The Hunger Dogs, Part Two

“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

"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.)

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

New Gods #7--"The Pact"

MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU.

So, I should probably talk about Star Wars at this point.

I’ve been tiptoeing around it for most of this series of articles, but it’s pretty widely acknowledged that the Fourth World Saga was a *huge* influence on George Lucas, and if you’ve been paying attention to my recaps, you’ve probably noticed this yourself. We’ve got a mythological cosmic epic that takes the form of a space opera but conceals more a primal, archetypal sensibility; good and evil in impossibly pure forms, with good represented by verdancy and the rejection of violence, and evil by the totalitarian domination of a chilling but charismatic master manipulator; an elaborate mythology full of strange beings, with a pre-existing backstory; and lots of other details, big and small. More obviously, you’ve got a villain named, phonetically, “Dark Side”, whose ruthless personality and will-to-power are more than a little reminiscent of a certain Sith Lord with whom we’re all familiar; throw in the physical characteristics (mutilated body encased in cloak and armour) of another of Kirby’s classic villains, Dr. Doom, and the connection is even more obvious. You’ve also got heroes worshipping and deriving their powers from something called “The Source” (and one from “The Astro-Force”), a gigantic technological hell-planet with great circular pits, and even Laser Swords make a brief appearance at one point. And there’s another major point of similarity which has been pretty heavily hinted at throughout the series, but which this issue, one of the best of the whole meta-series, will make abundantly plain. (This is gonna be a long one.)

“In the Beginning--The New Gods were formless in image and aimless in deed!!! On each of their two new worlds, their races had sprung from a survivor of the old!! The living atoms of Balduur gave nobility and strength to one!!—and the shadow planet was saturated with the cunning and evil which was once a sorceress!!"

With this opening caption, Kirby comes as close as he ever does to admitting that, yes, the Fourth World is supposed to have emerged literally from the wreckage of his imaginary destruction of the Marvel Universe, or at least the Asgard segment of it. I’m not sure why he even bothered to change the name of “Balder”, since he’s a mythological entity, and thus, not owned by Marvel. Although the way copyright laws are going…

So yeah, to recap, once he split with Stan the Man and the House of Ideas, Kirby basically performed a pretty stunning mental purge, metaphorically destroying the universe he’d worked on for so long and summoning a new work out of the ashes. It’s not hard to see how stuff like Countdown to Infinite Crisis That’s Final For Really Reals This Time and Spider-Man Sells His Continuity To The Devil and all the other status-quo-smashin’, father killin’, nothing-you-know-will-ever-be-the-same-again reinventions of the DC and Marvel Universes over the years were taking their cue from what Kirby did here—but none of them ever did it with the kind of breathtaking commitment Kirby brought to it (even though the world he ‘destroyed’ remained alive and static at the company he left behind).

There are almost too many ramifications to this to sort through, though as I mentioned elsewhere, it lends a surprising amount of logical consistency to the series if you imagine that the New Gods come from a parallel Universe—this aforementioned far-future Marvel Universe that’s been destroyed and reborn. It would explain why they talk about Earth like it’s a relic of their own history, why they’re seemingly millions of years old despite the fact that their predecessors are clearly the gods of Earth mythology, and why no one in the DCU ever stumbled across them until Darkseid decided to stop by. (The current “Death of the New Gods” places New Genesis and Apokolips firmly in a parallel dimension from the rest of the DCU).

Of course, there’s still some stuff that doesn’t really make sense, and it starts right on the first page, when we meet Izaya The Inheritor and his wife Avia, reposing in bucolic splendour on New Genesis.



Now, here’s the thing: Izaya is the man who will one day be known as “All-Father”, and I think Kirby meant for this to be a surprise, but I literally never even thought to question that they were the same guy until the end of the story; his beard isn’t grey, but otherwise the resemblance is obvious. Of course, there are some issues raised by this, like, um, New Gods can age? Also, he’s described as a warrior…yet we’re told that this is at a time before New Genesis and Apokolips went to war. So what was he fighting against? Did the New Gods just pull themselves out of the cosmic goop left by the Old Gods and say, “Hey, those guys fought a lot. We oughtta get some warriors, too! They get all the chicks!”

Tragically, Izaya is about to learn the true meaning of being a warrior, as he and his bride are attacked by Steppenwolf.



I’ve been waiting months to do that joke. And it was totally worth it.

No, this is the Steppenwolf we’re talking about:



Steppenwolf is simply German for “wolf of the steppes” (or Coyote), so it’s probably just a coincidence that it’s a band (and a Hermann Hesse novel) as well as a Kirby character. This particular Steppenwolf lives up to his name by being a pack hunter, who hunts the deadliest game of all: MAN. Or actually, NEW GOD. Yes, in what seems like a fairly suicidal move to me, Stepp has decided to hunt and kill a leader of their neighbouring planet for sport. Diplomacy: not an Apokoliptish strong point.

But then, this may be a classic case of a dumb, spoiled rich kid getting in way over his head, for you see, Stepp is the brother of Heggra, the witchly ruler of Apokolips…and mother of Darkseid. Who, we learn in very short order, was the one who suggested this hunting excursion in the first place. And while Izaya gives them a good run for their money at first, he’s rendered spiritless by the sudden death of Avia, who wandered back onto the battlefield to prevent Izzy from killing Stepp and got whacked herself. Izzy then gets taken out by Darkseid’s “Killing-Gloves” and left for dead. Stepp is just barely bright enough to suspect that something’s rotten in Denmark:

STEPPENWOLF: I don’t trust you, nephew! --Or your bizarre companions!
DARKSEID: Would you care to examine the body, noble Steppenwolf??
STEPPENWOLF: There’s no need! I know I’ll find no sign of life!!! Let me add further, Darkseid!! I don’t like you! You’re clever and cunning—and a plotter!!

Yeah, good thing you’re none of those things, Stepp. “I don’t trust you! Let me demonstrate this by falling into your trap with a minimum of goading!”

For of course, Darkseid set this whole thing up to ensnare New Genesis and Apokolips in a war. Izaya wasn’t killed, and when he wakes up, he’s ready to do some serious vengeance-taking against those who killed his wife. Darkseid’s motivations in setting up the war are never really spelled out as such, though obviously focusing Izaya’s wrath on his mother and uncle is going to help him seize power later. Plus, Apokolips seems to have been created as a world of warriors and weapon-makers, so it was inevitable that they would find someone to fight against. It just doesn’t speak very well of Stepp or Heggra that it took Darkseid to figure this out for them. What were they doing for the first few thousand years of their existence? Holding lavish banquets?



Oh.

The Darkseid family basically sits around rather pathetically in a bunker, squabbling for no particularly good reason except for the fact that they’re eeeee-vil, while the Monitors of New Genesis bomb the surface flat. Heggra castigates Steppenwolf: "You’re brash!! Arrogant! Loud!! You command an army which only produces battles and body counts!” As opposed to what, sensible shoes? Again, for all their sinister, warlike appearance and cackling and basically looking the part of a bunch of ruthless intergalactic warlords, these guys sure need the essence of conflict spelled out for them, don’t they? Fortunately, Darkseid is planning to betray them all and sieze power, and it can’t happen soon enough—even though he’s clearly a million times more competent, it’s still kind of goofy to see Darkseid playing the part of someone’s runty nephew. (By the way, Hegg and Stepp and the rest of Darkseid’s immediate family are a bunch of lemon-yellow, red-eyed weirdos, looking like severely stylized versions of Ming the Merciless, but Darkseid is his usual, rocky self. I know, I know, they’re gods, and aren’t constrained to follow the usual laws of genetics. But still, he kinda sticks out.)

Darkseid is showing off a mysterious “X-Element” that he (or Desaad, who he’s apparently already got working for him) have stumbled upon in the labs. Suddenly, the party is interrupted by Metron, uncharacteristically flustered, bursting in and pleading like a little bitch with Darkseid to be given the X-Element.

If you remember, way back when, I mentioned that Metron’s status as a good guy was a little shaky, and that Orion was basically right to distrust him. This scene is a big part of why. Metron is overtly described as being part of New Genesis, yet he completely sells them out here, agreeing to use the X-Element to open the “Matter Threshold” that will allow Apokolips to transport heavy weaponry directly to New Genesis. His reasoning is that he desperately needs the X-Element to build his Mobius Chair.

“You’re a nice boy!!” croons Heggra. “Does it bother you---to create the means for mass slaughter??” “I have no link with the Old Gods—or New!!” rationalizes Metron. “I am something--different! Something that was unforeseen!!--On New Genesis—or here!!” “You’ll betray us all in time, Metron!” Glowers Darkseid. “But this thing—you shall build—for us!!”

OK, so, we’re going with a Cat’s Cradle-style “the detatched immorality of science” thing here, apparently; Metron just wants to build and discover, and he doesn’t give a thought to what anyone might do with his inventions. Makes him kind of a dick, though, and you have to wonder how New Genesis ever got around to trusting him ever again. As Metron leaves, Heggra laughs with joy, paising her son, and Darkseid grins for I think the only time in the entire series:



Creepy.

Next thing you know, the Dragon Tanks and canine cavalry of Apokolips are blazing across the serene fields of New Genesis, led by Steppenwolf, who, with his tiny, tiny brain, has gone back to thinking well of Darkseid simply because he let his uncle lead the raid. Of course, the inevitable happens: Izaya the Inheritor appears from between the ranks and gets his revenge on Steppenwolf, driving off the Apokoliptish forces while he’s at it.

Metron appears to be castigated by Izaya—though not nearly enough, it seems to me—and makes a lot of “Ooh, that Darkseid! I hate him so much!” noises which are apparently sufficient to placate Izzy.

Over the next couple of pages, the war and the carnage grow ever greater, as the two forces turn to genetic engineering and bacteriological warfare, call down asteroids to slam into each others’ planets, focus the energy of the sun into gigantic flaming lasers (Kirby literally draws them as huge, flaming gouts cutting across space) and just basically making a mess of the entire universe. Somehow, despite being right next door to each other, the two planets don’t manage to wipe each other out, but New Genesis is transformed into a barren wasteland littered with ruins, over which Izaya looks sorrowfully.

“We are worse than the Old Gods!” He cries, in a bout of typically Kirbian anguish. “They destroyed themselves!! We destroy everything!! This is Darkseid’s way! I am infected by Darkseid!! To save New Genesis—I must find Izaya!!”

He proceeds to wander out into the wilderness and do a whole “biblical prophet” thing, ruminating on his past choices, declaring that he rejects the way of war, ripping the armor and war-staff from his body and declaring that he’s rejecting the way of war forever, as the wind whips itself into a frenzy around him. “Darkseid’s game is not mine!!” He howls. “Where is Izaya!!!?? Where is IZAYA!!!??”

In the middle of a re-enactment of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as it turns out, as suddenly a gigantic monolith comes into view across the plain. OK, so this one’s white and has a goofy little pointing-finger icon that writes “THE SOURCE” across it in fiery letters. Hey, I just realized: the Source is a Mac.

Some time elapses. Izaya returns to his throne in new robes, with a new staff; Darkseid, meanwhile, succeeds to the throne of Apokolips following the demise of his mother, and suddenly the war cools off. Darkseid and Izaya make a secret pact which involves their respective, and so-far unseen sons.

Yep, Darkseid’s got a kid: in fact, it seems he’s been married all this time, to this woman:



And as it turns out, the kid takes more after his mom, with the flaming red hair and the violence, than his rocky, pontificating dad. It’s not so surprising, either, since Darkseid never really wanted to raise a family anyway, and his son was raised on the other side of the planet, never knowing his dad. So the terms of the Pact seem fairly agreeable to him: he and Izaya will swap kids, the way ancient rulers were known to do, in order to cement a new truce between the two worlds. Of course, as it pretty much goes without saying, Darkseid just wants to buy some time and re-evaluate his options, so when Izaya’s young son is carried in by Granny Goodness, he immediately hatches a plan to someday break the truce: the kid will be raised in Granny’s Soldier-Orphanage, but he’ll harbour the dream of escape—and if he ever manages to do so, it’ll break the Pact and provide a convenient excuse to resume hostilities. In honour of this day, Granny names the kid “Scott Free”. (You’ve got to feel bad for Scott—it seems like his whole life, including his rebellion against evil, has been planned out by his archnemesis already. So much for being the living embodiment of freedom…)

At the signal, Darkseid’s son is thrust through his own Threshold and finds himself in a warren of tunnels, fighting and kicking the whole way. He’d kept a weapon secreted in his sleeve, and he now turns it on the first figure he comes across: Izaya, now in his white-bearded form of All-Father, offering him friendship and trust for the first time in his life. Orion—for it is he—screams that his father hates him, but Izaya responds with “‘Hate’ is no longer a word in this place!!!” Uh…but you just said…oh, never mind.

The point is that Orion is obviously in desperate need of a daddy, and with All-Father offering to fulfill this role, he decides to symbolically drop the weapon and embrace his new destiny as protector of New Genesis. Fade out.

Once again, I’m impressed by how much more confident Kirby’s storytelling is here than on the other series. The plot comes together much more tightly than I ever would have expected, and while I wish Kirby’s dialogue was smoother and more subtle, the underlying ideas are so powerful that it almost doesn’t matter. These characters’ actions convey who they are beautifully, even if what comes out of their mouth is kind of clunky, and while the forces of evil still seem to be more intellectually engaged (as it often does in these kinds of stories), the good guys actually manage to steal the show this time out. As usual, it’s hard not to think that Kirby was working out some personal issues in the sequence where Izaya rejects violence; perhaps he was coming to see the inherent conflicts in a cosmic war epic that revolved around hippie ideas of peace and brotherhood, and was making an effort to resolve them a little more clearly. As it is, this issue is a crucial peace of mythology that elevates the whole story quite effectively.

Oh, and that whole “hero turns out to be the son of the villain” thing? That’s a great idea. Someone ought to steal that for their own space epic.

The New Gods #6--"The Glory Boat!"

THAT'S THE GLORY BOAT, YOU PERVS.

What, you thought I wouldn’t go there? I only have class insomuch as it stands in the way of my making an obvious joke.

We’re now getting into the run of New Gods issues that Kirby feels was the strongest thing he ever did, and the energy is palpable. As you might recall, the last issue brought us face to face with the horrifying Leviathan the Deep Six (“Mystic Mutators of the Deep”) had unleashed on the world: a gigantic pink warthog-whale thing bigger than an oil tanker. You know how I can tell that? Because in the opening pages of this issue, the thing eats an oil tanker.

Well, it doesn’t “eat” it so much as it gores it with its tusks and that weird phallic ram-thing under its chin.



My favourite moment in this sequence: a sailor, spotting the leviathan, announces, “The closer it gets—the bigger it gets!!” He’s just discovered the magic of perspective! Also, the oil tanker, despite being specifically described as being made of steel, is coloured to look like an old-fashioned wooden sailing ship.

There’s now a montage of the Leviathan trashing ships all across the ocean, ending with a nice panel of a life saver marked “S. S. Aurora” floating empty in the water to segue to the main story. It seems that one of the vessels wrecked was a yacht owned by a wealthy industrialist named Farley Sheridan and his two children, who are now floating in a life raft in the middle of the sea. These three, who we’ll be getting to know better in a few pages, provide our “everyman” perspective on the following events, starting with Orion blasting out of the water a few meters away from them. Farley immediately jumps to the rather odd conclusion that “he’s some kind of new Navy frogman type!” Right, because navy officers are always dressing up in flamboyant, skintight clothing.

…Well, OK, but not while they’re on duty.

Orion, rather dickishly, chooses not to talk to the lost and frightened people on the raft, but first does a sweep of the area while caught up in his own expositional thoughts (basically recapping the last issue). Eventually, he does deign to lend a hand, shooting a tractor beam-ish thing to grab hold of the raft, or as he puts it, “A magnetic force will saturate your craft’s atomic structure!—And bind us as one!!” Kirby sure had a thing for the phrase “atomic structure”, didn’t he? Oh, atomic structures! Is there anything you can’t do?

Orion offers them rescue, but he points out that he’s on a dangerous mission, and that tagging along with him could result in their death. Here we get our introduction to the basic character dilemma of this issue: Farley, a WWII vet, claims that he’ll happily jump into the fray if it’ll get them off the raft, whereas his son Richard, a pacifist, is reluctant, and his daughter Lynn is basically a nonentity. (It’s an unfortunate feature of Kirby’s books that, in a given group, the woman will usually be the one most devoid of personality and least helpful…though there are a couple of major exceptions, like Barda.) Richard, meanwhile, is the one who starts to maybe get a teensy inkling that possibly, perhaps, the helmeted guy on the flying harness with the futuristic technology isn’t a naval officer.

After skimming across the ocean for a while (shown from above in another very nice panel), Orion finds what Mother Box has been leading him towards: a weirdly shaped wooden boat (actually, it’s more like a raft with a a temple-like cabin built on top) and a human-shaped figure bound in some kind of weird wrappings where the mast would be. Mother Box indicates that it’s alive.

“Well, there’s one way to strip those bonds away!-- Orion’s way! The way of the Astro-Force!!” Are you surprised? This is how Orion solves all his problems.

“Locked myself out of the car again! I’ll handle this Orion’s way! The way of the Astro-Force!” (Melts car with laser blast.)

“My microwave is broken! I’ll handle this Orion’s way! The way of the Astro-Force!” (Chars bagel to a smoking cinder.)

“The democratic candidates are in an almost neck-and-neck race for their party’s nomination which could lead to a brokered convention! I’ll handle this Orion’s way! The way of the Astro-Force!” (Starts randomly shooting people.)

Anyway, the bandages—which turn out to be more of that malevolent mutated kelp Orion encountered a while back—come off, revealing none other than Lightray, who, it turns out, broke his promise to Highfather to join the war against Apokolips. Mere panels later, Orion declares that “Your kind brings an undeserved honor to war!” Well, someone’s honor’s undeserved, anyway. With Orion and Lightray now together, the pompous speechifying picks up. “Now—to see what demon’s swill the Deep Six have served up inside this craft!!” declares Orion, marching inside. Meanwhile, the Sheridan family introduces themselves to Lightray, with Farley making clear his sneering contempt for his son’s non-violent ways. “I’m a conscientious objector!” declares Richard, “I don’t like war, violence, or killing!!” “Is that right?” muses Lightray. Well, I know of a place where everybody’s like that!”

Hmmm…so conscientious objectors are like New Genesisians? That’s actually logical in a way, despite the amount of fighting they do—the idea seems to be that they only go to war when it’s absolutely necessary. Of course, that assumes that the magic wall that tells them what to do is always correct and good and just; somehow I think that a real-world conscientious objector would have a hard time falling into line with that.

Orion calls for Lightray, and they enter the hold to find a big, green, icky creature crouching in the corner, which they dub a “Sender” and an “organic director”. “There’s a mountainous sea beast out there, destroying ships!--And this—this is its brain!!” Um…wouldn’t a better place for its brain be, y’know, in its skull?

“It shouldn’t be destroyed!” reasons Lightray. “It should be changed!! Light! Light!--not to glisten on swordblades!—But light at play with atoms--to make them sing in other ways!!” Are you perhaps getting the sense that Orion and Lightray are allegorical characters?

Lightray transforms the critter into a “living basic life form!!” which apparently means a big cube of jell-o. There’s a lot of technobabble here, but basically they’re going to “imprint it with the image of New Genesis” and cause the leviathan to turn around and head back to the ship. Which it does, accompanied by another of the Deep Six, named Jaffar. Yes, Jaffar. Sadly, he does not own a wisecracking parrot voiced by Gilbert Gottfried. He does, however, have the ability to turn invisible and slip past the beams of light Lightray is sending down to the ocean floor in an effort to spot him. You’d think they’d know that about the guy and thus not waste their time, but…

Back on the boat, Richard is succeeding in pounding it into his dad that they may be just a tad over their heads here. By the way, I love how Orion was just casually going to let them go into battle, despite the fact that they’re regular humans, and thus would presumably be creamed by the forces of Apokolips. Well, he did give them a choice, I suppose. Nevertheless, having seen the “life cube” beginning to grow into a gigantic, bleeping machine, and “with Lynn to consider”, Farley is having second thoughts about staying. So, uh, Farley, you knew there was going to be a fight, and you were willing to risk your daughter, but as soon as weird mechanical cubes get involved, suddenly you’re determined to keep her from harm? You’re kind of a douche, Farley. This is driven home by the fact that, despite his admittance that his son is correct, he’s still getting shots in at him as a coward.

Unfortunately, a clean getaway isn’t in the cards, as Jaffar shows up to menace them. Richard starts calling for them to escape, but Farley is paralyzed with fear (as, I guess, is Lynn, but she’s barely in panel for this sequence). Richard suddenly finds himself galvanized into action and leaps forward into battle, threatening to fight Jaffar to the death to protect his family. But despite his newfound courage, this has about the same result you’d expect, i.e., none at all. Jaffar grabs him and uses his mutating touch to kill Richard by, basically, erasing his face. It’s a pretty damn creepy sequence.

Of course, now Orion shows up. Yeesh. If you knew the guy was going to return to the ship, why didn’t you just stay and protect them? Anyway, he blasts Jaffar off the ship with the Astro-Force, but Jaffar is already gloating that he’s impossible to kill in the water. So what does Orion do? He shoots him over and over again, keeping him in the air each time, until he’s exploded. Ouch.

Orion returns to the ship to find Farley babbling, lost in the delusion that his son has “joined his platoon—on the beach!! Yes--that’s it!!” And Lynn, as usual, just standing around crying. Jeez, why is she even in this story? Orion straps her into his harness and sends her up and away, out of the story to safety, even as her father refuses to leave.

Declaring Richard to be “another faceless hero!” Lightray sets him alongside the machinery in the cabin. Then, as the wind rises ominously and fish are seen streaming past, the remaining Deep Six—the Deep Four, I guess—launch their attack. The remaining Deeps are Shaligo, “the flying finback”, Trok, who has a whirling axe on a whip, Gole, who…has no special powers that I can see, and Pyron, who flies the manta ship with its flamethrowers. You wouldn’t think flamethrowers would be a huge benefit underwater, but they turn out useful when Orion repels the attack and Pyron sets fire to the boat.

Orion seeks to get away, but Lightray has apparently gone insane. First, he’s tied Farley to the mast (!). Then he draws Orion into the cabin, where Richard’s face has been restored—whatever—and their weapon has taken shape, even as the Leviathan and the manta-ship bear down on them.

From all accounts, Kirby claimed the next two pages to be the best things he ever did. On one side: the Deep Four, zipping alongside the vast pink monster as it rears out of the water. On the other, a bizarre missile formed from the techno-active cube, with Richard’s body lying pread-eagled on top, Lightray standing right at the tip, and Orion clinging onto the side, brandishing his fist at their oncoming foe.



It’s pretty awesome.

The two forces meet and explode, but of course Lightray is able to pull Orion from the point of contact at, y’know, lightspeed. We’re left with the image of Farley—who we’re hastily told was “backlashed far from the flaming area!!” left floating, adrift at sea, alone with his guilt that his supposedly cowardly son was able to fight when he couldn’t. (A tiny ship, visible on the horizon headed towards him, obviously implies that he’ll be rescued.)

As we’ve seen, of course, the Fourth World is full of this kind of tension, between the old and the young, between violence and non-violence, but here we have probably the purest expression of it. Kirby, as we all know, was a WWII vet himself, but he also seemed to have a lot of affection for the hippie types that presumably made up a chunk of his audience…and here we see the two types coming into conflict. The fact that the young pacifist seems to be proven to be in the right--though maybe not in a way that a real pacifist would agree with—is interesting; was Kirby rejecting his own history? Was he pandering? Or am I reading too much into it?