ears for the nonce, which of course allows for a time-tested tradition: A Good Guy Fight. Of course, the New Genesisians are coming off kind of jerky, as Superman’s trying to talk sense to them and they just keep piling on with more punches. Eventually, Magnar channels “the combined magnetic repulsion-flow of a hundred galaxies” to send Superman flying.

Back to the Newsboys, who are leaving Scotland behind to cross the Atlantic in the Whiz Wagon, with the unconscious Charlie strapped precariously to the back. Halfway across the ocean, they suddenly find themselves lost in a fog, which is the moment Charlie chooses to wake up and burst free of his shackles. For whatever reason—I guess it’s because Charlie stomps on his face—Gabby doesn’t speak up to calm the rampaging pink bug-man, and he begins to tear apart the whiz wagon—as, all the while, a huge volcano comes into view below, rising out of the sea. As if that weren’t enough, the Wagon’s controls seize up and begin steering them towards a gigantic landing platform that looms out of the volcano’s mouth. Once they’ve hit the deck, a crowd of “Pseudo-men” emerge and hit them with immobilizing eye-beams.

Back to Superman, who’s managed to talk some sense into the New Genesisians mostly by adopting a pleasant tone of voice, something that a dude from Apokolips would never, ever do. Quickly making amends, they invite Superman to come visit Supertown, repeating the phrase from earlier: “This is a world of friends!” Superman then attempts to show off by inviting Magnar’s young pals to grab hold of his cape and fly with him up to the hovering city, but of course Magnar can fly as well, and the kids can follow along in his “magna trail”. Following slowly behind, Superman finds himself blending in with the Supertown crowd, for whom a flying super-strong man is a common sight. “They don’t even notice me!” he thinks. Five minutes among his equals, and Superman’s already starting to develop a neurosis about it.

Jimmy and the Newsboys find themselves waking up at a table, wearing green, cultlike robes. Uh-oh—that’s never a good sign. Sure enough, at the head of the table stands a dapper, sophisticated, eight-foot tall gentleman, dressed in Victorian-style clothing and drinking a cup of liquid that he lights on fire with a blowtorch. Yep, uh-huh, I’d say what we have here is a supervillain. You wouldn’t happen to be a “Doctor” or a “Professor”, would you, sir?

Yep. Definitely a supervillain.

(“That’s the kind of premise sold in “Golden Age” comics!” Unlike these completely sane modern comics, huh, Big Words?)

Back in Supertown, Superman is gawking at the décor and the inhabitants. “Supertown is truly a place for super-beings!!” He thinks, and then proceeds to completely forget what he just saw when he spots a pillar that appears to be falling on a young girl. He snatches it away, only to be met with scorn by the girl, who was of course moving it around on purpose with her telekinetic powers. Duh. And now she’s put out at Superman for attempting to save her life. “I keep forgetting that I’m in a city of super-beings!!” Thinks Supes. Yes, Superman, you do. You might want to write it on your arm or something.

Just then, he’s grabbed by a colossal iron hand that slams him against a wall. Aha! Here’s something Superman can punch without complaint—a gigantic metal ape-man. “With a face like that, you could only have slipped into town from Apokolips!!” declares Superman, judgmentally, and proceeds to wail on the robot. But of course, once again, Superman’s goofed…it’s a “harmless Protonoid”, and his owner shows up, all chuffed at Supes. Because, clearly, in a world where everything that we’ve seen so far indicates that the good guys are beautiful and innocent-looking, and the bad guys are ugly, to be physically assaulted by a giant robot just shows that Superman should have known better.

Yeah, um, actually, he friggin’ attacked Superman, Captain Sanctimony McMustache. “I may be a big deal on Earth!!” thinks Kal-El, “But in this place I’m just another meddling super-being!!” Well, you’re kind of a meddling super-being on Earth, too, but at least there people don’t get ticked off at you for jumping to perfectly reasonable conclusions.

Superman stops to have an emo attack on a nearby park bench, and who should be sitting next to him but All-Father. He’s there to provide the kind of third-act moral direction you typically get in an episode of Full House. Izaya lays out what’s instantly obvious to us: Superman isn’t needed on New Genesis, and he needs to be needed, so he’ll always be happier on Earth. Especially given that his friends were just captured by a fire-drinking crazy person, and they need him to go and rescue them. Superman grabs hold of the Wonder-Staff and instantly finds himself transported back to Earth—specifically the lair of Professor Volcanum, where Jimmy and the Newsboys are being held captive. But no sooner has he entered the room, than he’s trapped by the walls, which close in on him…

And…that’s pretty much it for angsty Superman. I mean, obviously Superman survives—duh, it’s just a couple of rock walls, he could smash them with his pinkies—I mean, that’s the resolution to the emotional drama Kirby wanted to set up. Superman realizes he’s not needed and goes home. A trifle anticlimactic, isn’t it?

Oh well. As with so many other aspects of Kirby’s work, we can now look back and see how he had the right idea, even if it took someone else to really follow through on those ideas. It’s just a shame more people couldn’t have seen that Kirby knew what he was doing when he was actually doing it. Like they say: a pioneer is that guy ahead of you in the trail with an arrow in his back.