JACK KIRBY'S FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS

Before Age of Bronze or Sandman or even Cerebus, before anyone else (in North America, at least) even conceived of the possibility of a long-running comic that would tell a single story and be collected in bound volumes to be read as literature for years to come, Jack Kirby created the Fourth World.

It was an ambitious plan, spread over three bi-monthly comic book series plus one monthly, an incredible pace. Most comic book pencilers are lucky if they can do a complete book every month, much less two or three, much less writing and plotting all of them as well. And yet, the art never looks rushed. And lest one suspect that Kirby did "loose" pencils, leaving much of the detail to be added by the inker, this set includes reproductions of many of Kirby's original penciled pages, which are astonishing.

The new mythos Kirby created for the series involved new gods -- indeed, one of the new series was called "The New Gods" -- superpowered beings who rose from the ashes of what is obviously a reference to Ragnarok of Norse mythology. Kirby's fascination with Norse mythology had been evident in his depiction of Thor as a superhero for Marvel, but this was something new. There were two groups of gods, inhabitants of two different worlds, New Genesis and Apokolips, who have been at war since their new beginning. An uneasy truce, a cold war, has been in effect for some time, but as the series begins war is breaking out in earnest again, with Earth as the primary battleground.

In addition to "The New Gods" Kirby created "The Forever People," which followed a group of younger gods who were more or less Kirby's tribute to the hippies and flower people of the 1960s, and "Mister Miracle," about an escape artist extraordinaire named Scott Free, who we soon learn has himself already escaped from Apokolips itself. Incongruously enough, the fourth book in the series, in fact the one in whose pages the Fourth World was first launched, was "Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen," which had long been an offbeat, often whacky vehicle for lighthearted fun. Kirby not only continued but even extended this tradition, giving us Don Rickles, a giant de-evolutionized Jimmy and featuring through most of his run a new young cloned version of his 1940s group of scrappy heroes, the Newsboy Legion. The Jimmy Olsen comics are mostly tangential to the main story, but definitely connected. One might think of them as similar to the clown scenes in Shakespeare's tragedies.

The books never met with the commercial success DC had hoped for. They seemed to think that by luring Kirby away from Marvel he would be able to spark for them the kind of explosion that company had experienced in the 1960s. This was unrealistic -- aside from the extremely important roles others like Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had played in the Marvel explosion, it ignores two important facts: a) it's easier to "explode" a tiny company reinventing itself with mostly new characters and complete revisions of a few existing ones than it is a behemoth whose own success is largely based on the familiarity of its hugely successful franchise stars like Superman and Batman; and b) the 1960s were a unique period in American history primed for cultural change, reflected in many different fashions across nearly all available popular media, including comic books, and by the time Jack Kirby came to DC that period was already waning. It would have been impossible for anyone to do for DC in the '70s what Kirby and others had done for Marvel in the '60s.

One could argue that Kirby's ambitious plan was just too grand to be understood and appreciated by the comic book audience of the time. On the other hand, one could also argue that Kirby's reach exceeded his grasp, and his own artistic failings, especially as a writer, doomed the comics.

A good representative example of both Kirby's strengths and weaknesses are visible in two adjacent pages of the recent reprinting of the entire saga as "Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus," a four-volume set. This is from volume 2, pp.46-47, reprint pp. 10-11 from "The New Gods" #4. On the first page, we have a close-up of Darkseid, ruler of Apokolips. He had just witnessed Orion, champion of New Genesis, shouting his defiance and fury to the skies at the death of one of his fellow new gods, one who was killed by Darkseid's forces, and speak about bravery and glory and how his death will not have been in vain. Among the thoughts of Darkseid's presented to us on the page is the following:

"Oh, how heroes love to flaunt their nobility in the face of death! Yet they know better than most that war is but the cold game of the butcher!"

If you ignore the over-wrought exclamation marks (ubiquitous in the medium and possibly added by the letterer), this is actually a deeper thought than most folks in 1971 would have expected from a comic book, and it's also well expressed, almost poetic. On the very next page, however, the effect is seriously marred by some extremely clumsy expository dialogue:

DAVE LINCOLN: I tell you, I saw it with my own eyes! We're in a war! It's hidden -- but it's very real!

VICTOR LANZA: B-But why us? We're just ordinary people!

CLAUDIA SHANE: Oh, yeah? How many just plain folks have been abducted to a weird world like Apokolips!

HARVEY LOCKMAN: Orion got us back here! We owe him that!

DAVE LINCOLN: We owe him that, Mister Lanza! Such as we are -- we may have to tackle super-beings!

VICTOR LANZA: But I'm Victor Lanza! An insurance executive! A family man! My wife makes me carry an umbrella in case it rains!

VICTOR LANZA (cont., new panel): And now, this! New Genesis! Apokolips! And things that would scare John Wayne!

CLAUDIA SHANE: What about it, Lincoln? I'm Claudia Shane, simple but worried secretary! What am I involved in this time? --

HARVEY LOCKMAN: And me, young but cool, Harvey Lockman!

Aside from the unlikely nature of this conversation, or the absurd notion that people who already know each other well would blurt out both first and last names in the course of it, I find it literally impossible to believe that anyone would introduce himself, either on first acquaintance or later, as "young but cool Harvey Lockman!"

(And of course, the inevitable exclamation points -- no one in American comics ever says anything, it is either declaimed, shrieked or simply yelled, apparently -- make the whole thing even sillier.)

In this, Kirby was no worse than many comic book writers who got paid only for their ability with words and couldn't draw at all. And while the dialogue is sometimes contrived or hokey, his conception and plotting is excellent, at least until near the end, when commercial considerations caused a hurried climax that was left unresolved. Years later he came back and finished the tale in a graphic novel, also collected in this edition, but even that ending doesn't ring quite true, as if it's not quite the ending originally planned. Reading the whole series collected in these four volumes, one gets the feeling that at least another volume, maybe even another three or four volumes, would have been needed to complete the story as originally conceived.

Despite all these problems, I think the work generally stands the test of time. It is obviously an important work that should be read by anyone with an interest in the history of American comics, but more importantly it's an enjoyable reading experience that I would recommend to many people with no such interest.

I would not recommend it to those who disdain superheroes, and certainly this is not the book to convince someone with a poor opinion of comics that they can be of real artistic value. Not that it doesn't *have* real artistic value, mind you. But it's of a type that such a person would be unlikely to see.

For it's own sake, just as a reading experience, the series probably rates a 3-1/2 or 4 on a 5-pt scale. If you care anything at all about the history of the medium or the development of mega-novels like the ones mentioned in the first paragraph, it's a 5, an absolute must-read.

JACK KIRBY'S FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS

Volumes 1-4

Jack Kirby and others

DC Comics

Vol. 1, 296 pages, $49.99

Vol. 2, 396 pages, $49.99

Vol. 3, 396 pages, $49.99

Vol. 4, 424 pages, $49.99

A New Beginning

I'm trying something new here - starting this blog over again and posting this new start from my new iPhone.

I will probably get around to doing more on religion and Cerebus one of these days, but for the nest few weeks I'm planning to concentrate on doing some reviews, which is going to be the main purpose for the site, I think.

Religion in Cerebus - Mothers and Daughters - Part Six

There's not as much directly about religion in Women as one would suspect. Oh, certainly, there are the facing pages from extracts of the writings of Cirin and Astoria, and one would assume they are there to exhibit some of the fundamental principles of Cirinism and Kevillism, respectively. And of course they are, in a way. But they are not spiritually oriented, really. There's little talk about The Goddess here, really. There is certainly discussion of morality, in the sense of a set of rules for living one's life (making sure girls tell their mothers all about their dreams, for instance). And there is discussion of the broader legalistic aspects of morality, more properly political than religious, such as the Alcohol Sanction. But we learned more about what Astoria believed in, what she thought about her Goddess, during the brief conversation between her and Cerebus in her jail cell in Church & State than is revealed in any of the writings here.

From the opening salvo, where Astoria asserts that "The penis is an organ without scruple" and advises women to take advantage of that fact, giving herself as a demonstration of how this can be done, and Cirin on the opposite page advises tolerance with daughters and assurance that they will "grow up" when they become mothers themselves, to the final debate on the nature of The Eye in the Pyramid, there is little here that provides insight into Cirnism or Kevillism as religions, although we learn much about their general attitudes toward life.

Nonetheless, I'll be dealing with these pieces as well as the few overtly religious moments in the narrative parts of "Women," because religious or not they do provide our deepest and best insight into Dave's ideas of what Cirinism and Kevillism are.

As I say, the first item is a call for women to be ruthless and unscrupulous in their use of sex to control men, on the justification that men are controlled by the penises anyway, and that organ has no scruples. It is at once boastful and celebratory, and Astoria seems totally unaware that the avenue she has chosen to travel is not available to all women. Like many women who are both attractive and intelligent, she completely discounts her appearance as contributing in any way to her success, congratulating herself that it entirely due to her intelligence, even while describing a path that could hardly have been taken by a homely woman. Cirin's counter is to call for tolerance of bad behavior by daughters, because they will eventually grow out of such excesses once motherhood overtakes them. While the percentage of fertile women is much higher than the percentage of attractive ones, Cirin is herself ignoring the fact that extremely homely women unlikely to attract a mate and those attractive enough to do so but infertile -- a substantial chunk of women, put together -- will never experience childbirth, in any case. She refers to it as a universal condition, but it is not so. They both, in other words, universalize from their own personal experience (gee, who does that sound like?).

This is not to deny a certain amount of truth in both positions. A young, attractive woman who is willing to use sex the way Astoria describes will indeed be able to get almost anything she wants from most men. And it's true also that childbirth does something to most men and women that alters and matures them, and that this effect is more pronounced in women than it is in men.

Their next debate is about power -- Astoria, as a daughter, chafes under the control of a matriarchy, arguing that mothers are by nature conservative and overly cautious, creating a static and stagnant political system. Cirin, points out that the expendability of males causes them to love disorder and chaos, seeking to make their mark on the world, and cautions that daughters with an "irrational fear of childbirth" may engage in the same behavior.

The next debate contains what is, for me, the first false note in the proceedings. Remember that long ago Dave said that modern-day feminists were Kevillists, and of course on the central political issue of modern feminism, abortion, the Cirinists are obviously firmly on the side of the anti-feminists.

So it seems odd to find Astoria charging that the Cirinists are hypocrites when it comes to children and family:

. . . at the upper levels of Cirin's government (and, in fact, at most levels of her bureaucracy) the children of her officials are cared for by nannies and governesses until the age of five when they are unceremoniously shipped off to government-run boarding schools. Cirin's own son, Gerrkick told me that he did not spend a full day in his mother's company until he was nearly sixteen; and then it was merely to observe her working day so that he might have a fuller appreciation of the complexities of governing Upper Felda.

Leaving aside the question of why Cirin's son, who as a male could not ever hope to hold any position in a Cirinist government, would be taught the complexities of governing, there is a very real problem here, in my opinion. There is an obvious solution to the problem of governing by mothers if motherhood is itself all important -- the delaying of career until after the children are grown, or at least until they are of a certain age. It's something many women have done through the years, something Cirin almost hints at in her rejoinder here. It seems obvious to me that if Cirinism were real that would be the standard and preferred way of doing things (though there certainly might be exceptions, especially among the upper echelons). It seems to me that Dave, eager to attack feminist motherhood and unable to do so through the Kevillists, whom he has artificially determined will all be childless daughters, has twisted Cirinism into something totally false and inherently hypocritical, something he will develop further later in the book but which seems to me to grow out of Dave's desire to paint women in the worst light possible rather than truly out of the inherent nature of the philosophies he claims to be representing here.

Cirin basically says that women should wait until childbirth to start a career, that before childbirth they are too immature, but that one shouldn't worry too much about a young woman who insists on putting career first -- for most of them, they will soon abandon it when a suitable mate comes along. She finishes:

In those situations where the cart is before the horse; where career comes before childbirth; it is interesting to note that few daughters ever return to that career. In those situations where the career comes after childbirth, career is kept in its proper place as an ancillary interest to the fuller and more important task of child-rearing.

There are a couple of things of note here. First, note the word "return," clearly and unmistakable implying that women who give birth in the Cirinist system do, in fact, wait at least some time before they begin a career, or return to one they have already started. How long? Six months? A year? Could it in fact be that the ideal is six years or twelve and that Astoria has distorted the situation, focusing on a few exceptions to the rule (such as Cirin herself) among the highest of the high? On the other hand, unless we discount Astoria's description of Gerrick's relationship with his mother as completely fabricated slander, there's an irony and an undeniable hypocrisy in Cirin insisting that a woman's career should be ancillary to the "fuller and more important task of child-rearing."

Before moving on to the next pair of quoted texts, I'd like to speak about Cerebus' meeting with the mysterious woman whom we much later discover to be the real Cirin. She tells him that women literally read men's minds -- something Dave has stated that he actually believes.

It's a little more complicated than that. "Women's intuition" is a nice way of putting it. "Women are more sensitive" is another. A not-so-nice way of putting it is that women rape men's minds the way men rape women's bodies. It's not an exact analogy, of course, because rape is invasion and invasion is the man's way, not the woman's way; absorption and consumption are the woman's way; what they're built for. Consider the two genders, one that invades and violates and the other that absorbs and consumes. The nice way of putting it is that they're complementary. The not-so-nice way of putting it is that they deserve each other; serve each other right.

I'm quite aware that these are the words of a character -- and a female character at that, and can't be taken at face value as Dave's opinion. Still, it's quite insightful that at this point in the story we're talking about a balance, about women being just as bad as men, but in a different way. There's no hint yet of the equivalent of "two legs bad, four legs good" kind of "anti-feminism" that discounts the value of half the human race Dave will develop later. "One that invades and violates and the other that absorbs and consumes." That strikes me as about right. The notion that men are all Goodness and Light and Reason and women are just absorbers and consumers of that Light strikes me as false.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Next: more of Women.